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How Microsoft Dynamics 365 Improves Your Customer Service

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides a unified view to Customer Service teams, allowing them to tackle service issues with all the information they need, in a methodical and efficient manner. This is done by guiding agents with processes flows that are built to ensure support request resolutions are in line with your organisation's rules and policies.

For detailed information visit our main Dynamics 365 Customer Service page, but for this post we will be covering three of the main elements to Dynamics for Customer Service teams, and how they help contribute to excellent customer service.

1. Customer Service Cases

What are customer service cases?

Cases gather into one place key information regarding a customer query / issue, the related customer and key contacts, the reason for the case creation, relevant products or services, and a timeline of actions taken.

By creating cases in Dynamics 365, users can better track the status of a case, understand next steps, and escalate or reassign cases with ease. Which in turn helps make informed decisions and provide greater customer service.

Progressing and tracking cases

Log and track phone calls, emails and activities on the case record timeline, to shape a narrative from case creation to resolution; at any time users can read the timeline and be up-to-date on how the case is progressing.

The stages a case has to go through can and should be tailored to each individual business and its needs, and each will have a set of tasks that need to be completed before moving onto the next stage. Even use branching logic to adapt steps based on the data entered; providing agents the flexibility to deal with service incidents on a case-by-case basis.

Also, have control over the priority of a case, for example set a case as high priority to ensure it is dealt with first.

Resolving cases

When a case is completed, mark it as resolved, as well as record detail such as resolution type, time taken to resolve, how much of that time is billable, and any further comments.

Using automation, customers can be sent a survey to provide feedback on the service they received and whether they are happy with the resolution. Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, Microsoft’s own survey application that helps review metrics and create action based on key insights.

2. Customer Service Entitlements

What are customer service entitlements?

In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, users can associate a customer to an entitlement to define the type / level of support that the customer is ‘entitled’ to. Support terms might be based on the product or service they have purchased, or whether they have purchased a support subscription package or a warranty.

Setting up entitlements

By default, Dynamics 365 defines support terms in the form of setting a number of cases allowed, or the number of hours allocated to resolving cases for a customer. Granting an entitlement to a customer requires creating an entitlement record and assigning the customer to the record.

The entitlement can then be applied whenever a case is created, or alternatively set it as the default entitlement whenever a new case is opened for this customer. This allows multiple entitlements to be granted to a customer.

Closing a case without reducing entitlement terms

There is still flexibility to allow customer services agents to close down a case without reducing hours / cases remaining in an entitlement. This is useful when completing free-of-charge development work or resolving a case where the customer isn’t at fault.

3. Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

What are SLAs?

A big part of providing excellent customer care is setting realistic expectations and agreeing beforehand what the supplier / service provider will do and when they will do it.

SLAs can be used to track support policies, which may differ from customer to customer, and they can be applied to support entitlements too. For example, define how quickly customers will receive support, how often customers will be updated on unresolved cases and how long after purchases will customers to supported.

Creating SLAs

Decide which entities SLAs can be against, such as Cases, then define individual key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand what successfully handling a case would look like, and lastly create SLA items to provide warnings when the process is not on track and what failure to achieve the SLA looks like.

Examples could be how quickly customers should expect the first response from the organisation, and then how quickly the case will be resolved e.g. five working days.

The SLA items and SLA KPIs can be as narrow or broad as required, depending on whether the SLA will be applied to all customers who purchased the same product, or if it is specific to a particular customer.

Defining SLA Items

Configurable elements include:

Being able to pause and resume the SLA item
Setting business hours
When the SLA item comes into effect, such as when priority is set to “high”
Adding success conditions to the SLA item, for example when a particular field has been set to "completed"
When a warning is sent to the agent working on the case
When the SLA item is set as failed

How can Preact help you?

If you're new to Dynamics, or have had it for a while now but want to improve your usage, Preact can help you along your journey. Each of these topics are covered as modules on our eLearning Academy - which you can use to train new starters or simply top-up knowledge for existing users by completing tasks in a safe training environment.

Learn more about Preact's eLearning Academy.

If you're thinking about implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, we'd encourage you to get in touch to start a conversation about your specific business requirements.

Schedule a call or fill out the callback request below.