Case Management Overview (Episode-04)

Posted on October 4, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

<– Previous Episode

What is a Case?

A case typically represents a situation or incident that’s reported by a customer and that requires a resolution. Cases are designed to track the process from the initial intake of an incident, through the remediation process, to the final resolution. From a customer service standpoint, a case can represent several items. Here are some common examples:

  • Questions: The customer might have a specific question about a product or service. For example, a customer contacts a support agent to ask for information about the organization’s insurance policy, like the deductible or benefit amounts.
  • Requests: The customer might have a specific request, like a request for more information or some type of action. For example, a customer contacts an organization to request that someone come out to do a property inspection.
  • Issue: The customer might be having a problem that must be fixed, like a warranty claim, a billing dispute, or a flaw in a product. For example, a customer contacts a support center because of a billing error on her mobile data plan.

Customer Service has several components that work together to provide an end-to-end case management solution that not only helps identify cases but also routes each case to the most appropriate agent who can provide guidance and resolve the case. Here are some of the most commonly used components:

  • Cases: A case represents a single incident of service. In other words, it represents anything, in the context of a customer interaction, that requires some type of resolution or answer. Multiple cases can be associated with a single customer at any time.
  • Activities: An activity typically represents an interaction with a customer, like a phone call. Multiple activities can be associated with a single case.
  • Entitlements: Entitlements specify the amount of support services that a customer is entitled to. Think of them as support contracts.
  • Knowledge articles: The knowledge base is a repository of informational articles that help customer service representatives resolve cases.
  • Queues: A queue is a place to organize and store activities and cases that are waiting to be processed.
  • Service level agreements (SLAs): SLAs are a way to track and define what should happen when a case is opened, like how long it should take to respond to a customer.
  • Record creation and update rules: Record creation and update rules can be applied to different activity types to automatically create Dynamics 365 records.
  • Routing rules: Routing rules are applied to cases to automatically route them to a specific queue or user.
  • Business process flows: A business process flow represents a guided process that has different stages and steps that are used to resolve a specific item, like a case.

Let’s look at an example that shows how all these components work together to provide an end-to-end solution.

In this example, the customer is a gold customer. The entitlement record that’s associated with this gold customer specifies that the customer is entitled to open 15 cases with the organization.

  • The customer can open these cases from multiple channels, including phone, a mobile app, social media, or email. (In this example, the customer has sent an email.)
  • After the customer email is received, record creation rules identify who the email came from and the content of the email. This information is used to create a new case in the application.
  • After the case is created, a routing rule automatically routes the case to the gold customer queue. An SLA is used to determine that initial contact with the customer must be made within 15 minutes.
  • A support agent who has access to the gold queue grabs the case from the queue to work on it. This agent is now responsible for resolving the case.
  • A case resolution process flow is used to guide the agent through the process of resolving the case.
  • The agent finds a knowledge article that might provide a resolution to the case, emails the article to the customer, and resolves the case.
  • The customer’s entitlement record is updated to reflect the fact that 14 cases now remain on the customer’s entitlement.

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Understand the Modern Customer Journey (Episode-03)

Posted on October 3, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

<– Previous Episode

Service has changed drastically over the last five to ten years. In the past, a customer would call and be put on hold until somebody picked up the phone to help. Today, the support landscape looks very different.

Today’s customer can start a support journey from multiple starting points. Customers have different channel preferences and expect an effortless experience across all channels.

With the advent of self-service capabilities, customers can now start educating themselves by using any of these resources:

  • Portals with an interactive bot
  • Live chat capability
  • Interactive kiosks
  • A mobile app deployed by the customer’s organization
  • Remote sharing of screens between a service agent and the customer
  • Any number of social networks, including Facebook and Twitter

As this list shows, we can never be certain just where the customer is coming from. Therefore, we must be prepared, with all possible channels and media open and listening.

Omni- Channel Experience

Improve agent productivity and reduce effort to serve across disparate channels & LoB apps.

Customer Perspective and Expectations

It isn’t enough just to have a bunch of different channels. Your service organization must be integrated, so that:

  • All the support channels have the same information. You don’t want the advice that your bots give to differ from the advice that a customer representative would give.
  • Your support channels are seamlessly connected. You want information to be able to pass easily from one channel to the other.

