Customer Intent Agent uses generative AI to autonomously discover ongoing intents from your CRM instance, analyzing past interactions to create an intent library that enhances dynamic conversations. This benefits both assisted and self-service scenarios by enabling support reps to quickly understand customer needs, guide conversations with follow-up questions, and provide tailored solutions in real time.

The feature also presents a curated list of questions and suggested solutions in the chat response box, enhancing support rep efficiency and reducing manual typing. For self-service, it generates relevant follow-up questions and uses collected information to query the knowledge source, leading to higher deflection rates and allowing support reps to focus on cases requiring manual intervention. This results in quicker issue resolution, reduced handling time, and improved overall customer service.

The key features include:

• Integrated lead management: Create, manage, and qualify leads directly.
• Integrated opportunity management: Create and manage opportunities, including adding products and generating quotes.
• Quote and order management: Create and manage quotes, orders, and invoices.
• Omnichannel engagement: Interact with customers via voice, email, chat, and social media.
• Multisession capability: Engage with multiple customers simultaneously to handle high volumes efficiently.
• Copilot support: Sales representative workflows augmented by Copilot to ensure decision support for positioning and next best actions.
• Seamless CRM system integration: Automatically sync all activities and customer data with the underlying CRM system.
• Unified interface: Access all customer interactions and data from a single, intuitive workspace.

In the complex journey of a contact center, customers often adopt or develop multiple systems that need to be in sync for optimal performance. Some scenarios include:

• Agents working on different channels in different systems–for example, contact centers using Dynamics 365 for messaging and another system for voice calls.
• Agents working on Microsoft Teams as well as Dynamics 365.
• Agents working across multiple Dynamics 365 environments.

The Presence API addresses these scenarios by ensuring synchronization across different systems.

You can create a single agent that can handle multiple languages in Copilot Studio. When you assign phone numbers in the voice channel in Dynamics 365 Contact Center, you can select a language that will be the primary one based on the phone number. This feature eliminates the need for multiple agents by linking languages to dialed numbers.

Using Power Apps, enterprise customers can leverage Dataverse tables to configure dynamic key values for their Copilot applications. Such examples include store locations, transfer numbers, broadcast messages, and lines of business. Through management of these AI agent rules, business administrators can enhance operational agility and swiftly adapt the IVR flow to their imminent business needs. Using Power Apps circumvents the need for direct modifications to the bot’s logic, which in turn eliminates the time associated with standard testing and deployment procedures.

Customers can set up their Power Apps integration with Copilot Studio in a few simple steps:

1. Create and configure your Dataverse table in Power Apps.
2. Create an application in Power Apps to support administration of your data.
3. Set up an action in Copilot Studio to connect your Dataverse table to your copilot.

Once the customer's application is established, business administrators can directly add, update, and delete key data values and seamlessly publish to the live copilot environment. The data associated with the copilot will be cached to ensure there is no latency or disruptions to the users.

Administrators have the flexibility to define the customer experience during unforeseen bot issues. Instead of abruptly ending the call with a busy tone, which is jarring for the caller, the application can gracefully manage the situation.

The application plays a courteous message such as, “We apologize, our application is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try your call again later,” or "We are facing some issues at the moment. Allow me to connect you with a representative who can assist,” guiding callers to the right course of action.

By default, this feature is activated upon the creation of the voice channel, ensuring immediate readiness. Administrators can personalize the message, aligning it with the organization brand identity and customer engagement strategy. This customization can replace the standard message to reinforce the brand’s voice and enhance the overall customer experience.

Some of the options include:

• Play a custom prompt message, transfer the call to an external number, and disconnect.
• Play a custom prompt message and disconnect.
• Play a prompt message and transfer to a queue.
• Directly transfer the call to a queue.

To handle calls originating in any language, you can configure a single multilingual bot in Copilot Studio and assign it to a common phone number for all users in your contact center. Based on the caller's language preference, the bot logic can switch bot language to the caller's preferred language. This feature eliminates the need for multiple bots and improves CSAT by supporting multiple languages with one phone number.

Key features include:

• A new report, Omnichannel Real-time bot dashboard, is available that enables better monitoring of IVR applications in real time. Key capabilities of this feature include reporting of the following bot conversations:

  • Active
  • Closed conversations
  • Bot conversation duration
  • Failed bot conversations
  • Conversation escalations in real time
  • Ability to view call volumes by DNIS and the language of the bot after the conversation is ended by IVR or chat bot.

  To enable the Omnichannel Real-time bot dashboard in your environment, contact Microsoft Support. Learn more at Get Help + Support.

  Once the feature flag is enabled, administrators must enable the Customer Service Admin Center > Insights > Realtime Analytics > Add real-time analytics for bot checkbox to view the report.

