Every contact center wants to maintain system health with minimal usability disruptions to offer a delightful and seamless customer experience. Now, contact center managers can use Application Insights to get details about customer conversations and solve problems more easily. 

Application Insights, an extension of Azure Monitor, provides greater visibility into conversation-based operational telemetry in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This helps contact center managers keep track of the application’s health across the full conversation lifecycle.  Metrics are available starting with initiation, virtual agent engagement, routing, and assignment, through to resolution. Application Insights tracks volumes, latency, scenario success, failures, and trends at scale. In addition to facilitating proactive system monitoring, it empowers developers and IT professionals to easily identify and diagnose problematic conversations. From there, they can self-remediate where applicable or get swift support.

Connect to Application Insights

This capability enables customers to establish connectivity between their Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment and Application Insights instance. Then they can subscribe to system telemetry for a core set of conversation lifecycle events across the channels they use. When these logs are available in Application Insights, users can combine them with additional data sets to build custom dashboards. 

Application Insights in action 

Contoso Clothing, a retail giant in apparel, has recently launched their online shopping experience. With the approaching holiday season, they anticipate high volumes. Their workforce is prepared to provide a satisfying customer service experience using Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Tim is a supervisor for Contoso Clothing’s customer service division. He is responsible for the management and optimum functioning of their live chat queues. On his monitoring dashboard, Tim notices a sharp increase in conversations in the backlog, leading to longer wait times. He can see that his customer service representatives are busy with ongoing conversations. This means they are unable to receive new chats, which is leading to long wait times and low customer satisfaction. The overall conversation volumes are well within Tim’s capability, and something doesn’t seem right to him.  
 
He highlights this to Kaylee, an IT professional on his team. Kaylee has recently enabled App Insights for Contoso Clothing’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment to access conversation telemetry. This has been helping her monitor operational health as well as troubleshoot issues in real time. Based on Tim’s observation, she pulls up telemetry for all live chat conversations from the last few hours. Each conversation contains business events logged along with associated success or failure, duration, and associated metadata in Application Insights. 

While looking through anomalies and failures, she notices a high number of ‘customer disconnected’ events being logged repeatedly. Tracing these conversations, Tim and Kaylee determine that multiple chat conversations being created for the same customer within a short span of time. They see that customers are having to reinitiate a chat every time they navigate away from their app and come back to continue the conversation.  

Tim realizes the need to give customers the option to reconnect to a previous chat session. Being a business admin himself, can enable this through the Customer Service admin center in a few clicks. Using Application Insights data, Kaylee can set up auto-alerts for this scenario in case the problem happens again. Over the next few days, Tim and Kaylee see live chat wait times go down and customer satisfaction improve. They not only proactively detected the problem early but were also self-equipped to take the necessary steps to fix it and meet their customers’ needs. 

Learn more

To learn more, refer to Conversation diagnostics in Azure Application Insights (preview) – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn 

The post Use Application Insights to diagnose conversations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The year 2023 has ushered in dramatic innovations in AI, particularly regarding how businesses interact with customers. Every day, more organizations are discovering how they can empower agents to provide faster, more personalized service using next-generation AI.  

We’re excited to announce three Microsoft Copilot features now generally available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service in October, along with the new summarization feature that was made generally available in September. Copilot provides real-time, AI-powered assistance to help customer support agents solve issues faster by relieving them from mundane tasks—such as searching and note-taking—and freeing their time for more high-value interactions with customers. Contact center managers can also use Copilot analytics to view Copilot usage and better understand how next-generation AI impacts the business. The following features are generally available to Dynamics 365 Customer Service users:

Copilot uses knowledge and web sources that your organization specifies, and your organizational and customer data are never used to train public models.

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Copilot features are empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways.

Read how

1. Ask Copilot a question

Whether they’re responding to customers using the phone, chat, or social media, agents can use Copilot to harness knowledge across the organization to provide quick, informative answers, similar to having an experienced coworker available to chat all day, every day. When an administrator enables the Copilot pane in the Dynamics 365 Customer Service workspace or custom apps, agents can use natural language to ask questions and find answers. Copilot searches all company resources that administrators have made available and returns an answer. Agents can check the sources that Copilot used to create a response, and they can rate responses as helpful or unhelpful. Contact center managers can then view agent feedback to see how their agents are interacting with Copilot and identify areas where sources may need to be removed or updated.

