Live chat channel

A strategic shift toward conversational messaging among consumers has encouraged organizations to add support beyond traditional customer interaction channels like email and phone. Live chat with its faster problem resolution and customer convenience has emerged as one of the drivers of this new trend.

Key capabilities of live chat channel

• Quick and easy provisioning of multiple chat widgets
• Authenticated and unauthenticated visitor support
• Set up pre-chat, post-chat, and offline surveys
• Customize chat widget theme based on org preferences

SMS channel

SMS channel is a powerful mechanism for organizations to reach and interact with their customers in a timely and convenient manner.

Key capabilities of SMS channel

• Two-way texting between customers and agents.
  • Scenario: Customers can interact with organizations for product inquiry, installation query, support issues, and so on through texts.
• Updating customers with automated SMS notifications.
  • Scenario: Notifications to the customer during case creation, case resolution, appointment reminder, and more.
• Automated response management.
  • Scenario: Welcome message, thank you message, and so on can be automatically sent to customers.

Channel Integration Framework

The Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework enables building immersive communication experiences with third-party channel providers.

These are the benefits of this framework:

• Bring your own channel providers into Dynamics 365. The framework allows you to embed communication widgets in the Unified Interface apps, which can communicate with Dynamics 365 using a standard API set. The framework is inherently channel-agnostic, and can be used to integrate communication widgets catering to one or many of the different channels—for example, voice, chat, and email.
• Minimize total cost of ownership with cloud-based solutions. It is a platform-independent, browser-independent, and zero footprint (no adaptors need to be deployed on agent desktops) framework for integrating communication widgets. Dynamics 365 will provide a plug and play configuration mechanism for communication widgets based on the framework, making it easy to deploy, manage, and upgrade.
• Customize for your business workflows. With this framework, many key communication scenarios, such as search and screen pop based on incoming communication parameters (such as phone number) and click to dial, can be automated. It also provides ways to perform CRM operations like creating a new record or updating an existing record from the communication widget.

Enable customers to bring their bots

Today, consumers are increasingly demanding that companies serve their needs and meet their requirements quickly, efficiently, and accurately. At the same time, there is a strategic shift toward use of self-service channels, with customers looking to solve product or service issues themselves.

Recent evolution in machine learning technologies, natural language research, and linguistic analysis, along with the ability to provide scalable, immediate, and contextual assistance, has made self-service tools like chatbots (or virtual agents) a key necessity to be incorporated within an organization’s customer service operations.

Apart from the ubiquity and nonstop availability offered by these chatbots, interactions with them could also be analyzed in regard to understanding consumer sentiment, level of engagement, and product feedback. Integration of intelligent bots within customer service operations positively impacts customer service KPIs like average handling time and average number of cases, while simultaneously reducing cost.

Bring your bot to Omni-channel Engagement Hub

With Omni-channel Engagement Hub, customers can now bring their own bots (built on Microsoft Bot Framework) and connect them with the Omni-channel Engagement Hub ecosystem.

As part of the Bring Your Own Bot feature, customers can now:

• Configure their bots in Omni-channel Engagement Hub through a simplified setup experience to enable routing of conversations to bots.
• Provide seamless, contextual escalation with consistent experience for end users.
• Enable agent productivity with rich bot-user conversation transcript and chat context.

Intelligent conversational bots at the frontline help to deflect the routine queries, while maintaining a natural experience for users. Integration with Omni-channel Engagement Hub enables a smooth, contextual handoff to the agents, helping them to focus on complex queries, while empowering them with relevant information, leading to a good experience for end users.

Schematic representation for customer-owned bots with Omni-channel Engagement Hub