• New metrics and filters available for Omnichannel Historical Bot Dashboard. These are available in the data model section of the Power BI dashboard. This option of editing the report is only available to those with the additional Analytics Report Author role. Call center supervisors can use the following for performance management, monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization:

  • OutcomeReasons: Indicates why a conversation with the Copilot Studio bot ended. It's based on every session within the entire bot conversation. This value is only available in historical dashboards through visual customization. It can be added as a matrix table to show the number of conversations based on their outcomes and outcome reasons. This helps identify human agent escalations by design or due to a maximum number of attempts by the user, or if the user reaching the IVR abandoned the conversation.
  • DNIS: The specific phone number dialed by users to reach the bot agent. A critical dimension for IVR reporting and operations. For example: When a user calls 800-555-0100, the system logs this as the DNIS.
  • Number of failed calls: A metric to show the number of conversations that failed to connect to an IVR after an attempt was made with a call failure treatment for a bot.
  • Language of the bot: Captures the last language used during the IVR interaction, which may differ from the default bot language in multilingual configurations.
  • Number of escalations to external phone number: An enhancement to the existing escalation metric to include external transfers to Dynamics 365. This feature supports standalone IVR, which won't have Dynamics 365 agents.

The Native SDKs are a native iOS and Android SDK that enable applications to start, manage, and retrieve customer communications for Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Both SDKs contain two main components:

• A ready-to-brand, fully featured, messaging user interface that developers can integrate into their existing application. The included interface is based on the live chat widget so brands can use the same features and customizations as their web program.
• An optional communication layer, containing all the messaging functions necessary to host a conversation that developers can use directly to support a new or existing fully custom messaging interface. Brands that opt to use the included interface don't need to interact with this layer.

The SDKs are distributed through public repositories similar to the existing Chat SDK for web. To enable communications through the mobile SDK, an admin creates a new chat workstream in the admin center and references the workstream's ID in the code for the mobile application. We recommend push notifications, for which the admin can also configure Google Firebase and Apple Push Notification accounts in the admin center.

Organizations are moving to Azure Virtual Desktop for access to tools and services that are needed to support their customers for better management and control of their agent devices. An agent may need to access an Azure Virtual Desktop instance located in Europe if they are specifically supporting European customers and handling their data, or an Azure Virtual Desktop instance in Asia Pacific for other use cases. To establish voice connections, a voice channel client will support Azure Virtual Desktop for VDI client as part of this release for the agent user interface.

Moving forward, the embedded contact center experience will include conversation details, sign-out, sessions management, pick mode, and voicemail capabilities.

Service representatives can take the following actions in the embedded experience:

• Assign conversations to themselves using the pick mode, adding more work items to their plate, along with sessions management.
• See the customer and conversation details when conversing with customers, enabling them to scan the holistic picture in real time.
• See voicemail and other async channels.
• Sign out of the embedded app.

By using the administrator toggle, you can allow agents to hide the transcript for the voice call by default. When agents are in a call, they can choose to show or hide the transcript. The agent gets the last-used setting when they accept a new call.

The interoperation with selected biometric verification engines with the voice channel in Dynamics 365 Contact Center enables organizations to improve customer satisfaction and contact center efficiency through voice biometric authentication and intelligent fraud prevention.

The use cases are as follows:

• Voice authentication for customers from directly within the Dynamics 365 Contact Center workspace, enabling fast, secure, personalized service.
• Fraud prevention capabilities alert service reps about known fraudsters and spoofing attempts, and allow service reps to flag conversations for further investigation by a fraud analyst.
• Supervisors can monitor conversations flagged as suspicious or fraudulent.
• Integrated reporting for fraud analysis.

The benefits are as follows:

• Improve service rep productivity and reduce costs by minimizing the time spent on authentication during each call.
• Modernize the customer experience and improve CSAT by delivering fast, personalized service without interrogating customers.
• Reduce losses caused by fraud. Fraudsters have developed patterns to conceal their identity and socially engineer contact center agents toward completing transactions that are fraudulent.

Work item lifecycles will now be available to organizations through Application Insights to monitor and take corrective actions in the event of any runtime issues that might arise. This lifecycle data will help diagnose issues, potentially enabling organizations to quickly put mitigations in place and ensure smooth operations of their contact centers.

Messaging platforms such as WhatsApp give businesses an opportunity to engage with customers in their own context to provide them with a seamless and personalized customer service experience. The following capabilities are available:

• Administrators can configure the WhatsApp channel powered by Azure Communication Services.
• Customers can reach out to the business through WhatsApp and seek support in an asynchronous manner.
• Agents can use one unified, contextual, and productive interface to engage with customers and resolve their issues.
• Supervisors and managers can access rich reports to run the support center efficiently and effectively.

Key capabilities of this feature include:

• Administrators can enable the application to generate a summary of closed conversations and voicemails.
• On the enhanced Closed conversation page, customer service representatives see an AI-powered conversation summary and insights for closed voice conversations and voicemails.

