Dynamics 365 Customer Service (Overview)

Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides functionality around Cases e.g., entitlements, SLAs, queues, knowledge base, and customer satisfaction(survey or voice of customer). It provides traditional case management functionality. When paired with other Dynamics 365 Service application, it provides a foundation to build a complete omni-channel solution for your customers. D365 customer service is an app that helps organizations manage relationships with accounts and contacts by capturing, tracking, and resolving their service issues (cases) that customers have.

● Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service: Adds multi-session and additional channel support to D365 Customer Service. Agents can engage with multiple customers at one time, across various channels such as chat, SMS, social and Microsoft Teams.
● Dynamics 365 Customer Service Workspace: Combine the multi session capabilities Omnichannel for Customer Service with the case management capabilities of customer service hub.
● Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights: Case analytics application that provides actionable insights into critical performance metrics, operational data & emerging trends from your customer service system.
● Customer Service Scheduling: Used by organizations that need to schedule and execute services for customers. Organizations can define the services and schedule them to qualified resources are available to perform the service.
● Connected Customer Service: IoT solution that work with IoT management applications to surface events related to the IoT devices defined in Dynamics 365.

Overview of case module functionality
● Cases: Cases are items that you need to resolve. Cases can include questions, problems, or anything else a customer may ask about.
● Queues: Queues are containers for similar cases that are waiting on a response from an agent. You can organize cases by similar topics, levels of difficulties, or other custom rules.
● Entitlements: Entitlements are numeric- or time-based contract records you use to manage how products are serviced who from a customer account can open cases, and the channels through which you receive a case.
● Service-level agreements: Service-level agreements define the level of service or support promised to a customer. They include the KPIs that you need to reach to meet that service level.
● Knowledge article: Knowledge articles are support articles available either internally or externally that customers or agents can reference to resolve a problem.
● Routing rules: Routing rules are criteria that decide which queue a case belongs in.
● Automatic Record Creation rules: The automatic record creation and update rules primarily help administrators define rules to create any entity record from a set of available activities. For ex: creating cases from the emails sent by customers.

Features by implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service:
● Enter and track customer issues by creating cases record.
● Manage and record all interactions-related case records such as phone calls and tasks.
● Provide a platform to share tribal knowledge by applying the knowledge base.
● Create queues and route cases to the right channels.
● Create and track service levels through service level agreements (SLAs).
● Define service terms through entitlements.
● Manage performance and productivity through reports and dashboards.
● Create and schedule services.
● Participate in chats.
● Manage conversations across channels.

Case Module Flow

Implementation Considerations:
SA needs to perform gap analysis on the following processes:
● Automatic record creation: Use the record creation and updates rule or use Power Automate.
● Customer Service Hub: The standard Account, Contact, and Case forms used by other apps are not used in Customer Service Hub. Each form has an Interactive Experience version used by Customer Service Hub app. Plan Accordingly when customizing and deploying.
● Knowledge Articles are not solution components.
● SLA items used Power Automate to perform the actions.
● Be aware of SLA behavior on import of historic case data.

D365 Customer Service has special processing for parent and child cases. The case hierarchy supports two scenarios:
● When a parent case is resolved, all child cases are resolved.
● The parent case cannot be resolved until all child cases are resolved.

Omnichannel: Service focused organizations understand the need to adjust their support strategy to provide customers with the best support options based on their needs. Customers want to engage with service organizations on their terms. They want to contact you when and how they feel most comfortable. Customers also want to know that when they do contact you, you will have the information required to solve their issue. One way that you can help customers is to offer various support channels for your customers. You can provide support via phone, email, live chat, virtual agents, social media, forums, and self-service knowledge bases. We call this range of options multi-channel support. When you give your customers multiple support options, you make it easier for them to start support requests. The increased request volume can be a challenge. It is a challenge to give customers a comprehensive and equally satisfying experience across any channel they are using.

Power Virtual Agents: OmniChannel supports bots created with Power Virtual Agents. You can route customers to bots automatically, which can help you triage and handle specific types of customer inquiries. Through triggers, virtual agents will know when to redirect conversations to live agents automatically. When agents receive a conversation from a virtual agent, Dynamics 365 Customer Service includes all earlier communication with the bot.

Customer Insights: Brings together your organization transactional, behavioral, and demographic data across all your data silos to create a 360-degree view of your customers. You can analyze customer interactions and usage with cross-channel analytics and harness the data to drive informed decisions, automate processes, and personalize customer engagement across channels.

Hope this blog post given some idea about Dynamics 365 Service Module (Overview). I have shared from my point of view & as per my product knowledge. Happy to hear from others if I have missed anything.