The complexity doesn’t stop there. In general, the modern service company must consider the following:

  • Social media: Customers are highly active on social media. They don’t just leave comments about the things they like. They’ll also comment—loudly—about what they don’t like. What’s more, many of their friends—your potential customers—are listening to those comments and forming their own opinions of your company.
  • Company size: Companies often want to target both small and enterprise customers through the same set of channels.
  • Support for contract and non-contract customers: Everyone gets support, not just those with service level agreements (SLAs). Again, you don’t know where new customers are coming from.
  • Fast response times: Customers expect fast response times. If you can’t give them a timely response, they’ll go elsewhere—maybe even to your competitors, who might have a better support channel in place.
  • On-site support: Sometimes, customers can’t be helped online. In this case, they often expect the service company to visit them at their place of business or in the field to resolve an issue.

Typical Customer Journey

The typical customer will follow a specific path to get a resolution to an issue:

  1. Self-assistance: When people need help, the first thing they do is go on the internet and see if they can fix the issue themselves. They’ll visit a few forums and newsgroups, and ask a few questions, hoping for a quick fix. They might visit the company’s website and do some research while looking around in the documentation.
  2. Initial case creation and routing: Cases will be generated from multiple channels. They can then be routed to specific queues, based on factors like whether there’s a contract, whether the customer is a preferred customer, or whether a technician who’s qualified to handle the issue is available on a specific queue.
  3. Case management and resolution: A service agent will now track all communication with the customer and follow a dedicated case resolution process while using an internal knowledge base. At this point, customer communication can be through email, text messages, or a phone call. Cases are typically tracked to create a historical log of what happened with the customer. The Knowledge Base will also be built out, so that other service representatives can take advantage of knowledge from past cases.
  4. Post-case activities: Customer service organizations are paying more and more attention to what they do after a case is resolved. These post-case activities are now seen as critical. Companies now want to get feedback from customers about the quality of the interaction, as a way to keep channels open and encourage the customer to stay with the company. To gain more insights from the case and further build out their knowledge base, companies might send customers a survey with specifics of the case.

In the modern world, this is typically how customers interact with a support organization within companies.

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Customer Service Core Components (Episode-02)

Posted on October 2, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

<– Previous Episode

Now we’ll look at the basic record types that are used for service management.

Types of Records

Customer records: In Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, customer service requests are typically managed in relation to an existing contact or account record. These contacts and accounts are also used by other areas of business operations, like sales or marketing.

  • A contact represents a person, just as it does in Microsoft Outlook.
  • An account represents a company, organization, or group of people.

Although these are the typical uses of accounts and contacts, different Customer Service deployments might use these record types differently. But they’re both typically referred to as customers. For example, when entering the customer on a case, you can select either an account or a contact.

Cases: Cases are the fundamental record type in service management and represent a single incident of any requested service. Different organizations might use different terms to refer to cases: incidents, tickets, service requests, and so on.

In other words, cases are anything in the context of a customer interaction that requires some type of resolution or answer. Many cases can be associated with a single customer record at the same time. In Customer Service, customer representatives can view open and resolved cases from the customer record.

Activities: Interactions between a business and its customers that are considered important enough to track in Customer Service are known as activities. Activities can be associated with many kinds of records in Customer Service. You can open the record and find the activities under Closed activities or Open activities.

  • Closed activities are those that have been marked as completed.
  • Open activities either haven’t been marked as completed or are waiting for completion at a different date and time.

Entitlements: Entitlements can be used to specify how much support services a customer is entitled to. For example, a customer’s entitlement in Customer Service might allot ten support cases that the customer can use at his or her discretion.

Entitlement channels: Entitlement channels can be used to specify the type of service a customer is entitled to. There are five entitlement channels:

  • Phone
  • Email
  • Web
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Knowledge Base articles: The Knowledge Base in Customer Service is a repository of informational articles that help customer service representatives resolve cases. In some organizations, the information in the knowledge base helps employees not only resolve issues but also ask follow-up questions.

Typically, this information is about the company, product questions and answers, and any other kind of information that can help employees better handle customer inquiries, requests, or issues.

Resolution activities: After all the activities for a case are resolved, the case itself can be resolved. After the case is resolved, an activity of the Resolution Activity type is created. This activity is found in the closed activities associated with a case. Resolution activities show the case’s resolution and how much time was spent on the case.

Queues: A queue is a place to organize and store activities and cases that are waiting to be processed.

For example, an organization might have a support team that has the email address [email protected]. If the support team receives an email that’s sent to this address, a member of the team handles the support case and works to resolve the issue for the customer.

Queues in Microsoft Dynamics work the same way.

Products: Products in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Catalog can be related to a customer service case. Therefore, they can help provide a more detailed view of cases, resolutions, and customer feedback at a product level.

