If you are part of an organisation providing customer service or support to your customers, it could be that you also need to work through and manage your own cases. It’s important to see at a glance which issues need immediate attention, what you should be following up on that week and make sure all of the cases are responded to in a timely manner. For a Customer Services Manager, getting a holistic view for the entire organisation is key to gain an understanding of where your team are succeeding and where improvements are required.
Cases
The core aspect of Dynamics 365 Customer Service is all about the Case record. This is the issue or request that documents what it is that needs to be done to help out your customer. Cases can be used to track support requests for fixing things, adding products or services, or just simply responding to questions your clients might have. A case can also be used for internal support, giving your employees a way to interact with your own IT team. If someone requires new software, or is locked out of an account, this can be a simple approach for them to get the assistance they need and make sure the right person is allocated the ticket to work through.
Dashboards can be used to get a high-level overview of the stage cases are currently in, and how long those cases have been open. With the ability to create multiple Dashboards, this makes it easy for a Customer Service Representative to not only review their own cases, but to check out cases for the other members of their team to see if anyone might require assistance or provide insights.
SLAS’s
Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) provide your organisation with the ability to ensure your customers get their issues resolved in the right amount of time, as per any agreements or policies they sign up for. Perhaps your SLA for low priority cases is 24 hours for a first response but reduces to 2 hours for a high priority case. This can make it critical that the Customer Service Representatives get back to customers as quickly as possible to make sure those SLA’s are met.
Each SLA must be linked to a Key Performance Indicator (such as First Response or Resolve By), with the Success Conditions defined so it’s clear when a KPI has been met. There are often circumstances which may be out of the Customer Service Representative’s control that may have an impact on the SLA being met. For example, if the customer didn’t provide all of the necessary information to proceed with working through the case, the agent might need to ask them for more details. While waiting for this to be provided, the SLA can be paused. The business hours and holiday schedule for the organisation can also be used to be sure the clock doesn’t keep ticking after hours or on any national holidays where the company might not actually be working. Warnings can be set to show halfway, or a few hours after the clock starts ticking, with a specific amount of time set to show when the agent has failed to meet the SLA.
Queues
D365 Customer Service includes the ability to set up queues, containing buckets or groups of work that need to be completed but are not yet assigned to anyone. Queues can be created to manage support cases, even splitting them out in to High and Low priority cases. They can also be used to manage emails coming into a shared mailbox. This provides the ability for agents to review emails and then determine if those should be a case that gets assigned to someone, or if the email is spam or junk it can just be deleted without the need for a case.
By using the concept of teams, you can connect specific users to specific queues. So, your level three support team can access one queue, while levels two and three might access other queues. Items in the queue can be reviewed, with agents able to select a case to work on by picking it from the list and removing it from the queue at the same time. A Customer Services Manager may wish to be the one to review the items in the queue and then route cases out to various members of their team, making sure the right person gets the right cases based on their skill sets.
Routing Rules
Tying back into the queues and routing cases to the right person, routing rules can be created to make sure they get to the right user or team faster rather than waiting for someone to review them in the queue then manually route them. Each routing rule set can have one or more rules to determine how things are handled. So, if the priority level on the case equals high, we can make sure that is immediately routed to the Level 3 Support Team in Dynamics 365.
If you still want to have the Level 3 Support Team review all the cases in a queue, the action on the rule can be to route to a queue rather than a Team. A private queue can be created for them, with the appropriate members being added, then all members of the high priority support team can work through the items in the queue as needed. Lots of options when it comes to routing those cases!
Knowledge Articles
Knowledge Articles are a great way not only to aid your support agents internally but can also be displayed externally on a client facing portal. This can deliver a self-service approach to your customers, giving the option to search for possible resolutions prior to submitting a support ticket thus saving them time, and you money! The articles are added and managed directly within D365 Customer Service and can be taken through an internal review and approval process to make sure the content is accurate and ready to be accessed by agents and/or customers.
While working through a case, Knowledge Articles can be accessed and reviewed directly from the main form, and even emailed out to customers when it’s relevant to their issue. Analytics for each article will let your team know how many times it has been viewed, any feedback provided via the portal on how helpful it was, and also any cases the article has been linked to. Using this feature can also be helpful to decrease the learning curve for new support agents that still need to learn about your products and services. By using the library of Knowledge Articles, it can help them start taking support cases a lot faster and help as a first line of support.
Customer Service Workspace App
There are so many fantastic features in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, it’s a fantastic solution for any organisation looking for a case management tool and can be used on its own or part of the full Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement suite. Customer Service also comes with the Customer Service workplace app, providing a clear focused approach to reviewing and working through cases. With this app, the agent can open new tabs along the top to get a clear working space for cases, queues, knowledge articles and other records related to their day to day work.
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This post has been written by our guest blogger Megan Walker. Megan is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP and a Power Platform consultant, you can follow her on Twitter here.