Introduction
A typical call center can handle thousands of customer-related issues on any given day. With so many issues coming in daily, even the most efficient organizations can become overwhelmed if their agents are dealing with all customer issues personally. At the same time, customers don't want to wait in a queue to talk to a live agent, whether it's on the phone or through a live chat. Customers want their issues handled and resolved as quickly as possible.
One way that organizations are addressing this issue is with copilots. Copilots can simulate a human conversation with a customer through a chat interface. This approach allows organizations to use copilots to deflect commonly reported or simple issues away from agents, therefore freeing the agents to focus on more complex issues. A copilot can be a customer's first point of interaction on a support issue. The copilot can gather additional information or help resolve the issue. If the copilot is unable to resolve the issue, it can escalate the conversation and send it to a live agent.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service can be integrated with various copilot technologies to work seamlessly to pass conversations between them. Omnichannel for Customer Service can initially route a conversation to a customer service copilot and receive conversations that are escalated to live agents in the application. One of the simplest ways to create an integrated copilot solution with Omnichannel for Customer Service is to integrate it with a Microsoft Copilot Studio copilot.
Overview of Microsoft Copilot Studio
Microsoft Copilot Studio helps organizations automate routine conversations and allow their agents to focus on high-value interactions. Microsoft Copilot Studio conversations can be escalated and handed off to human agents. When a conversation is escalated to a human agent, they see the full transcript of copilot conversations and have complete context while engaging with customers. Copilots that are created in Microsoft Copilot Studio can be connected to an Omnichannel for Customer Service environment. After you create and connect the copilot to an Omnichannel for Customer Service environment, you can add it to different queues and configure it to route chat sessions to queues.
Integrating a Microsoft Copilot Studio copilot with Omnichannel for Customer Service gives you the following capabilities for copilot conversations:
Seamless integration - Copilots can be integrated across all channels without the need to add channel-specific code in the copilot.
Integrated escalation - Transferred copilot conversations include the full context of the conversation.
Monitoring - Copilot conversations can be monitored in real time by using the supervisor dashboard so that you're aware of conversation details such as the customer's satisfaction.
Automated routing - Configurable rules selectively route incoming requests to copilots based on context, such as issue type or the type of customer. For example, you can route low complexity issues to copilots, or route the conversation to a sales or support copilot based on the webpage browsing history of the customer.
Analytics - Copilot transcripts are available in Microsoft Dataverse after the conversation is complete. Historical dashboards provide insights into the effectiveness of the copilots through metrics such as resolution rate, escalation rate, resolution time, escalation time, and average sentiment.
Prerequisites
Your organization needs to have the appropriate licensing for services that are being used with your Omnichannel for Customer Service instance such as the Dynamics 365 Chat Service or Digital Messaging. Additionally, you need Microsoft Copilot Studio licensing and a Microsoft Azure subscription.
For a seamless handoff from a Microsoft Copilot Studio copilot to Omnichannel for Customer Service, you need to configure the integration as follows:
Register an application in Azure. The Application registration is used to facilitate the handoff from the Microsoft Copilot Studio copilot to Omnichannel for Customer Service.
Create a Microsoft Copilot Studio copilot. This step represents the copilot that initially handles incoming conversations from different channels before it escalates to a live agent, if needed.
Configure a Microsoft Copilot Studio copilot to hand off to Omnichannel for Customer Service. The copilot needs to be configured to point to your Omnichannel for Customer Service environment to ensure that conversations can be sent there when they're escalated.
Configure Omnichannel for Customer Service. The copilot needs to be added to the necessary Omnichannel for Customer Service queues. Routing rules need to be created in Omnichannel for Customer Service to ensure that escalated conversations are routed to the correct queues.
The remainder of this module examines each of these steps in more detail.