Although products can be associated with cases to better categorize the types of cases, this association will not have an impact on pricing or invoicing. In addition, using products together with cases is optional and might not be applicable to all organizations.

Goals: In addition to reporting on and analysing the information in Customer Service, organizations can use the Goal Management features to establish and track progress against target values for key performance indicators (KPIs). For service management, these KPIs might include metrics like resolved cases or in-progress cases.

Service level agreements: Service level agreements (SLAs) are a way of tracking and defining what should happen when a case is opened. You can track things like when a case was first taken by a support engineer and how long it took to resolve the case. You can also send emails based on specific warning and failure timelines.

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Introducing Dynamics 365 for Customer Service (Episode-01)

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

Customer service is a key aspect of any customer relationship management strategy. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service has many features that organizations can use to manage the services they provide to customers.

Customer Engagement

Overview of Customer Service Landscape

To help you better understand the context of customer service, let’s review some real-life customer scenarios:

Addressing and solving customer or product issues: Paul Cannon is a customer of Contoso Bicycles. He recently discovered that the suspension on his Contoso mountain bike is defective and isn’t working correctly. Paul contacts Contoso Bicycles to discuss the issue and get help with his bike. The issue is logged in the Mountain Bikes Support Request queue.

Rob, the Mountain Bikes Support Specialist for Contoso Bicycles, receives the issue through Customer Service. He then works with Paul to schedule a service activity to repair or replace the defective suspension.

Receiving and answering customer questions: Jim Glynn is a customer of Fabrikam Furniture. He recently received a table that he bought through the Fabrikam website. Jim tries to assemble the table, but he isn’t sure he’s doing it correctly. He contacts Fabrikam Furniture to ask questions and get help with his table.

Sidney, a Customer Support Specialist at Fabrikam Furniture, receives Jim’s questions. He uses the Knowledge Base in Customer Service to find a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document for the table. He then uses that document to help answer Jim’s questions.

Collecting and applying customer feedback: Maria is the Products Manager for Tables and Chairs at Fabrikam Furniture. She wants to collect feedback about the at-home assembly process when customers contact Fabrikam. She uses the case management functionality of Customer Service to capture this feedback. She can also analyse the tables and chairs that cause the most issues during at-home assembly, and those that are easier to assemble. Additionally, Maria can determine which instructions for at-home assembly of tables and chairs must be prioritized for editing and review.

Understanding Today’s Customer

Today’s customer (Customer 2.0):

  • Wants it all and wants it now
  • Wants to be on control of the experience without interface

Customers today are more informed than ever. Customers are used to getting what they want, when they want it, the way they want it.

Think of the typical process of buying a TV:

  1. Before you go to the store to buy the item, you probably do some research on the internet.
  2. You might select several TVs and compare the different options and features.
  3. You’ll likely check out customer reviews and determine which TV you think is best before you set foot in a store.
  4. After you’re in the store, you might engage with a sales rep, but you already have a good idea of what you’re looking for.

The same process can be applied across different experiences. Customers want to be in control of the experience, and they prefer little or no interference as they work through the process. Customers should have the flexibility to drive the engagement experience but still be able to engage with live agents. But any such engagement should be on their terms.

Trends Influencing Customer Service

There are many trends that are currently affecting how customer service works. As a service organization, it’s important that you understand what those trends are and how you can take advantage of them to enhance and drive the customer experience. Here are some of the trends influencing service today:

  • Mobile devices: With so many mobile devices available today, people are no longer engaging with customer service just through a phone call or email. They want to be able to access portal information on their mobile devices or engage with an agent through a chat that they initiate on their device.
  • Social media: People aren’t usually shy when it comes to expressing their thoughts and opinions on social media. You must be able to take advantage of this platform to ensure that customer issues or complaints are handled the same way they would be if the customer engaged directly with support.
  • Self-service: Self-service can mean different things:
    • It can be as simple as providing a knowledge base that customers can use to find answers to simple procedural questions.
    • It can involve letting customers manage their accounts.
    • Sometimes, it can involve giving customers a way to engage with other customers who are in the same situation.
  • Internet of Things: With more and more devices connected to the internet and communicating back and forth, it’s important to take advantage of the technology used on these devices to engage in service calls. Here are some of the ways this can be done:
    • Anomaly detection
    • Predictive maintenance
    • Using the data that’s collected to help drive service offerings in the future
  • Customer engagement: Engagement is more than just reaching out to gain customers opinions. It can include knowing these details:
    • When is the right time to engage?
    • What channels should be used?
    • What information should you collect?

