Dynamics 365 Contact Center… it looks #impressive – yes, another hashtag
Like most of my other posts, they tend to start with me throwing in a bit of waffle with what I have been doing in the field, so as not to put a change in direction as to what I have to say…
I didn’t want to throw out a pointless post right away. Still, I wanted time to digest and look around the new offering first to make it at least partially meaningful from a technical/architectural perspective, with a couple fun memes along the way (tech is fun…).
Contact Centers are on the up, productivity needs to be increasing, agents crave more information than ever and technology is trending to make all this happen.
Over the past 15 years I’ve been doing this the whole industry changed, when Microsoft bought their digital side (OCS / Lync / Skype) into the communication enterprise-grade, everything changed (not all for the better I might add) and companies had to adapt to get on the moving train – the leap to Teams was a big one.
What came out of these products, aside from more hardware and licensing, was productivity, it’s a huge word that gets thrown around in the trend quite a bit, not from a technical perspective but targeted for supervisors/managers for their teams.
Having the scope to see where, when, and what an agent needs to assist in a task is key, but importantly taking away the administration of call wrapups or medial ‘same answer‘ responses can drastically make an improvement all around, not just for the team’s goals, but the agent as well.
Microsoft is already in the CCaaS space, they have been in the background for a while (except copilot took over a bit), and only recently have they finally started to push into the main enterprise-grade offering, which takes us onto the newly announced below.
Microsoft have now plugged 3 major avenues for contact center focussed areas which all have their target audiences, Digital Contact Center Platform, Queues, and now Dynamics 365 Contact Center, they all have their respective targets based on requirements and functions but basically one is toned down for uplift from Call Queues and AA’s (Queues), the new kid on the block gives us a multi-target CRM integration using copilot and GenAI (Dynamics 365 Contact Center) and the monster for full mandatory Dynamics CRM integration (Digital Contact Center Platform) – they all have their feature sets but it’s a great way to start to compare against each other for the requirements, and most importantly costings of the product themselves.
Dynamics 365 Contact Center
This is the one that has everyone now talking around the houses, having the ability to pull away from the full Dynamics CRM requirement gives it a standalone play for customers to leverage, this gives us options around architecture, not being locked into a special or required deployment strategy and license model – choice!
My top interesting things that may come out of this new play:
Costings – There doesn’t seem to be much on the costings at the moment (pure guess), as suspected the buzz of the product itself is trending (rightly so), but if previous other licensing costs come into play, could we see an injection into the E license model Microsoft already have in play?, a check box appearing in the license allocation for users to ‘switch on’ – could be a quick way to get agents into the system from the off – I hope we get this, it would be faster and beneficial.
Agent focus – This one for me has always been a big play, having agents to be contained into a single pane, window will decrease the need to go hunting for information, data sources, or anything that will help identify or assist resolution overall.
Copilot / GenAI – No doubt this will be the biggest trend currently, having the functionality to natively pull data from a source, deflect inbounds for customer questions and adaptive information is the ‘best‘ thing I can see out of all of this, if it makes a role easier, who doesn’t want to use it?
Routing – They have taken both sides of the coin that’s already there in the Digital Contact Center Platform and brought it into this side as well, intelligent routing and identification will be a great help to save the building of 1 – 8 IVR drop system (remember those… nested 12 levels), I really like this one #fun.
Transcription / Sentiment – This one I have been using inside of the Digital Contact Center Platform already, having the understanding to see what’s emotionally happening in the call can help escalate, request assistance, and supervisor notifications will give agents that extra support when it’s needed during, not after the call when the possible damage is done – during and after being the focus words on this one.
There is a lot more to cover but the web will be filling up with it all in due course so it’s worth a hunt around.
Ben