What’s New in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Sales in 2023 Release Wave 2

In our first post, we reviewed 2023 release wave 2 changes and new functionality for Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management and Finance and Operations cross-app capabilities.

This post reviews changes and new functionality in the 2023 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Sales.

For additional details related to the topics reviewed here, or to view the applicable Release Plan go to:

Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Customer Service in 2023 Release Wave 2

Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Sales in 2023 Release Wave 2

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a part of the Digital Contact Center Platform that provides best-in-class customer service through functionality such as live customer engagements, agent collaboration, advanced telephony, and AI-based analytics.

Tools like advanced routing, case management, knowledge management, assistive AI, and embedded Microsoft Teams capabilities help a company maximize agent productivity.  Simplified administration combined with integrated analytics optimizes contact center operations. Companies can develop an omnichannel experience with chat, voice, social, and business messaging channels.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service Release Wave 2 Include

Enhanced Agent Experiences

Agent confidence is the key to customer satisfaction. Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides intuitive collaboration capabilities, using a customizable workspace that elevates your agent’s effectiveness and confidence. Productivity tools enable agents to deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences across any channel.

User Display Enhancement

The option to switch to dark mode in the customer service workspace application enhances the agent experience and service environment.

Conversation Panel Icons

New intuitive icons for call controls in the conversation panel assist the agent in controlling the conversation and provide an improved customer and agent experience.

Live Chats and Voice Display

The user can view live chats and voice calls in the agent’s inbox display. Viewing all chat and voice content in one place improves agent productivity.

Enhanced Workspace Application Display Controls

The ability to resize the communication panel and set the conversation control size for a channel in the customer service workspace application allows the agent to define the display that works best for them.

Improved E-mail Experience

The agent can now compose emails using an improved Outlook-like email experience. Using familiar e-mail tools and functionality provides increased processing efficiency and results in less e-mail errors.

Omnichannel

Omnichannel capabilities enable agents to instantly connect and engage with 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.

OAuth 2.0

OAuth 2.0 is now supported to enhance authentication in live chat sessions.

Voice Channel Enhancement

Virtual desktop infrastructure support on Azure Virtual Desktop for the voice channel is now available.

VOIP and Emergency Calling

Agents can now use VOIP for voice consultation and transfer to Teams users, improving team communication. Additionally, the agent can now use emergency calling in Canada, with the agent’s location being detected.

Other Voice Channel Enhancements

Other voice channel enhancements include caller ID for outbound calls, operational telemetry monitoring through App Insights, integration of Nuance Gatekeeper with the voice channel and an improved and intuitive voice call dialer.

Teams Integration

Microsoft Teams is now embedded within Dynamics 365 Customer Service providing agents with best-in-class business process automation, collaboration, and communication. Conversations embedded in Teams are linked directly to customer service records, enabling a robust contextual experience.

Copilot and AI innovation

Improved Resource Identification

Copilot provides agents with AI-powered assistance to improve resource identification. This helps agents to resolve issues quickly, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks. These enhancements allow agents to focus on delivering high-quality service to their customers.

Contextual Query Replies

“Copilot” drafts contextual answers to queries in chat and email, in addition to providing an interactive chat experience over knowledge bases and case history. Once enabled, this AI-powered expertise is always available to answer questions.

Administrator Experiences

An enhanced administration experience provides a consistent setup unifying the management of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, unified routing, and omnichannel activities.

Customer Service Admin Center Application

The customer service admin center consolidates all administrator experiences relevant to customer support into a single application. Providing an intuitive and guided “wizard-like” experience enables effective first-time and incremental setup.

Unified Routing Intelligent Routing

The customer service intelligent routing service function uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming customer service requests from all channels (e.g., case, record, chat, digital messaging, and voice) to the best-suited agents.

Assignment Rules

Assignment rules consider customer-specified criteria, such as priority and skills.

Streamlined Queue Management

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 providing increased operational efficiencies.

Other Enhancements

Features such as percent-based routing, overflow management, and preferred agent routing optimize work item routing to the agents best-suited to meet the customer’s needs. Additionally, the ability to route calls to agents who are idle for the longest period is now generally available.

Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales is the market-leading sales application that empowers every company to increase selling by understanding their customers and the way they want to buy. Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of business data to wherever the seller is working and across their favorite productivity tools like Office 365 and Teams.

Buyers expect a blend of digital and personalized experiences throughout the sales journey. To accomplish this, some shifts need to occur from the current experience, allowing sellers to spend more time becoming trusted advisors to their customers.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Sales Release Wave 2 Include

Copilot AI Capabilities

Copilot empowers team members with AI tools built for sales, service, marketing, operations, and supply chain roles. AI capabilities enable everyone to spend more time on the most effective parts of their jobs and less time on non-productive tasks.

Managing Customer Relationships

Copilot focuses on enhancing seller productivity and workflow effectiveness, by automating the sales process, and augmenting seller actions and decisions with AI-powered insights and actions.

Sales Execution and Sales Force Automation

Duplicate Leads

Duplicate leads are identified and prevented from entering the system either through manual creation or bulk import, streamlining lead records and reducing lead record maintenance.

Follow-up Task Creation

Follow-up tasks are automatically created, based on various Office applications information such as emails, Teams messages, and Teams call transcripts. Friendly follow up task reminders help to complete those tasks.

Opportunities Creation

Create opportunities using new input forms that declutter information and provide an enhanced visual layout.

AI Account-Based Suggestions

Sellers can now use an AI-powered solution to get account-based suggestions for targeted selling and precise workflows to leverage productivity.

Customer Org Charts

Create customer organization charts allowing sellers to know the roles of customer contacts and view a relationship map.

Sales Engagement

Sales engagement capabilities allows sellers to effectively engage their customers. AI-driven customer relationship and conversation insights, as well as tools that help accelerate and standardize the selling process, help sellers to maintain a healthy relationship with customers and engage in impactful conversations with them.

Initial Customer Outreach

Engage a “bot” for the initial customer outreach ensuring that only good quality leads reach the sellers at the right time, making the selling efforts more efficient.

Customer Insights and Tips

During a customer call, sellers can view insights and tips based on past customer interactions, improving the communication process.

Enhanced Conversation Intelligence Support

Conversation intelligence support is extended for third-party telephony resources, providing seamless insights irrespective of the call provider you’re using.

E-mail Enhancements

Pre-populate emails based on the content frequently used while drafting emails (e.g., self-introduction and product details) reducing e-mail preparation time.

Sales Accelerator

Improvements such as enhanced worklist items, up next widgets, better performance, personalization, and ease-of-use capabilities help to enable a tailored experience for sellers, minimizing the time they spend on their search for the best “next” customer to reach out to.

Other Enhancements

Sequences

A host of sequence enhancements including sequence step visibility, sequence performance, custom templates, step loops, multiple sequences assignment, personalization, automated replies, and more will now be available to the selling team.

Customer Communication

Sellers can now send and receive customer communication through SMS and get real-time notifications for incoming SMS.

Notes for Application Administrators

Features Enabled Automatically

Features impacting users should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities. 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.
You can find the applicable release plan in each of the article links provided at the beginning of this post.