The ability to ask Copilot questions can save agents valuable time. Microsoft recently completed a study that evaluated the impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service on agent productivity for Microsoft Support agents providing customer care across the commercial business. They found that agents can quickly look up answers to high volume requests and avoid lengthy investigations of previously documented procedures. One of our lines of business with these characteristics has realized a 22 percent reduction in time to close cases using Copilot.

2. Create intelligent email responses

Agents who receive customer requests via email can spend valuable time researching and writing the perfect response. Now, agents can use Copilot to draft emails by selecting from predefined prompts that include common support activities such as “suggest a call,” “request more information,” “empathize with feedback,” or “resolve the customer’s problem.” Agents can also provide their own custom prompts for more complex issues. Copilot uses the context of the conversation along with case notes and the organization’s knowledge to produce a relevant, personalized email. The agent can edit and modify the text further, and then send the response to help resolve the issue quickly.  

3. Understand Copilot usage in your organization

It’s important for service managers to measure the impact and improvements as part of the change that generative AI-powered Copilot has on their operations and agent experience. Dynamics 365 Customer Service historical analytics reports provide a comprehensive view of Copilot-specific metrics and insights. Managers can see how often agents use Copilot to respond to customers, the number of agent/customer interactions that involved Copilot, the duration of conversations where Copilot plays a role, and more. They can also see the percentage of cases that agents resolved with the help of Copilot. Agents can also rate Copilot responses so managers have a better understanding of how Copilot is helping to improve customer service and the overall impact on their organization.

4. Summarize cases and conversations with Copilot

Generally available since September, the ability to summarize cases and complex, lengthy conversations using Copilot can save valuable time for agents across channels. Rather than spending hours to review notes as they wrap up a case, agents can create a case summary with a single click that highlights key information about the case, such as customer, case title, case type, subject, case description, product, and priority. In addition, agents can rely on Copilot to generate conversation summaries that capture key information such as the customer’s name, the issue or request, the steps taken so far, the case status, and any relevant facts or data. Summaries also highlight any sentiment expressed by the customer or the agent, plus action items or next steps. Generating conversation summaries on the fly is especially useful when an agent must hand off a call to another agent and quickly bring them up to speed while the customer is still on the line. This ability to connect customers with experts in complex, high-touch scenarios is helping to transform the customer service experience, reduce operational cost savings, and ensure happier customers.

Next-generation AI that is ready for enterprises

Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.

AI solutions built responsibly

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.

Learn more and try Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Learn more about how to elevate your service with AI and enable Copilot features for your support agents.

Try Dynamics 365 Customer Service for free.

The post Modernize customer support with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Business Central 2023 release wave 2 introduces a new global feature – Electronic Documents. Microsoft has crafted this as a foundational framework, providing a robust base for catering to localized requirements. This innovative approach allows Microsoft to efficiently deliver tailored localization apps for some countries. Furthermore, partners can leverage this model to craft their custom localizations. Given the unique e-document formats and distinct integration services prevalent in various countries, these localization apps are indispensable.

Why did Microsoft deliver it?

Before we delve into the world of E-Documents within Business Central, let’s acquaint you with an important new acronym – CTC, which stands for Continuous Transaction Control. This term signifies the imperative ‘real-time’ invoicing reporting and validation mandated by authorities. CTC encompasses a suite of digital control mechanisms to enhance tax collection and curb tax fraud. Electronic Invoicing stands as a key component of CTC, a model increasingly embraced by numerous countries.

We can easily conclude – this approach will become mandatory in many countries if it hasn’t already. The prospect of different solutions for each country poses challenges. Hence, we’ve developed one global extendable solution as an app, simplifying support for diverse countries.

