Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Customer Service in 2024 release wave 1

Important

The 2024 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2024 to September 2024. 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 a cloud-based solution that uses generative AI across the service journey to help businesses deliver fast, personalized, and consistent service across multiple channels. Advanced routing, case management, knowledge management, Copilot, and embedded Microsoft Teams capabilities maximize agent productivity, while simplified administration and integrated analytics optimize contact center operations. The omnichannel capabilities enable organizations to provide an omnichannel experience to their customers with chat, voice, social, and business messaging channels.

In 2024 release wave 1, we're focused on the following:

• Infusing generative AI into customer, agent, and supervisor experiences.
• Enhancing voice, messaging, and email channels.
• Extending Copilot capabilities.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2024 release wave 1

Investment areas

Administrator experiences
The modern administration experience provides 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 experience to enable rapid first-time and incremental setup, as well as proactive health checks to ensure the system has been set up and works as expected.

Agent experiences
The agent experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and enhancing agent confidence is the key to improving customer satisfaction. Customer Service provides a powerful agent desktop, with infused generative AI, seamless collaboration capabilities, and productivity tools in a customizable workspace. Our features boost agent effectiveness, enabling them to deliver personalized customer experiences across any channel.

Copilot and AI innovation
Copilot transforms the Customer Service support experience with generative AI. Agents are more productive and deliver a better service experience with Copilot helping them find resources to resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks. Copilot harvests knowledge from internal and external sources to draft contextual answers to questions in email and chat conversations. Agents can ask Copilot questions as they conduct research for a case, and they can use Copilot to generate case and conversation summaries in a single click.

Omnichannel
The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service enable organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers via channels like live chat, SMS, voice, Microsoft Teams, and social channels. By providing a seamless agent experience and valuable conversation insights across channels, the omnichannel features enable organizations to deliver a true, all-in-one contact center.

Supervisor experiences
The supervisor experience is targeted at customer service managers and analysts. Availability of key operational metrics allows supervisors to continuously monitor contact center operations and make course corrections. For example, supervisors can intervene when customer sentiment becomes negative and improve agent staffing to optimize productivity, thereby keeping service levels high.

Supervisors can also use the extensibility feature and customize data models to include additional metrics and report on custom entities, improving contact center efficiency.

Teams integration
Use Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Teams together to provide your agents and customers with a cohesive environment where they can seamlessly collaborate with each other.

With embedded chat and swarming, agents can get help from experts across the entire organization to resolve complex customer issues.

Agents can connect with their customers using the Join a Teams call feature and meetings integration to have more efficient collaboration with video, screen share, and remote control options.

Unified routing
The intelligent routing service in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels, namely case, record, chat, digital messaging, and voice, to the best-suited agents. The assignment rules take into account customer-specified criteria, such as priority and skills. The routing service uses AI to automatically classify, route, and assign work items, and eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations. The various features like percent-based routing, overflow management, and routing to preferred agents help optimize the routing of work items to the best-suited agents.

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:

Check out the release plan

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.
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.