‘Offline-first’ with the Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile application offers many advantages for frontline workers. The offline-enabled application will allow frontline workers to perform functions while they are in the field, without depending on an internet connection. This keeps them productive even in environments without high quality network coverage, which can be a common problem in rural locations or even remote urban areas where network coverage is poor.

In this blog post we will share details on recent enhancements to the Dynamics 365 ‘Offline-first’ as well as some new capabilities to help your organization debug customizations with the offline application. Let’s go!

Wave 1 2023 enhancements

With the release of Wave 1 2023, frontline workers will have a faster sync experience and better visibility into the sync status of their offline-enabled Field Service Mobile application. 

The offline sync icon is now moved from the sitemap to the header of the application providing an ever-present status of their offline app.

Based on states of the icon, the offline-enabled frontline worker can see if their application is connected to Dataverse, a sync is actively running, an up-sync in pending, or if the previous sync resulted in an error.  This will allow the user to make informed decisions while in the field. For example, if an up-sync is pending after a period of being without network access, they will know to connect and allow that sync to complete so all their changes can be viewed by the back office.

The offline status page is also enhanced with more details on the sync, the size on disk and app connectivity status.

In addition to offline-related interface update, the sync experience is faster and more reliable. This includes optimizations to intelligently sync table or metadata changes, and improved parallelization to bring down data faster – including when the application is accessed in a way which forces a record sync such as launching the app via push notification.

Debugging the offline application

Debugging on a mobile application can be a difficult task, which is made more challenging when introducing unique aspects of ‘Offline’ mode. To help support customers who require customizations and enhancements while working offline we have introduced debugging capabilities for the model driving applications running on Android and Windows platforms, iOS platform compatibility is coming soon.

Debugging on Android

Debugging on Windows

References & resources

Please check out Dynamics 365 Power Apps Documentation for even more information on Offline mode – best practices, limitations to consider, and more

Offline Profile Guidelines

Offline Capabilities & Limitations

The post Fire up your mobile field service game: offline enhancements for a seamless user experience appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Customer service agents in a digital contact center interact with multiple customers daily through live chat, phone calls, and social media channels. During customer interactions, often they find themselves searching for relevant information on various screens or other systems, resulting in increased wait time for the end customer. Also, they want to quickly capture or update the information about their conversation, in real time without having to create or link a case to a conversation. Recent enhancements to the Active Conversation form allow agents to access and edit relevant information without any screen switching.  

Now, agents have all the relevant information at their fingertips, so that they spend less time looking for information on different screens or systems and help customers quickly. This leads to a reduction in average wait time and better customer satisfaction.  

Customize the Active Conversation form

This feature allows administrators to add custom fields on the conversation form and embed canvas apps to display the information from external sources. To ensure agents can capture information quickly, it offers agents the flexibility to view pre-filled information and update it as needed while interacting with the customer. They can view the records related to the conversation on the sub-grids. 

Access the enhanced Active Conversation form  

The Active Conversation form now displays the Customer 360 card. This allows agents to view information related to the customer. They can also make inline edits without having to navigate to contact or account form. Similarly, it shows case details with information related to the case linked to the conversation and allows agents to make inline edits as needed. Administrators can configure the fields they want to show on both these cards.

Additionally, the form includes the configurable recent cases card. This shows the color-coded priority and case status for easy discoverability by the agents. Moreover, switching from the active to the closed conversation form is restricted when the conversation is still active. The reverse is true as well. 

Administrators can enable these enhancements in the Customer Service workspace application by navigating to the Customer Service Admin center > Workspaces > Active Conversation form settings. 

Learn more 

To learn more, read the documentation:  

View Active Conversation in Omnichannel for Customer Service | Microsoft Learn 

The post Customize and access the improved Active Conversation form  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Organizations in different industries need to visualize their customer interactions in different ways. With customized columns in the conversation table, organizations can enable agents to quickly summarize the purpose of the interaction, and they can associate conversations with leads. The ability to customize the conversation table improves agent productivity and creates positive customer outcomes.  

Improve agent productivity and CSAT with conversation table customization 

When agents converse with customers, the Active Conversation form helps capture the details of the interaction. And consequently, supervisors and other agents can easily understand it. 

Ana is a customer service agent at Contoso who works tirelessly, juggling multiple customer problems over chat throughout the day. After every conversation with a customer, she patiently reviews her interaction, summarizes the issue, and writes wrap-up notes. She wishes there were a better way to quickly capture the outcomes of customer interactions and move on to serve other customers instead of spending time wrapping up the conversation.   

Dynamics 365 Customer Service does not have an out-of-the-box solution to serve her needs. However, admins can now customize the conversation table to help agents like Ana wrap up cases more quickly. Conversation table customization now supports adding columns, charts, views and connecting conversations to leads or any other activity-enabled table. 