Posted in D365 Customer Engagement (CRM), D365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 | Tagged , | 1 Comment

D365 – Create Alternate Keys

Posted on August 19, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

Alternate Keys facilitates two functions inside Dynamics 365:

  • Duplicate detection based on a combination of fields.
  • Integrating Dynamics 365 with existing systems, using SDK.

For Example: Duplicate detection rule for Account: Combination of First Name, Last Name and Email.

Each alternate kay must be given a unique name.

Alternate key can consist for one or more fields.

After creating Alternate key, you can use CD to integrate with external applications.

To Create Alternate Keys:

  • Open Customization
  • Click Keys under an entity (for example: Contact)
  • Click New to create a new entity.
  • Select the keys for which you would like to track duplicate records (let’s say Email and Fax).

  • Click OK and Publish Customization.
  • Try creating two contacts with same Email and Fax and check if you receive a duplicate key warning.

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D365 – Use Rollup Fields

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

  • Rollup Fields rollup information from the related records (or in other words, it aggregates value of related records).
  • Example: Total estimated revenue of open opportunities of an account, Number of high priority open cases across all accounts, etc.
  • Functions available:
    • Sum
    • Count
    • Min
    • Max
    • Avg

    How it Works?

    Let us say, we need to see how many bookings does a Contact have?

  • Customize the system
  • Go to Contact Entity and add a new Rollup field as shown below:

  • Add this field to the Contact form.
  • Create some Booking Details with various Agents (Contacts) and then check the contact form for the result:

    NOTE: If you do not see a value, click Recalculate function.

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D365 – Use Calculated Fields

Posted on July 22, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

  • Calculated Field allow you to automate manual calculations used in your business.
  • Calculated field comprises of calculations that use fields from current entity or related parent entity.
  • It has two important sections: Conditions and Actions.
  • Example: Weighted Revenue, Contact Number, Lead Score, etc.
  • Calculation field option is available for the following data types:
    • Single Line of Text
    • Option Set
    • Two Options
    • Whole Number
    • Decimal Number
    • Currency
    • Date and Time

Example: Single Line of Text

Example: Date and Time

Example: Decimal Number

Add these fields to the form and check how the field behaves.

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D365 – Configure Fields

Posted on July 20, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

Following are the screenshots of how you can configure fields of different data types in Dynamics 365. In this example, we have use the data type name as the field name for demonstration:

Single Line of Text

Option Set

Multi Select Option Set

Two Options

Image

Whole Number

Floating Point Number

Decimal Number

Currency

Multiple Lines of Text

Date and Time

Lookup

Customer

Now add the fields to the form to check behaviour of fields with different data types:

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D365 – Configure Lookup Fields and Customer Fields

Posted on July 20, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

Lookup Fields

Lookup fields are used when:

  • You want to select a record from an existing entity
  • When you know that field values can change anytime and are not fixed. For example: Accounts lookup field on Contacts entity

Customer Fields

Customer fields are used when you want to look up to either Accounts or Contacts entity records. For example a Preferred Vendor can either be a person or a company.

You can add these fields to the Form and check the result:

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D365 – Implement Option Sets and Two Option Fields

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Paresh Sharma

Option Sets

  • Option Sets allow you to create a number of choices to select in a field
  • Option Sets are used when the choices are limited and known
  • For example: Payment Terms (Advance, 7Days, 30 Days, 60 Days)
  • Two types of Option Sets:
    • Global Option Set: Can be used for multiple fields on multiple entities
    • Local Option Set: Can be used only for a single field on a single entity

Two Options

  • Two Options is used when there are only two values
  • For example: Yes or No, Active or Inactive, etc

How to Create Global Option Set?

  • Go to your Solution or general Customization in Dynamics 365.
  • Under Components click Option Sets
  • Click New
  • Specify Display Name, Name and add Options
  • Save and Publish

Now, you can use this Option Set in any Entity.

How to Use Global Option Set?

  • Go to your Solution or general Customization in Dynamics 365.
  • Under Components, Entities
  • Select an entity and add under Fields click New
  • Add a new field and select the following properties:
    • Data Type as Option Set
    • Use Existing Option Set as Yes
    • Select the Option Set form the list

NOTE: In case of Local Option Set, you can select the property Use Existing Option Set as No and create a list of options needed.

When you add the field to the form, you will be able to select the options from the dropdown list:

NOTE: Similarly, you can create a new field and select Two Options as Data Type and check the results.

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