Today, nothing is certain for brands. Standing still means falling behind. Heritage brands are no different. Now more than ever, brands need to find authentic ways to engage with digitally-savvy consumers no matter where they are. How do brands steeped in tradition create modern experiences that resonate with today’s digital-native consumers?

Heritage brands like Campari and Leatherman are at a pivotal moment in their rich history, as consumer behavior shifts seemingly overnight. To adapt, these established brands turned to Microsoft Customer Experience Platform to forge direct relationships with consumers. Hyper-personalizing experiences while retaining their unique brand personality is made possible by combining digital technology with their brand and marketing strengths to attract and retain customers. Individualized journeys require real-time insights gleaned from customer data and infused into line-of-business applications, and seamless activation across a growing number of customer touchpoints. Privacy-aware, consent-enabled personalization powered by AI enables the brands to engage each customer at precisely the right moment with the right touch, at scale.

Unify and predict to personalize experiences

Campari Group, the 160-year-old alcohol spirits manufacturer, found it challenging to collect and analyze data to accurately predict customer needs. To derive value from the vast amount of customer data, Campari turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, a customer data platform (CDP) that’s part of Microsoft Customer Experience Platform to unify fragmented customer data and generate AI-powered insights that reveal the next best action.

Because of the sensitive nature of customer data, security and compliance were very important considerations. With the most advanced data governance and consent management capabilities, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was the obvious choice.

Moving forward, Campari is taking experiences to the next level with real-time, customer-led journey orchestration in order to hyper-personalize experiences across different touchpointslike email, mobile, social, and in-personaccording to marketing segments and consumer types.

“Customer journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing promotes contextually relevant and consistent real-time conversations with every customer across all interaction points. We can more precisely align marketing messages for each communication channel to gain the greatest impact. We see the effects in in-store sales and also in e-commerce, which is particularly important during COVID-19We want to use this data in an end-to-end way, from marketing to sales to customer service, capturing and optimizing the entire customer journey.”Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global IT Marketing and Sales, Campari Group.

By unifying data and deriving insights, Campari is now better prepared for new opportunities, whether it’s launching a new product, entering a new market, or building customer loyalty.

Engage in new ways

Whether customers are engaging with your brand virtually, in-person, or both, Microsoft can help create a seamless customer journey across channels. Leatherman, a leader in high-quality multi-tools, pocket tools, and knives for 37 years, needed a solution to meet their growing direct-to-consumer business. They wanted to curate a more personalized customer journey and to create user experience continuity with their online store. They leveraged customer journey orchestration to deliver an end-to-end welcome journey for their new customers.

Leatherman was able to create multi-touchpoints that allowed them to engage their customers across commerce and marketing using real-time custom events. This journey was executed every time a customer signed up or started to check out on their website. It allowed Leatherman to seamlessly activate new customers and to create opportunities for continued engagement along the way.

“We have the flexibility to trigger our journeys in multiple ways from our website and our other Dynamics products, and products from other vendors. The journey can also react to customer activities in real-time.”Liz Lee, IT Director, Leatherman Tool Group.

Leatherman gained a 360-degree view of their customer, was able to break down silos between existing systems, use the data to drive insights, and better tailor the customer experience.

When you have true multi-channel personalization that keeps your customer top of mind, you not only create a better experience for them, but also build brand loyalty. These individualized customer journeys keep them coming back for more and can turn customers into ambassadors for your brand.

Learn more

Take your brand into the future by creating tailored, delightful customer journeys with Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, an end-to-end solution that safely unifies and protects your customer data while inspiring trust and loyalty.

The post Shaping the future of retail with Microsoft Customer Experience Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

When unified routing is running smoothly for your customer service organization, incoming work items are routed to the best agent and the service workload is optimized and efficient. Depending on the needs of your business, the underlying routing infrastructure can get complex over time. When something goes wrong, it can take some effort to troubleshoot the issue. Recent updates to the unified routing capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Service help you streamline the problem-solving process. 

Unified routing stages for classification and assignment 

The architecture of unified routing lets you divide your routing setup into stages, and then optimize each stage individually. The classification stage lets you create rules that use customer datawhether direct or subtleto add insights to the incoming work item. You can also use machine-learning models like intelligent skill finder, sentiment prediction, and effort estimation in this stage. The insights added are then used in the assignment stage to prioritize and assign the work item to the best suited agent or queue for resolution.  

For every incoming work item, rules within each applicable stage are processed so that the work item is assigned to the best agent. Diagnostics are generated from this processing, and you can view those diagnostics on each stage. You can look at how a work item was classified, how it was routed to a certain queue, and how it was prioritized and assigned.  

Problem solving with unified routing diagnostics 

When there is a problem with this routing setup, you use diagnostics to get insights into what might be wrong. You can see why certain work items are taking longer to assign, and you can also see why an item could be incorrectly assigned. More information: Diagnostics for unified routing 

Historically, only administrators had access to diagnostics from Customer Service Hub or the Omnichannel admin center app. So, only the administrator had the ability and responsibility to create rules, view diagnostics, search for misroutes, edit rules to fix issues, and optimize the routing setup.  

But during day-to-day operations, it is the supervisors and customer service managers who are responsible for the performance of the queues and the agents they manage. Issues usually surface here first, before they come to the attention of the administrator. Therefore, supervisors and managers now have access to historical analysis for unified routing. These reports surface KPIs for measuring the efficiency of all resources. While analytics tell your staff that something is not right, they need more tools to dig deep and pinpoint the core issue.  

To help with this, we have extended the access to diagnostics to supervisors. Now supervisors can look at individual work items in queues that they manage and diagnose why each work item was routed in a certain way. If the routing is not as expected, they can inform the administrator and even make suggestions to improve the current setup. 

Unified routing diagnostics scenario 

Let’s consider an example. Imagine a scenario where a supervisor is managing queues for coffee machine refund requests. Previously, there were only two queues, one for customers at the Bronze level and one for those at Gold or Silver service levels. Now, the organization has added a third queue exclusively for Gold-level service customers. The supervisor wants to ensure that the new queue for refunds to Gold status customers is working properly.   

Reviewing analytics, the supervisor can see that work items in the Silver queue have a higher session transfer rate. With access to diagnostics, the supervisor can investigate further by opening Routing diagnostics, selecting the Silver queue, and reviewing the diagnostics records for some of the recent work items.

In our scenario, the supervisor looks at the rules that are applied to the work items, as seen in the image below, and quickly notices that the route to queue rule has incorrect logic that sends work items to the Silver refunds queue instead of Gold. Note that the finalidentified queue is displayed at the top of the page in the route to queue stage, which makes it even easier for the supervisor to check the queue identified.

To quickly mitigate this issue, the supervisor can manually assign the appropriate work items to the correct queue, where they will then be assigned to the right agents. Now that the supervisor was able to unravel the mystery behind the increase in session transfer rate, they can bring up the issue to the administrator, who can make the required rule change and fix the problem.

Analytics and diagnostics are powerful tools. With broader access to these tools, your organization can gain better efficiency as you more quickly evolve your routing setup.

Next steps

With 2021 release wave 1, take advantage of the benefits of unified routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Check out the system requirements and availability in your region. Also, read more in the documentation:

• Learn more about supervisor access to routing diagnostics.
• Manage record routing, such as for cases, emails, or tasks, from the Customer Service Hub administration experience.
• Manage unified routing for all channels, including chat, digital messaging, and records.
• If you’re already using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, use the unified routing migration application to migrate your messaging workstreams.

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

The post Use diagnostics to optimize unified routing for your call center  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.