2024 Release Wave 2 Highlights: Dynamics 365 Customer Service

It’s All About Improving Agent and Customer Experiences

When businesses focus on streamlining their service processes, they make things a lot easier for their service agents. That enables the agents to deliver great service, which forges long-term customer relationships.

Streamlining customer services is what Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is all about. The solution enables businesses to deliver fast, personalized, and consistent services across multiple communication channels. Embedded AI, analytics, case routing, knowledge management, and collaboration tools also maximize contact center efficiencies.

With the Customer Service 2024 release wave 2 plan, Microsoft has announced more process enhancements that businesses can expect to see between October 2024 and March 2025. A consistent theme is the use of Microsoft Copilot AI to improve experiences and productivity for agents and supervisors. This in turn will have a positive impact on the most important group for any business: their customers.

Here’s a quick preview of what to look for in the coming months:

Improved Agent Experiences

Enhancing agent experiences is key to improving customer satisfaction. With the release wave 2 enhancements in Customer Service, agents can more easily handle multiple interactions, switch between sessions without losing context, and use productivity tools to enhance workflows:

·   Manage cases efficiently with enhanced case controls.

·   Prioritize cases with improved case grids.

·   Compose emails using an improved attachment experience.

The Customer Service desktop, with infused generative AI, provides seamless collaboration capabilities and productivity tools within a customizable workspace. This helps agents boost their effectiveness and deliver personalized customer experiences across chat, phone, text, and email interactions.

Innovative Uses of AI 

The key technology integrated with Customer Service is Microsoft Copilot. The generative AI tool helps agents find resources to resolve customer issues faster and automate time-consuming tasks:

·   Provides proactive prompts and insights during customer interactions.

·   Facilitates agent authentication for data source plugins.

·   Enables access (within Microsoft Teams) to generative AI workflows

Through Teams, Copilot can provide meeting summaries and generate follow-up tasks. Copilot can also extract knowledge from internal and external sources to draft contextual answers to questions in email and chat conversations.

Agents can also ask Copilot questions as they conduct research for a case, and they can generate case and conversation summaries in a single click. All this adds up to agents handling more cases and increasing customer satisfaction.

Intelligent Service Case Routing

Intelligent case routing in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels—records, 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 also uses AI to automatically classify, route, and assign work items, and it eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution. Other features—like percent-based routing, overflow management, and routing to preferred agents—further optimize the routing of work items to the best-suited agents.

Another cool routing feature in release wave 2 is the ability to update queue memberships for agents in real time. This allows agents to take work in their new record queues immediately after they are added. When a supervisor removes agents from queues, they won’t receive work from the removed queues, thus reducing the wait time due to reroutes.

So Many Features to Pick From

With Microsoft constantly rolling out new features, it can be a challenge to know which ones can most help your business. To navigate all the 2024 Release Wave 2 enhancements, Velosio is here to help.

We are among the largest and most recognized Microsoft Dynamics partners, with thousands of active customers. Many years as a recognized leader in ERP, CRM, cloud productivity, and business intelligence solutions have repeatedly landed us in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics Partners worldwide.

We will be glad to advise you on when each Dynamics 365 Customer Service enhancement will be available, which enhancements make sense for your environment, and how to sync them with the sales functions you already rely on. Contact us today to learn more.