Customer service is not just about solving your customers’ problems. It is directly related to how the public views your company. Bad customer service can immediately affect your reputation, which will, in turn, drive your profits downhill. Nobody wants that.
Microsoft has excelled in Customer Service from the CRM days (Dynamics CRM) all the way to Dynamics 365. Now that it’s a standalone app, it contains all the components needed to have a robust Customer Support System that can easily integrate with other Microsoft apps. (It can be used with Dynamics 365 for Sales, Marketing, and more.) They will share the same data model to avoid duplicated data.
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Similar to all other Dynamics 365 apps, Customer Service is loaded with features and capabilities built-in to streamline the process and automate the repetitive bits. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting ones.
1. Customer Service Hub
With the release of Dynamics CRM 2016, Microsoft built-in a preview feature called “Interactive Service Hub.” This feature has been renamed to “Customer Service Hub,” and is included with the Customer Service App or the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan.
At the base level, the Customer Service Hub provides the service team a unified interface to see all the updates regarding cases and service issues. What separates it from the standard Dynamics 365 dashboards is that it’s Interactive. Instead of just showing data and charts, you can click on different parts of the dashboard and interact with the displayed data.
One of the most interesting features is “Timeline” inside the case record, where you can see all different activities of the selected case sorted in chronological order to give you quick insights on the history of interactions about the problem.
2. Voice of the customer
Getting your customers’ feedback is the fastest way to point out areas for improvements in your products or services. In the end, the customer’s opinions matter the most for your business. The “voice of the customer” feature provides you with the best tools to efficiently gather feedback right into your Dynamics 365 instance. You can create survey templates with the user-friendly drag-and-drop designer. You can easily customize the survey with the ideal theme colors, logos, and titles to make sure it looks consistent with your branding. Once done, you can configure Dynamics 365 to automatically send your customer a link to the survey the minute their case is resolved to measure their satisfaction level with the service experience.
3. Service Level Agreements
Service Level Agreements (also known as SLAs) are basically agreements reached between a business and a customer that defines the level of support the customer receives. For instance, an agreement could be that a case should be solved within 24 hours of creation, otherwise, it should be escalated to higher tier support. If an SLA is defined for a certain customer, whenever a case is created for that customer, it will have the SLA details in a tab at the bottom with active timers depending on the agreement.
4. Entitlements
Entitlements in Dynamics 365 define the type of support customers are entitled to. Support terms can be specified based on hours of support or number of cases raised or resolved. If a customer has an SLA in place, it can be linked to the entitlement record in Dynamics 365 to have all of the support terms for the customer in one place.
As long as the entitlement is active (not expired), Dynamics 365 will automatically calculate the remaining case/hours allowance based on the criteria configured, allowing your customer service team to solely focus on problem resolution.
5. Knowledge Articles
Customer service departments use knowledge articles to catalog information about problem resolution. This method has been in use for years, and Microsoft made sure it’s implemented perfectly in the Customer Service app to keep all your data in one place. Managing knowledge articles in Dynamics 365 has multiple benefits:
- You can keep different versions of one knowledge article
- You have translation capabilities
- You can share knowledge articles with customers
6. Service Activities and Scheduling
Sometimes support cannot be completed over the phone or online; there might be a need for support agents to go to a customer site to solve a specific issue. Now if you require top-class scheduling capabilities, there’s another Dynamics 365 App called Field Service designed with advanced resource scheduling and work order management. However, if it’s not worth purchasing another app solely for this, the scheduling in the service calendar should be more than enough.
In Dynamics 365 for Customer Service, you can create Service Activities to schedule your resources to go on a support visit. You can define different resource groups and send specific members on visits based on their availability. The built-in scheduler will take into consideration defined working hours, other scheduled appointments, and the type of service that needs to be delivered. This comes in very handy when you have a big team of people whose availability is not always easy to track.
7. Automatic Case Creation
Many cases come from emails. Having to enter data again from an email into a case management system is not ideal and adds steps to the process rather than simplifying it. If you have a specific mailbox for support (which most companies do), you can set up automatic case routing in Dynamics 365 so that any email sent to this mailbox will be created as a case record and assigned to the relevant queue. You can go a step further to select whether you want and only create cases from email when the sender is already existing in your Dynamics 365 database, or create new contacts for unknown senders. You can also setup auto-responses to let your customers know that their issues have been received and will be looked at shortly.
Conclusion
Everyone wants to know that their voices are heard and that their problems are being looked after. That’s why excellent customer service is crucial to maintaining a healthy, long-lasting relationship with your customers. Keeping a history of all interactions helps solve future problems faster, and this keeps your customers happy.
Throughout history, Microsoft has dominated the Enterprise market, and the main reason is that they understand how business works and how it should be managed. Dynamics 365 for Customer Service offers all the tools you need to keep all your data safe and organized in one place while providing an exceptional customer service experience.
