We need to talk about... Dynamics 365... Dynamics 365 Contact Centre

Today I launch a new series of blog posts, introducing all the features and functionality within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Centre. In this first post I will be discussing an overview of the solution and where it is placed within the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem.

Introduction

Dynamics 365 Contact Centre is the next-generation contact centre solution provided by Microsoft. The solution was officially announced in the summer of 2024 and went into general availability around October last year. It has been designed and positioned within the market to allow organisations that want to provide their customers with true omnichannel capabilities. The solution, when delivered end-to-end looks to provide a joined-up customer engagement through intelligent and connected experiences.

The solution itself is built on Microsoft Azure and closely integrated with the wider Dynamics 365 ecosystem, as well as integrating natively with Outlook and Teams. It provides a unified platform which service teams within your organisation can use to provide consistent, personalised, and proactive service across all the desired customer channels.

Omnichannel Engagement

To achieve the above, Dynamics 365 Contact Centre provides a wide range of channels, including voice, chat, chatbots via Copilot Studio, email, SMS, web form integration and social media channelling, all of which are centralised into a single agent desktop called the Contact Centre Workspace.

Customers can initiate "conversations" on their preferred channel and easily switch between them without losing context, ensuring that joined-up service experience regardless of their chosen channel.

AI-Powered Capabilities

The Contact Centre uses a lot of built-in generative AI and Microsoft Copilot features to assist agents once they have been connected with the customer. These tools and features provide real-time suggestions, summarisation of records, knowledge retrieval, and next-best actions.

Intelligent routing uses AI to direct interactions to the most suitable agent based on skills, availability, and customer profile, reducing resolution times and increasing first-contact resolution rates.

Unified Agent Experience

Agents can also benefit from the fact that regardless of channel, i.e. voice calls, chat, SMS, or web form submissions that the request can be handled directly from within a centralised interface.

The contact centre workspace looks to not only consolidate customer information, but also provides case and conversation history, as well as interaction timelines, and knowledge articles, all within one screen. This agent experience reduces context switching, improves agent productivity, and enables more informed service delivery.

In a lot of service based roles the user has a range of disparate omnichannel solutions, where calls are separate from live chat and live chat is separate from email, the agent must move between these solutions and will lose data and context in terms of the customer request.

Integrated Collaboration

Dynamics 365 Contact Centre also comes equipped with out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft Teams. This means that once agents are connected with the customer, they are still able to connect with subject matter experts and collaborate instantly and in most cases alongside the customer conversations.

There are processes in place for the escalation of complex issues internally, and co-author responses, all of which are aimed at providing faster resolutions and improved teamwork across the team.

Insights & Reporting

And lastly, while all the above functionality is being used by service representatives and agents, the team leads and supervisors within your organisation can gain access to analytics and real-time dashboards that can track KPI’s such as SLA’s, agent performance, customer sentiment, and interaction volume.

With a new set of omnichannel analytical dashboards, they can identify trends, i.e. which agent takes the longest on calls, optimise workflows, i.e. which agents get routed the most/least calls and then make informed decisions to enhance the teams' overall efficiency. Because the solution is a one stop Contact Centre, agent routing, skills, capacity and workload parameters are all managed directly within the admin centre of the solution.

I hope you enjoy this series on Dynamics 365 Contact Centre and I will continue the series in my next post talking specifically about the configuration and setup tasks needed to deploy the solution. Take Care, Speak Soon!