Now that the conversation table is customizable, contact centers can tailor the agent experience to business-specific use cases like Ana’s. When the conversation table is customizable to Ana’s needs, she can save time, serve more customers, lower wait times for customers, and leave them happy with Contoso’s service.  

Create positive customer outcomes by associating leads with conversations  

Contoso enabled Conversation disposition as a custom column on the conversation table and added it to the active conversation form.  

Olivia, a Contoso customer, contacts Contoso support over webchat. She wants to find out why she was charged full price for her coffee subscription instead of the promotional price. The agent assigned to address Olivia’s concern, Ana, checks with her account team, and rectifies the error. Ana quickly wraps the conversation by specifying “Pricing dispute” disposition instead of having to write elaborate notes. Ana or any other agent connected to Olivia in the future can quickly get the context and complete interaction history through dispositions instead of having to go through one note after the other.

With the ability to view service and sales data in a single record, Ana can pitch a special offer to Olivia and associate a lead to this conversation immediately in the same form. Contoso’s sales team can follow up with Olivia subsequently through the lead.  This single source of information offers a true end-to-end customer experience without having to juggle between sales and support lines.  

Contact center supervisors can review interactions like Olivia’s pricing dispute or other dispositions and take appropriate preventive measures based on aspects of the conversation such as volume or sentiment.  

The use cases for customization are truly limitless and best left to the imagination of our customers and their business scenarios.  

Customize the conversation table 

Now you can extend the conversation table just like any other Dynamics 365 table from the customization experience in Power Apps. Use the Regarding column to associate any activity enabled entity to Conversation. You can create additional columns, views, and charts. This feature is enabled by default for all customers with our April 2023 release wave.  

Learn more

Watch a quick video introduction.

To find out more about conversation customization in Customer Service, read the documentation:

• Customize the Active Conversation form | Microsoft Learn
• Customizations supported by the Conversation table and form | Microsoft Learn 

The post Customize the conversation table for your business needs  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Support agents often have to manage complex and lengthy conversations and cases. These require a lot of time and attention to understand and resolve. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to quickly get the gist of what’s going on without having to read through every single message or all the information linked to a case? 

Now agents can use Copilot to ramp up fast. Copilot summarization automatically generates concise and informative summaries of conversations and cases in simple, intuitive natural language. Agents can read these summaries in seconds and get up to speed on the most important details. 

Conversation summarization

Conversation summarization is available for any digital messaging or voice conversation that involves a virtual agent handoff to live support, an agent consult, or conversation wrap-up notes. You can also request a conversation summary on demand at any time during the conversation. 

A conversation summary will capture the 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. It will also highlight any sentiment expressed by the customer or the agent, plus action items or next steps.

Case summarization 

Case summarization is available in a single click, right on the case form. It captures highlights from key case fields such as Customer, Case title, Case type, Subject, Case Description, Product, and Priority. It also considers linked timeline records such as notes, emails and conversation summaries when the conversation summary feature is enabled. Case summaries can help support agents catch up on who has worked on the case so far. They can also see what has happened in previous communications, and any issues that have been addressed to date. This information helps agents quickly determine the best next steps.  

A case summary is valuable during case collaborations, transfers, and final resolutions when support agents are documenting what occurred throughout the case lifecycle. They are especially valuable in accelerating the administrative tasks surrounding multiday or long running cases. 

Extensibility and customization

Copilot summarization is flexible and adaptable to your organization’s needs and preferences. You can customize and extend the feature in various ways. 

With conversation summary, administrators can specify which actions trigger a conversation summary in the Customer Service admin center. For example, you can enable conversation summary only for handoffs and consults, or only for conversation wrap-ups, or for all three. 

With case summary, administrators can add the case summary card to any form that uses the case entity in Power Apps. This makes it easy to extend the functionality to any customized application that support teams use. 

Copilot summarization is a powerful tool that can help you accelerate your support processes and improve customer satisfaction. By providing agents with quick access to the most relevant information, Copilot helps save time, reduce errors, and enhance communication. Try it today and see how it can transform your support experience. 

Plan for future updates

We plan to update Copilot experiences monthly with features and enhancements. The AI models and prompts will be updated regularly behind the scenes, and you’ll see the quality of Copilot’s responses improve over time. The following features are already on our roadmap:  

• Out-of-box analytics. These reports will give supervisors insight into how their agents are using Copilot and its impact on their tracked support metrics.  
• SharePoint support for Copilot knowledge. Organizations who have their support content outside of Dynamics today can easily connect to a SharePoint content source. 

AI solutions built responsibly 

Enterprise grade data privacy at its core. Azure OpenAI offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Copilot is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection. 

Responsible AI by design. 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

For more information on extending the case summary, see Configure Copilot features for custom case forms and custom apps | Microsoft Learn 

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Hello to the Project Service Automation (PSA) Community!

