New voice channel streamlines omnichannel customer experiences

We are announcing the expansion of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service omnichannel capabilities to include a new voice channel, built on Microsoft Azure Communication Services. The addition of this channel gives businesses the scale and reliability of the calling platform that powers Microsoft Teams worldwide today. With native voice, businesses receive seamless, end-to-end omnichannel experiences within a single solution, ensuring consistent, personalized, and connected support across all channels of engagement. This end-to-end solution unifies all points of customer interaction data, enabling businesses to simplify and streamline their processes, gain instant insights into trends, and deliver faster resolution from AI-driven assistance—all while ensuring your data remains secure and compliant, backed by the trusted Microsoft cloud.

Watch the video to learn more about our new voice channel for Customer Service.

Addressing the fragmented experience

Typically, customer service organizations must manually integrate standalone telephony and CRM solutions, which results in fragmented experiences for agents and customers across engagement channels. Ultimately, these stitched-together solutions from multiple providers are not only complex to roll out and maintain but also create data silos with disconnected insights of customer interactions and agent performance across channels. The addition of the voice channel enables Customer Service to offer businesses a solution that minimizes failure points caused by custom-built, complex integrations and maximizes the ability to create better customer and agent experiences. This single, holistic solution also makes it easier to scale to meet ever-changing business needs.

We also recognize that businesses may want to leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 in partnership with their existing provider. That’s why we continue to support integrations with key Microsoft partners including Five9, Genesys, NICE InContact, Solgari, Tenfold, and Vonage, who are building connectors that make it easy to enable their voice solutions within Customer Service. Whether the goal is a single, one-stop-shop solution or enabling a seamless experience between telephony providers and Customer Service, Dynamics 365 has it covered.

Microsoft’s all-in-one solution

Our new voice channel for Customer Service enables an all-in-one customer service solution without fragmentation or manual data integration required, and enables a faster time to value. Our solution provides a single view of the customer that empowers agents to provide personalized service across all channels, and true omnichannel analytics and insights for agents and supervisors alike.

Because this solution is built on Microsoft’s own infrastructure, added benefits are available right out of the box that enable organizations to:

  • Simplify their solution. Streamline the setup, maintenance, and administration of your customer service solution by eliminating management of multiple contracts, upgrades, integrations, data sources, and user experiences, all backed by the safety, reliability, and compliance of Microsoft’s Azure.
  • Get instant visibility into trends across all channels. Quickly identify factors to improve the customer’s overall experience through access to insights including customer interactions, customer satisfaction across channels, and advanced topic clustering.
See key performance metrics and actionable insights across channels and drill in for deeper analysis.
 
  • Leverage AI to resolve issues faster. From AI-powered virtual agents to real-time agent productivity tools like call transcription, sentiment analysis, and similar case and knowledge article recommendations, lean on built-in AI to resolve customer issues faster.
  • Streamline self-service capabilities. Microsoft Power Virtual Agents can be built once and deployed across messaging and voice channels for maximum efficiency and consistency.
  • Intelligent routing for voice. Skills-aware, automatic call distribution routes calls to the right agent based on their individual skills and capacity and also supports routing for blended agents who work across multiple channel types.
  • Create true omnichannel experiences. Regardless of which channel the conversation takes place on, the agent experience remains consistent and connected. Agents receive full context of previous customer interactions across all channels, resulting in highly personalized customer experiences and more successful outcomes.
With the Dynamics 365 Customer Service, agents can view the real-time call transcript while on the call, see the customer’s details, recent and related cases, and suggested knowledge articles and similar cases that can help agents resolve customer issue more quickly.

Learn more about new and planned features

The voice channel will begin rolling out to select regions in the first half of 2021. Stay tuned for more information and in the meantime, check out more of the great new and planned features coming to our Customer Service portfolio during the Dynamics 365 2020 release wave 2.