Introducing voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Today, I am excited to announce the general availability of the first-party voice channel for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. With the addition of the voice channel, built on the same planet-scale platform as Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365 Customer Service expands to become the all-in-one digital contact center solution. Organizations can now provide consistent and personalized service to customers across all channels with one data-driven, AI-infused, end-to-end solution with no integration required.

Let’s take a closer look at the four key areas that help our customers deliver world-class service.

Personalized calls, connected across channels

Service leaders know that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase from companies that provide more personalized experiences.1 But for many contact centers, ensuring a continuous, personalized experience across all channels is difficult to achieve. Multiple tools and disconnected data silos prevent agents from having a complete view of the customer journey. But no more.

No matter how your customers connect with you, now you can deliver a consistent, intelligent, and personalized service experience. With the addition of the voice channel, Dynamics 365 Customer Service out-of-the-box enables:

  • A consistent, 360-degree view of the customer across all channels, allowing agents to quickly understand the full customer journey so customers never have to repeat themselves.
  • An intelligent, conversational Power Virtual Agent that can be used as an interactive voice response (IVR) for the voice channel and versatile enough to be used as a chatbot for SMS, live chat, and social messaging channels.
  • AI-based routing of incoming calls to the best skilled agent, consistent with all other channels.
  • Increased collaboration with other agents and subject matter experts globally using embedded Microsoft Teams to resolve issues faster.

AI at each step of the call

AI is infused throughout our first-party voice channel to enrich the customer and agent experience by automating routine tasks and offering insights and recommendations to increase the agent’s focus on the customer.

  • Real-time transcription eliminates the need for agents to take notes. Now the agent can refer back to what the customer has said without having to ask the customer to repeat information.
  • Live sentiment analysis provides a pulse on customer emotions throughout the call so agents can deliver a more empathetic experience.
  • Proactive, AI-driven recommendations for similar cases and knowledge articles help agents resolve customer issues faster.
  • Real-time translation of transcripts gives agents assisting customers in different regions and across multiple languages added confidence of seeing the conversation in their native language.

“In the past, we were looking at many different pieces of information to try to put together the true story of our customer and how we can work with them in a better way. Here, AI will help us with the intelligence and analytics and really be able to secure that we’re providing the ultimate customer experience.”—Brian Davis, Head of Sales Operations, Sandvik Coromant

Sandvik Coromant logo

Figure 1: Agents can view a real-time call transcript, see the customer’s details, recent cases, and suggested knowledge articles and similar cases to help resolve customer issues more quickly.

Figure 1: Agents can view a real-time call transcript, see the customer’s details, recent cases, and suggested knowledge articles and similar cases to help resolve customer issues more quickly.

Unified insights across all customer interactions

Dynamics 365 Customer Service breaks down traditional data silos between channels with a single, secure data platform, elegantly connecting customer conversations across all channels. This end-to-end view of customers and their journey generates rich and instant insights out-of-the-box.

  • Advanced AI analyzes all conversations including messaging and voice and identifies emerging issues, helping service organizations pinpoint opportunities for improving the delivery of customer care.
  • Rich KPIs and insights that span live chat, social messaging, and voice all in one place to provide a holistic view of the contact center.

Figure 2: View actionable insights and key performance metrics across channels and drill in for deeper analysis.

Figure 2: View actionable insights and key performance metrics across channels and drill in for deeper analysis.

Easy to start, easy to scale

Getting started with the new voice channel is painless. In just a few clicks, you can be up and running with a phone number and a conversational Power Virtual Agent which will allow you to start making and receiving calls right away. When we asked Brian Davis, Head of Sales Operations at Sandvik Coromant, to tell us how his team felt about getting started with the voice channel preview, he said, “It’s easy to connect. It’s easy to get on board and it’s easy for our team members to use so I’m really excited for the future with this solution.”

I’d love for you to try it out as well by signing up for a free trial here. And, as you begin to scale the voice channel out across your organization, you can do so with confidence knowing that the voice channel is built on the same secure planet-scale communications platform that powers Microsoft Teams today.

Figure 3: In just a few clicks, you can experience the voice channel. Getting started is that easy.

Figure 3: In just a few clicks, you can experience the voice channel. Getting started is that easy.

The all-in-one digital contact center solution

With the new voice channel, we are delivering an all-in-one digital contact center solution that brings together contact center channels, unified communications, leading AI, and customer service capabilities together into a single, SaaS solution, built on the Microsoft cloud.

And, when it comes to your business, you have a choice. We continue to support integrations with key partners such as Five9, Genesys, NICE, Solgari, Tenfold, Vonage and others who are building connectors to enable their voice solutions within Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Whether the goal is a single, one-stop Microsoft solution or to deploy a partner-developed experience between telephone providers and customer service, Dynamics 365 continues to innovate to help our customers differentiate themselves by delivering world-class customer care and earn customers for life.

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1“50 Stats Showing The Power Of Personalization,” Blake Morgan, Forbes