What’s new in Dynamics 365 Customer Service in the 2023 release wave 1

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a powerful customer service automation tool that helps businesses provide best-in-class customer service through live customer engagements, agent collaboration, advanced telephony, and AI-based analytics. Microsoft is committed to enhancing this powerful solution by releasing two waves of updates each year. In the 2023 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft will implement new features that enhance agent, supervisor, administrator, and omnichannel experiences. In this post, we will highlight the best new features and updates included in this release.

To review our summary of the last release, read our 2022 release wave 2 blog.

In public preview since October 2022, daily agent forecasts for conversations and cases enable customer service managers to make hiring decisions and staff adjustments for the coming budget year. These forecasts help managers ensure they have an adequate number of agents available while avoiding overcapacity and underestimations. Agent forecasting for conversations and cases was released as a preview in October 2022 with the following capabilities:

• Forecast conversation volumes daily
• Automatically detect seasonality from historical traffic to help customer service managers accurately forecast conversation and case volumes during special, seasonal events
• Forecast agent demand to handle forecasted conversation volumes to account for business goals such as service-level agreements (SLA) and average handle time
• Visualize on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis for up to six months
• Slice volume and agent forecasts by any combination of channels and queues

As a part of the 2023 release wave 1, customer service managers can now perform forecasts at 15-minute intervals using historical data.

Available for public preview in April 2023, AI suggested replies will provide agents with multiline prompts and response suggestions in the chat based on the context of an ongoing conversation. The model will learn from the chat history and adapt over time so that response suggestions are relevant and high quality. The highlights of this feature include:

• Real-time suggested replies for agents in the digital messaging experience
• Automated named-entity recognition for personalized responses
• Simplified data configuration experience
• Robust reply management experience for admins
• On-demand model retraining to ensure the model is always up to date and accurate
• Unique models for each organization trained on historical support conversations

Currently, agents are unable to upload and view multiple attachments or capture notes when they create a case. This lack of functionality can lead to unnecessary and repetitive tasks. In the 2023 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, agents will have access to a new intuitive and enhanced case form. This new feature will allow agents to:

• Find information quickly and manage cases efficiently using the new case form
• Add key information to the case quickly without losing sight of customer details, past cases, and previous interactions
• Provide updates on existing customer cases without interrupting the case creation flow or switching tabs
• Take notes during case creation
• Upload multiple attachments directly to the case
• Use the Description field with Rich Text Editor (RTE) capabilities to capture case details
• Access all attachments of a case in a consolidated view

Available in April 2023, is a new email template creation experience that provides users with an advanced, digital content designer for creating and styling templates. This new designer includes advanced layouts that are responsive and adapt to different screen sizes. Additionally, users can add elements like images, text, buttons, or dividers while creating email templates.

The Dynamics 365 Customer Service workspace empowers agents to multitask by switching seamlessly between cases, conversations, and issues, without losing the context of the work that is in progress. In the latest release, the workspace will receive an enhanced design with a new layout for the site map, sessions, and tabs. Key capabilities in the workspace app this release are:

• Sessions and child tabs are displayed horizontally
• Improved handling of overflow tabs and sessions
• Tab bar is only visible if multiple tabs are open
• Improved site map that is accessed from the Menu
• Improved accessibility with 400 percent zoom mode
• Increased predictability of session closure in multisession apps
• In-app notifications aligned with the multi-session navigation

Omnichannel engagement enables instant engagement and connectivity between agents and customers while giving supervisors real-time visibility into operational efficiency. In the 2023 release wave 1, Microsoft enhances the omnichannel experience.

• Make workspace app available for omnichannel roles – Users with out-of-the-box omnichannel security roles will now have access to continued innovations in the Customer Service workspace app by default
• Enable customers to keep queue spot, get callbacks – Queue position with direct callback enables customers to request a callback as soon as an agent is available instead of remaining on the call
• Integrated Nuance IVR – Integration of Nuance interactive voice response (IVR) enables organizations to provide continuous self-service to their end customers
• Integrated Nuance Gatekeeper – The integration of Nuance Gatekeeper technologies with the voice channel in Customer Service enables organizations to improve customer satisfaction and contact center productivity by providing biometric authentication and fraud prevention

The 2023 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides enhancements to the supervisor experience enabling supervisors to monitor and improve contact center operations. Included in this release are the following features:

• Customize visualizations of omnichannel real-time analytics dashboard – With this feature, administrators can customize reports to meet their organizational requirements by leveraging the out-of-the-box real-time Power BI-embedded data model
• Monitor support operations in near real time – In this release, supervisors will have better visibility into the overall support performance through near real-time reporting, empowering managers to monitor key operational metrics, make course corrections at the right time, and keep service levels high
• Personalize out of the box real-time analytics reports – Supervisors will be able to use the out-of-the-box real-time reports with your selected filters by saving them as bookmarks. This helps personalize your reports and saves the time and effort required to reapply the filters every time you open the dashboards.

Rand Group is your Dynamics 365 Customer Service support partner that can highlight new features that your organization should utilize, train your users on the new features, and perform system checks to ensure all modules are performing as expected after each release wave. Ready to start using these new features from the 2023 release wave 1? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.