Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Customer Service in 2024 release wave 1

Overview

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a cloud-based solution that uses generative AI across the service journey. It helps businesses deliver fast, personalized, and consistent service across multiple channels. Advanced routing, case management, knowledge management, Copilot, and embedded Microsoft Teams capabilities maximize agent productivity. Simplified administration and integrated analytics optimize contact center operations. The omnichannel capabilities enable organizations to provide an omnichannel experience to their customers with chat, voice, social, and business messaging channels.

In 2024 release wave 1, we focus on the following features:

• Infusing generative AI into customer, agent, and supervisor experiences.
• Enhancing voice, messaging, and email channels.
• Extending Copilot capabilities.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2024 release wave 1

Investment areas

Administrator experiences
The modern administration experience gives you a consistent setup process that brings together the management of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, unified routing, and omnichannel activities. The Customer Service admin center app brings together all administrator experiences related to customer support into one app. It offers an intuitive, guided experience that helps you quickly set up the system for the first time or add to an existing setup. It also includes proactive health checks to make sure the system is set up correctly and works as expected.

Copilot and AI innovation
Copilot transforms the customer service support experience with generative AI. Service representatives become more productive and deliver a better service experience when Copilot helps them find resources to resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks. Copilot gathers knowledge from internal and external sources to draft contextual answers to questions in email and chat conversations. As service representatives research a case, they can ask Copilot questions. They can use Copilot to generate case and conversation summaries in one step.

Omnichannel
The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service enable organizations to connect and engage with their customers through channels like live chat, SMS, voice, Microsoft Teams, and social channels. By providing a seamless service representative experience and valuable conversation insights across channels, the omnichannel features help organizations deliver a true, all-in-one contact center.

Service representative experiences
The service representative experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. When you enhance service representative confidence, you improve customer satisfaction. Customer Service gives service representatives a powerful desktop with infused generative AI, seamless collaboration capabilities, and productivity tools in a customizable workspace. Its features boost service representative effectiveness and enable them to deliver personalized customer experiences across any channel.

Supervisor experiences
The supervisor experience is designed for customer service managers and analysts. When supervisors have access to key operational metrics, they can continuously monitor contact center operations and make course corrections. For example, supervisors can step in when customer sentiment turns negative. They can also improve service representative staffing to optimize productivity and keep service levels high.

Supervisors can use the extensibility feature to customize data models. By adding extra metrics and reporting on custom entities, they make the contact center more efficient.

Teams integration
Use Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Teams together to give your service representatives and customers a cohesive environment where they can collaborate seamlessly.

With embedded chat and swarming, service representatives can get help from experts across the entire organization to resolve complex customer issues.

Service representatives can connect with their customers by using the Join a Teams call feature and meetings integration. They can collaborate more efficiently with video, screen sharing, and remote control options.

Unified routing
The intelligent routing service in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels—case, record, chat, digital messaging, and voice—to the best-suited service representatives. The assignment rules take customer-specified criteria into account, such as priority and skills. The routing service uses AI to automatically classify, route, and assign work items. By eliminating the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution, the routing service offers operational efficiencies for organizations. Features like percent-based routing, overflow management, and routing to preferred service representatives help optimize the routing of work items to the best-suited service representatives.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Service below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.

Get the most out of Customer Service