Back in November 2022 we announced the availability of the second phase of Project Service Automation to Project Operations upgrade, making it possible to upgrade projects with up to 500 tasks.  If all projects in your environment contain 500 tasks or less, we strongly encourage you to start your upgrade process as soon as possible so you can take advantage of many new Project Operations features such as: 

• Integration with Project for the Web with many new advanced scheduling features

• Project Budgeting and Time-phased forecasting  
• Date Effective price overrides 
• Revision and Activation on Quotes   
• Material usage recording in projects and tasks 
• Subcontract Management 

• Advances and Retained-based contracts 
• Contract not-to-exceed 
• Task based billing 
• Multi-customer contracts 

Learn more

Curious to know details about the upgrade process? Please check this link and learn more about it! 
 
Want to learn more about Project Operations? Check this link and navigate to our detailed documentation! 

Want to try Project Operations? Click here and sign up for a 30 days trial! 

Thank you

The Microsoft Project Operations Product Team 

The post Upgrade Project Service Automation to Project Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In Resource Scheduling Optimization, dispatchers can lock existing scheduled bookings to Resource, Time or Time Range, or Resource and Time based on their scheduling scenarios.

What are locked options and why are they needed?

Once a booking is created, a lock can be set on the Scheduling Lock Options field in the Resource Scheduling Optimization tab of the Bookable Resource Booking record.

There are 4 options:

• Lock to ‘Time Range’. A repair work order is scheduled for tomorrow and a confirmation sent to customer stating that a technician will be arriving between 9am to 12pm in the morning. In case if this repair work order needed to be rescheduled as part of rescheduling or re-optimization process, RSO will need to make sure estimated arrival time for this booking still between 9am to 12pm but may move this booking to other resource if needed in order to optimize global scheduling results.

• Lock to ‘Resource’. Sometimes, certain technicians manage work order requests for specific service accounts, in this case, dispatchers can configure technician as ‘Must choose from’ resource on Resource Requirement record before requirement gets fulfilled, or if the booking already created lock the booking to this resource. RSO will make sure to keep this booking assigned to the same resource but may move to another time in order to optimize global scheduling results.

• Lock to ‘Time’, similar like Lock to ‘Time Range’, instead of keeping the booking within a time window, RSO will make sure to keep the estimated arrival time for this booking at exact time but may move this booking to another resource if needed in order to optimize global scheduling results.

• Lock to ‘Resource and Time’: Sometimes, there are specific commitments with customers, which requires booking time or assigned technician to not change, with this lock option, RSO will NOT change this booking at all, it may recalculate estimated travel time based on prior booking changes.

How did RSO handle locked bookings before?

Before this changes, RSO administrators could select and rank ‘Locked booking’ objective on optimization goal, RSO will try to include locked bookings and optimize together with other bookings. When there are too many locked bookings in optimization scope, it reduces the flexibility of RSO system to generate optimal results. To improve global optimization results, RSO may decide to NOT include some locked bookings in the new proposed schedule, and since RSO will not delete locked bookings either, these locked bookings will be treated as ‘Ignored’. Dispatchers will end up seeing overlapping bookings on schedule board, or technician gets double booked which causes confusions and disruption.

For example, there are two requirements, Repair work (1 hour) and Install boiler (8 hours). We have one resource (Jeff) that works 8 hours per day. If you book repair work (1 hour) to the resource Jeff and lock that booking to Jeff, when RSO runs with the objective of maximizing total working hours, RSO decides to ignore the booking for Repair work (1 hour) and create another booking for Install boiler (8 hours) to maximize the total working hours. Since Repair work (1 hour) gets ignored from the final schedule and not being deleted, Jeff ends up being double booked.

Improved logic for locked bookings

With the improved logic for locked bookings shipped along RSO 3.4.0.8, RSO will ALWAYS include locked bookings in the new proposed schedules, and schedule other bookings around.

In the previous example for Jeff, RSO will make sure that booking for Repair work (1 hour) remains on the schedule, won’t create booking for Install boiler (8 hours) to avoid overlapping.

Excessive use of lock constraints may result in poor optimization of the final schedule. For example: Jeff has low utilization as there isn’t any other requirement can fit into the remaining hours.

Booking lock options should be used wisely to maximize Resource Scheduling Optimization results and minimize interference with other Resource Scheduling Optimization objectives.

Will RSO still respect locked bookings when locked bookings violate scheduling constraints?

Sometimes, dispatchers may lock a booking explicitly without being aware that the locked booking potentially violates certain scheduling constraints.

E,g: skill matching, a booking gets assigned to a technician who does not have the required skill. 

In this case, RSO will still respect locked bookings and make sure this locked booking is in the final schedule, as RSO respects user decision of the ‘locked booking’.  RSO shows a prompt: “Locked booking is infeasible, has invalid match of resource skill” to let the user decide in case they would like to correct manually and explicitly.

These are some of the new enhancements to allow efficiency in resource scheduling. Do review the detailed documentation on Universal Resource Scheduling for Dynamics 365 Field Service overview – Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn for further information.

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