The enhanced outbound dialing experience enables agents to:

• Place a call by searching for a customer contact or account from the outbound dialer.
• Open the customer record from the call history.

For more information, watch our Outbound dialer enhancements in Dynamics 365 Customer Service video.

With this feature, you can:

• Use Copilot Studio agents to gather customer feedback and configure contextual actions, depending on the feedback.
• Unify and centralize the process of configuring surveys across all channels—messaging, voice, and custom channels.
• Use predefined templates to create surveys.
• Allow supervisors to view and review feedback summarized into actionable insights.

Agents will now be able to:

• Perform outbound calls in one click by setting the most often used outbound profile as the default profile, reducing the need for extra clicks.
• Have an enhanced calling experience while in a voice call when there's a need to consult with or transfer to an external number.
• Have an enhanced contact search powered by Dataverse search for contacts and accounts.

Supervisors can filter a list of representatives based on a combination of availability, skills assigned, and the skill proficiency when assigning conversations. Search results will include representatives with exact match or partial match on the search criteria, providing the required flexibility in identifying the best representative to work on a conversation at that point in time.

The new metrics for overflow actions help in the following ways:

• Voicemails:

  • Voicemail left during business hours vs. outside-of-business hours.
  • Voicemail left for individual or group.
  • Time to voicemail assign: The time taken by the system to assign the voicemail to a service rep after the voicemail was created.
  • Time to voicemail close: The time taken by the service rep to address the voicemail after it was created.
  • Open voicemail trend: Cumulative per timeframe.
  • Filter out empty voicemails and count them as abandoned calls.

• Direct callback and general overflow actions:

  • List conversations with overflow action of any type that triggered direct callback.
  • Identify the overflow condition that's triggered, before work items are queued, when work items are queued, or out of operation hours.
  • Identify the time the overflow action was triggered.
  • Identify whether the customer accepted the callback option and the time it was accepted.
  • Identify when callback was initiated by the system.
  • Identify if and when the callback notification was accepted by a service representative.

The key capabilities of this feature are as follows:

• Administrators can enable the option to block capacity for messaging and voice channels in the work distribution settings of the corresponding workstreams.
• The presence of service representatives is automatically updated when they are engaged in consult conversations.
• The capacity is automatically released when the consult session ends or the representative leaves the consult conversation.

The key capabilities of direct transfer of conversations are as follows:

• Administrators can enable direct transfer of conversations.
• Service representatives can transfer conversations to other representatives within their queue or other queues without the need to consult first.

Create templated rulesets for routing configurations like prioritization, assignment, and work classification rulesets. Apply these ruleset templates when you create prioritization, assignment, and work classification rulesets in a queue or workstream. In one go, administrators can manage templated ruleset configurations globally from one place and publish updates to all queues and workstreams where the ruleset is applied.

The least active assignment method is available out of the box. Administrators can now use the least active setting in the messaging queues as an assignment method so that service representatives with the lowest number of active conversations will be prioritized first. If all representatives have the same number of active conversations, the representative with the oldest capacity release time is prioritized. The admins can also use the least active method as an ordering attribute in custom assignment rules.

The key capabilities of automatic selection of a service representative for consult in a queue are as follows:

• Administrators can enable consult to queue for the messaging and voice channels.
• Service representatives can select a queue for consult when they are unsure of finding the appropriate representative to consult.
• The system automatically assigns a consult representative based on the conversation context.

Administrators who manage these updates won't have to wait for 15 minutes for an agent's queue membership update to reflect in the system. With the real-time queue membership update, agents can take work in their new voice and messaging queues as soon as they are added to them. When you remove agents from queues, they won't receive work from the removed queues, thus reducing the wait time due to reroutes.

For contact centers that use the persistent chat feature in live chat, administrators can now set up a new notification template to reassign returning conversations to the same agent who last interacted with the customer, even if they are offline or away. This will help them prioritize the customer-agent relationship rather than speedy responses. The administrator can also customize the title and other details on the notification template to differentiate the returning conversations from new ones.

The first in, first out prioritization for live channels is based on conversation start time. However, conversations that come from asynchronous messaging channels like persistent chat, Facebook, WhatsApp, and SMS can be paused or kept in a waiting state, allowing the customer to respond on their own schedule while preserving the conversation continuity.

Organizations want to ensure that customers get a quick response when they resume the conversation. Now conversations will be prioritized by the latest interaction time. This means, for new conversations, the start time is still considered the interaction time. With this enhancement, for conversations that are resumed from the waiting state, the resume time will be considered in the first in, first out order of the custom prioritization rule.

With overflow for work items in a queue, administrators can:

• Set a clear and reasonable wait time limit for work items before they are marked for overflow.
• Define a contingency plan for work items that exceed the wait time limit, such as transferring them to another queue with more agents who can address the customer request.