Microsoft announces first party Contact Centre Solution within “Dynamics 365 Customer Service”

Today at Ignite, Microsoft has announced “voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service”. This basically means that “Dynamics 365 Customer Service” is expanding to become a first party Contact Centre solution.

In the official Microsoft Blog, they said that with the addition of the “voice channel”, in Dynamics 365 Customer Service will enable:

  • A consistent, 360-degree view of the customer across all channels, allowing agents to quickly understand the full customer journey so customers never have to repeat themselves.
  • An intelligent, conversational Power Virtual Agent that can be used as an interactive voice response (IVR) for the voice channel and versatile enough to be used as a chatbot for SMS, live chat, and social messaging channels.
  • AI-based routing of incoming calls to the best-skilled agent, consistent with all other channels.
  • Increased collaboration with other agents and subject matter experts globally using embedded Microsoft Teams to resolve issues faster.

As with the rest of the Dynamics suite, Microsoft say that “AI is infused throughout our first-party voice channel to enrich the customer and agent experience by automating routine tasks and offering insights and recommendations to increase the agent’s focus on the customer”. This includes

Real-time transcription eliminates the need for agents to take notes. Now the agent can refer to what the customer has said without having to ask the customer to repeat information.
Live sentiment analysis provides a pulse on customer emotions throughout the call so agents can deliver a more empathetic experience.
Proactive, AI-driven recommendations for similar cases and knowledge articles help agents resolve customer issues faster.
Real-time translation of transcripts gives agents assisting customers in different regions and across multiple languages added confidence of seeing the conversation in their native language.

  • Real-time transcription eliminates the need for agents to take notes. Now the agent can refer to what the customer has said without having to ask the customer to repeat information.
  • Live sentiment analysis provides a pulse on customer emotions throughout the call so agents can deliver a more empathetic experience.
  • Proactive, AI-driven recommendations for similar cases and knowledge articles help agents resolve customer issues faster.
  • Real-time translation of transcripts gives agents assisting customers in different regions and across multiple languages added confidence of seeing the conversation in their native language.

What about third-party contact centres?

Microsoft have stated, that whilst they now “offer” a first-party SaaS contact centre within Dynamics Customer Service, they have also stated that they will continue to actively support other contact center providers and integrations with Dynamics 365.

Microsoft said, “We continue to support integrations with key partners such as Five9, Genesys, NICE, Solgari, Tenfold, Vonage and others who are building connectors to enable their voice solutions within Dynamics 365 Customer Service“.

Pricing?

I haven’t seen any information on pricing of the voice services for Dynamics Customer Service yet but presume this will build on the Azure Communication Services and be priced accordingly?

Availability.

The new Dynamics 365 Customer Service with voice channel is available for trial right now, by following the link below.
https://aka.ms/TryCustomerService

Microsoft “Forms Pro” becomes “Customer Voice”

Dynamics Customer Voice

Yesterday at Inspire, Microsoft’s Global Partner Event, Microsoft made a massive announcement about changes coming to their survey and feedback tool known as Forms Pro). Released almost a year ago to the day, Forms Pro provided a host of additional features to Forms including functionality tied into the Common Data Service and was the suggested replacement for the previous “Voice of the Customer” which was part of Dynamics 365.

Introducing “Customer Voice

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is a not just a name change for Forms Pro, it’s a new product which will replace Forms Pro – it’s primary focus being to request and manage customer feedback at multiple levels.

As MVP Megan Walker said in a blog, “it took a few steps to get there, but hopefully, now we can see that Microsoft Forms is one product, and Customer Voice is another“.

Customer Voice (which is available from end of August) will have the same notable features as Forms Pro but will also include a host of new capabilities and exciting features.

The user interface will also be separate and different from Microsoft Forms – a move that will hopefully remove a lot of the confusion of not knowing exactly which product was which when using Forms and / or Forms Pro since they do, in essence, look the same!

What are the new Features?

Customer Voice works more on the concept of Projects than just a whole bunch of unstructured surveys. These projects can hold one or more surveys – so the layout is slightly different but easier to manage – for example, you can group surveys based on products or surveys etc.

There are also new satisfaction metrics coming for sentiment, Net promoter or CSAT.

You can also pick new solution templates for projects such as

  • Multiple surveys
  • Branching rules
  • Custom templates and even third-party templates

The full list of features can be found on Microsoft’s office page here:  

Megan – a friend and experts in her field has also done a great video blog on these changes and new stuff…check it out here:

When will the changes kick in?

The transition from Forms Pro to Customer Voice will happen in Mid/Late August 2020 and all existing Forms Pro Surveys and responses will transition across to the new service.

What do you think, are you are Forms Pro user? What do you think of the latest changes?
Let me know

 

Microsoft announces “Cloud for Healthcare” at #MSBuild2020

As Microsofts’ annual dev conference Build opened today (May 19 2020), Microsoft announced the launch of the Microsoft Cloud For Healthcare, — a new Microsoft Industry Cloud solution.

Microsoft said that the solution aims to integrate Microsoft Cloud with an “industry-specific data model” “cross-cloud connectors,” and APIs to better help serve the global healthcare industry.

Global capabilities uniting the healthcare industry

The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare wi bring together capabilities from across many Microsoft Cloud Services 365. This includes Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and if course Azure. This will be powered by a common data model which will allow the sharing of data across various applications to provide better analytics. Microsoft say that this will allow health providers globally to provide better services for patients, clinicians and doctors by helping make it easier to deploy resources to the needs of all hospital and care units.

For example, Cloud for Healthcare, will focus on what Microsoft has identified as important needs for the field, like engaging patients, facilitating health team collaboration and improving operational efficiency, all with strict security measures.

Sample Health App powered services


Of course, an important component of healthcare is aftercare, where medical professionals need to keep in touch with their patients to follow up on their recovery and any post opp treatment, tools available to do so are generally limited to follow-up phone calls and emails, which are not only tedious but can sometimes not meet security standards or provide the best care.

Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot Service will be available as part of this service, which Microsoft say is behind more than 1,500 instances of COVID-19-based bots that have gone live globally since March 2020. These bots can help alleviate the strain on emergency hotlines for public and provide health providers while addressing common questions that patients might have.

Availability

Microsoft has said that a public preview will be coming in coming days and will be free for 6 months for evaluation, with general availability bringing late this calendar year.

Microsoft has also said that although the healthcare industry will be “first served” with the solution, they also promised that more industry-specific clouds solutions will follow.

Thoughts..

What do you think.. Is industry specific Cloud solutions a good next step for Microsoft?