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 channel of choice, deliver effortless self-service to improve containment powered by generative AI, 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 are 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 provides a consistent setup experience that unifies the management of Dynamics 365 Contact Center, unified routing, and omnichannel activities. The admin center app consolidates all administrator experiences that are relevant to customer support into a single app. It provides an intuitive and guided experience to enable rapid first-time and incremental setup, as well as proactive health checks to make sure that the system is set up correctly and works as expected.

Agent experiences
The agent experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Contact Center and enhancing agent confidence is the key to improving customer satisfaction. Dynamics 365 Contact Center provides a powerful agent desktop, with infused generative AI, seamless collaboration capabilities, and productivity tools in a customizable workspace. Its features boost agent effectiveness, enabling them to deliver personalized customer experiences across any channel.

Copilot and AI innovation
Copilot transforms the service experience with generative AI. Agents 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 harvests knowledge from internal and external sources to draft contextual answers to questions in email and chat conversations. Agents can ask Copilot questions as they research for a case, and can use Copilot to generate case and conversation summaries in a single click.

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

IVR capabilities
Conversational IVRs enable enterprises to increase containment, improve customer satisfaction and reduce cost by letting customers self-serve using their voice. Dynamics 365 Contact Center IVRs are powered by Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Omnichannel customer experiences
The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Contact Center enable organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers via channels like live chat, SMS, voice, Microsoft Teams, and social channels. By providing a seamless agent experience and valuable conversation insights across channels, the omnichannel features enable organizations to deliver a true, all-in-one contact center.

Supervisor experiences
The supervisor experience is targeted at customer service managers and analysts. Availability of key operational metrics allows supervisors to continuously monitor contact center operations and make course corrections. For example, supervisors can intervene when customer sentiment becomes negative and improve agent staffing to optimize productivity, thereby keeping service levels high.

Supervisors can also use the extensibility feature and customize data models to add metrics and report 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 agents. 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, and eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations. The various features like percent-based routing, overflow management, and routing to preferred agents help optimize the routing of work items to the best-suited agents.

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 Dynamics 365 Contact Center