Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Contact Center in 2024 release wave 2

Overview

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is a Copilot-first, cloud-based contact center that brings unparalleled intelligence and improved customer experience to every engagement channel in a CRM system of your choice. It enables organizations to engage customers in their preferred channel, deliver effortless self-service powered by generative AI to improve containment, accelerate agent-assisted service with embedded Copilot capabilities, and enable smoother operations for supervisors through a 360-degree view of each customer.

For 2024 release wave 2, we're focused on:

• Enabling agent capabilities such as knowledge harvesting from conversational data, intent assist for dynamic self-service, and AI-driven conversation routing
• Providing proactive outbound omnichannel engagement assisted by Copilot
• Enhancing extensibility for out-of-the-box integrations with ServiceNow and Zendesk

Updates to Dynamics 365 Contact Center 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

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

Copilot and AI innovation
Copilot transforms the service experience with generative AI. Service representatives are more productive and deliver a better service experience with Copilot helping 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. Service representatives can ask Copilot questions as they research a case and can use Copilot to generate case and conversation summaries in a single click.

Extensibility
To reach more customers, use extensibility to integrate the features in Dynamics 365 Contact Center with non-Microsoft CRM solutions through client-side and server-side integrations. Interoperability helps businesses adopt new offerings without disrupting their existing setups.

IVR capabilities
Conversational IVRs (interactive voice responses) enable enterprises to increase containment, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce costs by letting customers self-serve using their voice. Microsoft Copilot Studio powers Dynamics 365 Contact Center IVRs.

Omnichannel customer experiences
The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Contact Center 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 enable organizations to deliver a true, all-in-one contact center.

Service representative experiences
The service representative experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Contact Center. When service representatives feel confident, customer satisfaction improves. Dynamics 365 Contact Center gives service representatives a powerful desktop with infused generative AI, seamless collaboration capabilities, and productivity tools in a customizable workspace. Its features boost the effectiveness of service representatives, enabling them to deliver personalized customer experiences across any channel.

Supervisor experiences
The supervisor experience is designed for customer service managers and analysts. By having access to key operational metrics, supervisors can continuously monitor contact center operations and make course corrections. For example, supervisors can step in when customer sentiment turns negative and improve agent staffing to optimize productivity, which keeps service levels high.

Supervisors can also use the extensibility feature to customize data models by adding metrics and reporting on custom entities to improve contact center efficiency.

Unified routing
The intelligent routing service in Dynamics 365 Contact Center uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels—namely chat, digital messaging, and voice—to the best-suited service representatives. The assignment rules take into account customer-specified criteria, such as priority and skills. The routing service uses AI to automatically classify, route, and assign work items. It eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution, so organizations gain operational efficiencies. 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 Contact Center 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 Contact Center