Exploring the Scope of E-Invoicing Models

Understanding the landscape of E-invoicing can initially seem straightforward – creating an electronic file and transmitting it. However, the reality is more intricate. E-invoicing encompasses various models, including the 2-corner, 3-corner, and 4-corner frameworks. Each country retains autonomy to determine its preferred approach. Moreover, even in non-mandatory scenarios, businesses often opt for E-invoicing to streamline communication.

Our solution encompasses all the corner models mentioned here and facilitates additional messaging capabilities between access points, providing a comprehensive E-documents framework.

How do E-Documents Operate in Sales and Purchases?

E-Documents in Business Central facilitate seamless interaction in both sales and purchase processes. It’s a two-way system, enabling the transmission of electronic sales documents to customers while also receiving electronic documents from vendors. These electronic documents have their own distinct lifecycles, which may not always align with invoice timelines. To accommodate this, we’ve introduced a new entity, the E-Document, linked with the original document in Business Central. This entity hosts a unique information set, including statuses, logs, and potential error notifications or warnings.

Once the system is configured, posting a sales document triggers the automatic creation of an E-Document. Depending on your setup, it’s promptly dispatched to the designated service. You gain complete visibility into its status and can take additional actions as needed.

In the case of incoming purchase electronic documents, you have the flexibility to upload them to Business Central manually. However, if your access-point provider provides a document delivery service, you can configure a Job Queue for automated downloads and E-Documents creation. Here’s the magic: if you’ve mapped vendors’ items with yours through item-references or G/L accounts and there are no errors, the system will effortlessly generate purchase invoices with all the essential details. Your task? Just review and post them.

How to Expand This Functionality?

This framework has been created to speed up your productivity when building electronic invoicing applications by taking care of all the infrastructure work, like subscribing to different posting routines, writing custom mapping logic, logging, error handling, and running jobs in the background.

The framework is designed to improve your productivity in developing electronic invoicing applications. It handles essential infrastructure tasks such as subscribing to various posting routines, custom mapping logic, managing logs, handling errors, and running background jobs. This empowers you to direct your attention towards the specific electronic invoicing logic, including:

• Exporting/Importing documents from Business Central to the local format mandated by the authority.
• Establishing seamless integration with the authority’s endpoint for sending and receiving electronic documents.

To create your local E-Document:

1. Create a new extension adding dependency to the E-Document Core application.
2. Implement a document interface based on the specification mandated by the local authority, using designated endpoints for the sales: Check, Create, and CreateBatch, and GetBasicInfo and PrepareDocument when you expect to receive documents.
3. Implement an integration interface to send/receive documents to the local authority automatically.
4. Enhance user experience by implementing a setup wizard that gathers all necessary configuration details and obtains customer consent for data transmission. This streamlined process ensures a smoother onboarding experience for users.

More details with examples how to extend existing E-Document Core application can be found here.

The post E-Documents as a Global Solution for Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Digital contact centers need to create support cases automatically when they receive incoming emails, phone calls, and messages from customers. They rely on this automation to avoid manual efforts in creating cases so they can address customer issues promptly. The activity monitor view helps diagnose automatic case creation issues and ensures this automation runs smoothly. 

Today, Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers automatic record creation rules for creating support cases automatically based on the conditions defined by administrators. However, an incoming work item may not automatically convert to a case for multiple reasons. The activity monitor tool helps administrators diagnose those issues and provides the reason a work item was not converted to a case. Once they know the reason, administrators also need the system to provide them with suggestions on how to resolve the issues. Recent enhancements to the activity monitor tool provide recommendations to administrators with steps to avoid future case creation issues by making changes to the rule configuration.  

Now, administrators can view recommendations for each activity monitor event to see why case creation was skipped or failed and steps to resolve the issue. The activity monitor form for each event contains the resolution steps and direct links to the rule settings that they should change. This helps administrators diagnose and self-solve their issues quickly.  

Navigate to the activity monitor

In the Customer Service admin center, administrators can view the status of events for the past 7 days. They can see skipped, failed, and successfully processed events by automatic record creation rules with the status as Ready for Power Automate.

