By Ayesha Mirza, senior consultant at InfoStrat
One of the key initiatives of
customer service is to make tasks easier for both the customer and customer
service agents. Customers want to find information and customer service agents
have the need to process, absorb and promote information requests in order to
provide an adequate customer experience.
Streamlining this flow of
information requires planning and a robust platform such as Microsoft Dynamics
365 to bridge the gap between the customer experience and agent activities.
This post describes our approach and
best practices to consider while implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer
Service.
- · Strategy – Plan
out your implementation from the start. Define purpose, scale, budget,
baselines, promotion, delivery, maintenance and escalation methods prior
to kick-off. This will aid in clarifying internal and business
expectations and help keep costs and schedule as projected. The approach
can be defined with the following milestones.
- Knowledge - At the core of an effective customer self-service
solution is a strong knowledge base. The knowledge base allows you to
easily add, edit and deliver information and use customer feedback from
across channels, agent knowledge of frequently asked questions, keyword
search data and more to provide the answers and information customers want
and need. It provides agents access to a central knowledge base of
product, service and customer service information so that they can deliver
current, consistent answers and train faster.
o Knowledge
Management Process: The following diagram describes the default
process for creating and using knowledge articles in the Customer Service Hub
in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
§ Create
an article and mark it for review.
§ The
reviewer can approve or reject the article.
§ If
the article is rejected, it is sent back for edits or updates.
§ If
the article is approved, it is published on the portal. It is also available in
search and can also be translated.
§ For
more information, please refer to Microsoft Documents “Create and manage
knowledge articles” https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/customer-service/customer-service-hub-user-guide-knowledge-article.
· Visibility & Metrics - Provide
each agent with individual productivity scorecard. Set targets and objectives
for agents with weekly reports that show customer satisfaction score, tickets
resolved, knowledgebase articles suggested, etc. These metrics can then be
converted for leadership in accessing areas of improvement, training, issues
and growth through KPIs. Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides interactive
dashboards come in two forms:
o Multi-stream
dashboards: Primarily used for Tier 1
Support where representatives handle a large number of cases across multiple
workstreams. Users can easily switch from a standard view to an interactive
tile view to dissect and absorb data effectively. It further provides the
ability to drill down to the emphasizing records.
o Single-stream
dashboards: Primarily used for Tier 2 support representatives that
handle relatively small to medium sized caseloads and require more complex or
escalated data breakdown in a single view.
o Both
multi-stream and single-stream dashboards contain interactive charts that give
you a count of relevant records, such as cases by priority or by status. These
charts also act as visual filters.
o For
more information, please visit Microsoft Documents “Manage service cases using
interactive dashboards” https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/customer-service/customer-service-hub-user-guide-dashboard.
· Collaboration - Promote
instantaneous collaboration and knowledge sharing among agents. Use community
(feedback form) and/or social tools (Yammer and / or Microsoft Teams) to help
speed resolution of trending issues.
· Consolidate - Implement
an agent service desk that combines all channels. Merge channels for
omnichannel service delivery so that agent can seamlessly transition across
channels with the customer.
o Businesses
can utilize the unified routing and work distribution capabilities for
Microsoft Dynamics 365 to route work items initiating from chat, messaging, and
web portal channels to various customer service support teams within the company.
Through setup and configuration, organizations have the ability to define the
role, profile, permissions and makeup of the agents’ access and automate
workflows (queues) based on their availability, capacity and team makeup. This helps streamline the process and makes it
easier for the business and respective agents to work effectively and
proficiently. For more information
please visit Microsoft Documents “Unified routing and work distribution” https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/october18/service/customer-service-omni-channel-release-notes/unified-routing-work-distribution.
· Delivery - Distribute
reliable information that is searchable and well organized by topic,
most-viewed, most-recently-added, etc.
o You
can search the knowledge base from the following areas in the Customer Service
Hub app:
·
Select a case by navigating to Service Ã
Cases
·
In the Related section, select Knowledge Base
Search and search for knowledge articles using keywords in the search box.
·
Quick find in Grids - Go to Service Ã
Knowledge Articles and select the search box to search the knowledge base using
keywords.
·
Global search - Select the Search icon on the
navigation bar to do a global search for knowledge base articles. Global search
lets you use “Characterized” Search or “Relevance” Search.
·
For more information, please visit Microsoft
Documents “Understand knowledge base search mechanisms” https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/customer-service/knowledge-base-search-methods.
· 360 View - Provide
a full circle view of the customer for personalized and appropriate service.
Give agents a heightened view of customer information via custom widgets and
dashboards so that they can have ease of access to data, product history,
sentiment analysis, service history and other customer-centric material.
· Feedback - Incorporate
agent feedback to improve your service replies and delivery. Gather feedback
from agents to improve procedures, efficiency, and self-service knowledge base
with answers to most frequently-asked customer questions.
o Improve
your products and services by enabling users to provide feedback and ratings
for entity records in Microsoft Dynamics 365. For example, you can enable feedback
and ratings for the Product entity to know user's feedback on the products you
sell, or on the Incident (case) entity to understand and improve the quality of
your customer support team.
o You
can enable feedback and ratings for both system and custom entities in Dynamics
365. By default, the KnowledgeArticle entity is enabled for feedback and
ratings. Use the new Feedback entity to create and manage feedback for entity
records.