Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Customer Service in 2022 release wave 1
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Overview of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2022 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2022 to September 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Overview
Dynamics 365 Customer Service is an end-to-end service for customer support, spanning self- and assisted-service scenarios across multiple channels of customer engagement. Customer Service provides comprehensive and efficient case routing and management for agents, a knowledge base where users can author and consume knowledge articles, and robust insights through AI suggestions and rich, embedded analytics. It also provides add-ons for omnichannel engagement through chat, social channels, and voice.
For 2022 release wave 1, we'll continue to deliver features for:
- The all-in-one contact center.
- Contact center routing.
- Agent experiences with automation and knowledge management.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2022 release wave 1
Tip
Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.
* Overview guide available in English version only
Investment areas
Teams integration
Provide your agents with best-in-class business process automation, collaboration, and communication with Microsoft Teams embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Conversations in embedded Teams are linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience.
In 2022 release wave 1, we're improving embedded Microsoft Teams with Dynamics 365 data integration, AI-suggested contacts, and AI-generated conversation summaries for agents.
Knowledge management
Knowledge management plays a vital role in enabling organizations to deliver world-class customer care. Allowing agents to create rich, high-quality knowledge resources and showing the right knowledge content across engagement modalities—including self-service, assisted service, and onsite service—expedites issue resolution. It also drives customer and agent satisfaction and productivity.
The ability to create, import, and share knowledge bases is a core capability of successful support delivery. With knowledge management, agents and supervisors can author knowledge articles from templates, add knowledge search providers from multiple sources (SharePoint, Microsoft search, and other Dynamics 365 organizations), and receive AI-triggered knowledge suggestions to speed up support delivery.
In 2022 release wave 1, we're providing search integration for knowledge management in portals and historical analytics on knowledge articles and search terms.
Omnichannel
Omnichannel for Customer Service enables organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers via channels like live chat, SMS, voice, and social channels. By providing a seamless agent experience and valuable conversation insights across channels, omnichannel capabilities enable organizations to deliver a true, all-in-one contact center.
Omnichannel for Customer Service provides a modern, customizable, high-productivity app that offers contextual customer identification, real-time notification, integrated communication, and agent productivity tools like knowledge search, macros, and case creation to ensure agents are effective.
Supervisors get real-time and historical visibility and insights into the operational efficiency of agents and their use across various channels.
The enterprise-grade routing and work distribution engine allows customers to configure agent presence, availability, and routing rules, thus ensuring that agents are working on the most relevant engagements.
Service-level agreements
Service-level agreements (SLAs) enable businesses to track support policies and ensure that customers are supported as per their entitled support policy. Businesses use SLAs to govern support products that customers receive either as part of their purchase or as add-ons to their purchase. SLAs include policy details, such as how quickly a customer is entitled to receive support, how many support requests a customer can make, and how long after a purchase a customer can be supported as part of the agreement.
Communities
Self-service is a critical first step in the customer service journey, as it helps deliver high up-front resolution rates and increased customer satisfaction due to speed and convenience. Communities are the engine that powers self-service since it enables peer-to-peer support and the creation of relevant and high-quality content at scale. Online communities of customers, partners, and employees offer a "wisdom of the crowds" approach to rapid, user-generated content creation through formal and informal knowledge articles, Q&A forums, and blogs. And by leveraging feedback-sharing, communities can impact and drive your future investments, building trust and brand loyalty by demonstrating that you listen to your customers.
Agent experiences
Agent experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Enhancing employee confidence is key to improving customer service satisfaction. Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides intuitive collaboration capabilities in a customizable workspace and elevates your team’s effectiveness with the productivity tools needed to deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences across any channel.
In 2022 release wave 1, we're making enhancements to the inbox view and the Customer Service workspace app.
Unified routing
In 2022 release wave 1, we're enhancing unified routing diagnostics and default queues to simplify routing management.
Traditionally, organizations use queue-based routing, where they route incoming service requests to a relevant queue. Then, agents work on those service requests by picking them from the queue. Organizations can miss service-level agreements if agents pick the easier service requests and leave the higher-priority requests in the queue. To address this scenario, organizations either create custom workflows to periodically distribute service requests among their agents or have dedicated personnel to distribute the service requests equitably among agents while adhering to organizational and customer preferences. Both methods are inefficient and error-prone and need continuous queue supervision.
The intelligent routing service in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels (cases, entities, chat, digital messages, and voice) to the best-suited agents. The assignment rules take into account customer-specified criteria, such as priority and auto-skills matching. The new routing service uses AI to classify, route, and assign work items with full automation. This eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations.
Administrator experiences
A modern administration experience should provide a consistent setup experience that unifies the management of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, unified routing, and omnichannel activities. The Customer Service admin center app consolidates all administrator experiences that are relevant to customer support into a single app. It provides an intuitive and guided, wizard-like experience to enable rapid first-time and incremental setup.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Service below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Customer Service
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Customer Service. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Customer Service. |
| User community | Engage with Customer Service experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Customer Service. |