From here, administrators can navigate to the Activity monitor events for last 7 days view. This provides a grid view of the events processed in the past 7 days. It provides details like current state, rule name, and condition. Additionally, it contains the reasons and recommendations to resolve the issues if the state was skipped or failed. Admins can also view the Recommendations column in the existing All activity monitor events view. 

View the form for a specific activity

Administrators can double-click on any part of the event record to navigate to the Activity monitor form. The form shows the Actions section with the Recommendations field. This field explains why case creation was skipped or failed and the steps to take to resolve these issues. Some contain direct links to the Advanced settings of the relevant automatic record creation rule with suggestions for configuration changes. Administrators can directly navigate to these settings and make the required changes. Once they make the changes, any future work items that use automatic record creation rules will convert to cases. Note that the changes will not impact the work items sent to Dynamics before the admin changed the configuration.  

Learn more

Watch a quick video introduction.

Read the documentation: Manage activity monitor to review and track rules | Microsoft Learn 

The post Solve case creation issues using the enhanced activity monitor tool  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The work hour calendar multiple recurrence feature is a new URS functionality that allows you to create and manage work hour calendars with more flexibility and efficiency. You can now define multiple recurrence patterns for your work hour calendar events, such as daily, weekly or monthly, and specify different start and end dates for each pattern. This way, you can easily accommodate different work schedules, holidays, and special events in your organization.

The new multiple recurrence feature in the upcoming V2 work hour calendar can help you to:

• Add multiple recurrences within a single day, to represent different instances of recurring shift work e.g. morning, afternoon and evening shifts in a single day with different recurrences
• Have overlapping recurrences within a week e.g. A recurrence for Mon and Wed, and a recurrence for Tues. Previously the Tuesday recurrence would have deleted the Mon and Wed entries; now they can coexist alongside each other.
• Input work hour events in different timezones, which is helpful for workers who travel. Previously, the calendar supports only one timezone across all work hour calendar events.

What are work hour calendar events and why are they needed?

Work hour events define when a resource is available to perform work, and they exist as 2 types:

• Occurrences (one-time events) are work hour events that happen only once on a specific date and time. Occurrences always take priority over Recurrences. E.g. team cohesion days, seminars or emergencies.
• Recurrences (repeating events) are work hour events that repeat on a regular basis according to a pattern and frequency. E.g. rotational shift work, weekly cadences, monthly client visits

Occurrences and recurrences can be used today in URS to define different types of work hours, such as working hours, non-working hours, breaks and time off.

How did URS handle work hour events before (V1 work hour calendar)?

Before this update, only 1 recurrence event is supported per calendar day, for a given date span.

Scenario 1, Jane is a doctor who does shift work at various clinics:

• Recurrence 1 (morning shifts): 7am-12pm UTC, repeats Mon, Tues, Wed
• Recurrence 2 (afternoon shifts): 1pm-5pm UTC, repeats Tues, Wed, Thu
• Recurrence 3 (night shifts): 7pm-11pm UTC, repeats Wed, Thu and Fri

The old work hour calendar does not support more than 1 work hour event per calendar day, so this scenario would not be supported

Scenario 2, John is a utilities engineer with different work hours on alternating days:

• Recurrence 1: 8am-5pm UTC, repeats Mon, Wed and Fri
• Recurrence 2: 6am-8pm UTC, repeats Tues and Thu

Adding both recurrences was not supported in the old work hour calendar; Recurrence 2 would have deleted the Mon, Wed and Fri entries from Recurrence 1 for a given date span.

Scenario 3, Becca is a travelling salesperson who works in both Seattle and Singapore:

• Recurrence 1 (work in Seattle): 8am-5pm PT, repeats all days of the week
• Recurrence 2 (work in Singapore): 8am-5pm SGT, repeats all days of the week

Adding both recurrences of different timezones was not supported in the old work hour calendar.

How does URS handle work hour events now (V2 work hour calendar)?

The new V2 work hours calendar now follows the following logic:

• Occurrences have a higher priority than Recurrence rules for a given calendar day. So if there were two rules (one occurrence and one recurrence) on the same day, the daily occurrence or time-off occurrence will take the priority over the weekly recurrence for the entire calendar day.(Unchanged from previous)

• When there are multiple recurrences within the same date span:
  • If the times do not intersect, they will both remain on the calendar
  • If the times conflict, the rule that was most recently created/modified will be the one that is considered for the resource’s calendar. All other conflicting rules in the date span will be removed. In the event that some recurrences have conflicts on some dates but not on others, the rule will be spliced to retain the non-conflicting events, while removing the events on dates that do have conflicts.

Scenario 1, Jane is a doctor who does shift work at various clinics:

• Recurrence 1 (morning shifts): 7am-12pm UTC, repeats Mon, Tues, Wed
• Recurrence 2 (afternoon shifts): 1pm-5pm UTC, repeats Tues, Wed, Thu
• Recurrence 3 (night shifts): 7pm-11pm UTC, repeats Wed, Thu and Fri

Create Recurrence 1, Recurrence 2, then Recurrence 3 in succession. All will now show up on the calendar as seen below

Scenario 2, John is a utilities engineer with different work hours on alternating days:

• Recurrence 1: 8am-5pm UTC, repeats Mon, Wed and Fri
• Recurrence 2: 6am-8pm UTC, repeats Tues and Thu

Create Recurrence 1, then create Recurrence 2 in succession. Both will now show up on the calendar as seen below:

Scenario 3, Becca is a travelling salesperson who works in both Seattle and Singapore:

• Recurrence 1 (work in Seattle): 8am-5pm PT, repeats all days of the week
• Recurrence 2 (work in Singapore): 8am-5pm SGT, repeats all days of the week

As seen above both Seattle and Singapore work hours are both easily expressed on the V2 work hours calendar. Note that the Singapore work hours are shifted to match the dispatcher’s Timezone i.e. Pacific Time – the timezone of the calendar itself is visible at the bottom left of the calendar, and the dispatcher can be altered this in <Personalization Settings>.

What else has changed/remains unchanged?

Previously in the V1 Work Hour Calendar, only 1 recurrence is allowed per calendar day, thus adding any new recurrences will completely override the work hour events for that calendar day.

With the V2 Work Hour Calendar, the previous work hour events will only be overridden if there is a direct conflict in time between the 2 recurrences.

For instance, Joel is an equipment technician with the following work hours:

• Recurrence 1 (regular work hours): 9am-5pm PT, repeats all days of the week
• Recurrence 2 (temporary work hours): 1-9pm PT, only from Jul 10-14

Create Recurrence 1, then create Recurrence 2 in succession. As seen below, Recurrence 2 overrides Recurrence 1 for the Jul 10-14 period because there is a direct conflict between the recurrences. All other work hour events remain.

The following dialogue will now appear whenever a new work hour event is added, in order to remind users of this behavior:

Occurrences remain unchanged from the previous V1 calendar i.e. Occurrences always take priority over Recurrences and will override recurrences for the entire day.

For instance, Duke is an equipment technician with the following work hours:

• Recurrence 1 (regular work hours): 9am-5pm PT, repeats all days of the week
• Occurrence 1 (team cohesion): 6-9pm PT, only on Aug 1

Create Recurrence 1, then create Occurrence 1 in succession. As seen below, Occurrence 1 completely overrides all other work hours events for the Aug 1 calendar day even if there is no direct collision between the Recurrence and the Occurrence.

When will the V2 Work Hour Calendar be available, and how can I get my hands on it?

The V2 Work Hour Calendar will be available early-September 2023 in our Early Adoption Wave 2 update. You can opt in through Power Platform Admin Center, as seen below:

How can I find out more?

If you want to learn more about the new work hour calendar multiple recurrence feature, you can:

Read the documentation here: Edit work hour calendars by using APIs in Dynamics 365 Field Service – Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn

Join the community forum here: https://community.dynamics.com/

Contact the support team here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus/

We hope you enjoy the new work hour calendar multiple recurrence feature and find it useful for your business needs. We appreciate your feedback and suggestions on how to improve our products and services. Thank you for choosing Dynamics 365!

The post Introducing multiple recurrence support for the work hour calendar in Universal Resource Scheduling (URS) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.