Evaluating Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service for your organization? Here are some key benefits of Dynamics 365 Customer Service you should know about.
We live in an age where customers expect organizations to deliver excellent service 24/7. In fact, service excellence is a critical competitive differentiator for companies, and the right technology can help them address common issues. If you’re in the market for an integrated customer service solution, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Customer Service is a leading cloud CRM solution. But is it the right fit for your specific business? In this blog post, we’ll give you a quick overview of the solution and the key benefits of using Dynamics 365 Customer Service in your organization to help you in your evaluation.
What is Dynamics 365?
Dynamics 365 is a collection of intelligent cloud-based business applications by Microsoft. Each application focuses on helping you manage a specific business process, such as sales, marketing, HR, customer service, and more. These cloud-based applications can work as a standalone app but also seamlessly integrate, and they share the same data model to avoid duplicated data. To get more insight into Dynamics 365, check out our blog post “What is Microsoft Dynamics 365?” which provides an overview of some more popular applications.
What is Dynamics 365 Customer Service?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a cloud-based solution that has everything your business needs to deliver exceptional customer service on any channel. It was named a Leader in the Gartner® June 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for the CRM Customer Engagement Center.
In a nutshell, it can help your organization:
Automate self-service support using knowledge base portals & virtual agents
Tailor and personalize all your customer interactions
Assists agents with case resolution by providing them with the right information when they need it
Optimize your customer service operations
There are currently two versions available, Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional and Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional offers core customer service capabilities for case and knowledge management and is typically geared towards small businesses. Pricing starts at $64 CAD per user per month ($50 USD).
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise is a more advanced offering, with additional capabilities for analytics and reporting and embedded intelligence. Pricing starts at $121.60 CAD per user per month ($95 USD).
With the Enterprise package, you have the option to extend the solution’s capabilities if required, based on your company’s specific needs. Some of these omnichannel add-ins include voice channel, digital messaging, and live chat.
What are the top benefits of using Dynamics 365 Customer Service?
D365 Customer Service Benefit 1: Get a 360-degree view of your customers
Multiple tools and disconnected data silos prevent agents from having a complete view of the customer journey, and many service teams find it challenging to ensure a continuous, personalized experience across all channels. Dynamics 365 Customer Service makes it easy to understand your customer and provide a customized experience by giving your service team a consistent, 360-degree view of your customer across all channels. You can easily view the customer’s profile and see the entire history of previous interactions with the support team. You’ll get at-a-glance views of their conversation summary, support history, and any recent cases.
D365 Customer Service Benefit 2: Simplify case management with a unified interface
A top benefit of Dynamics 365 Customer Service is that it makes day-to-day life simpler for your service team and empowers them to work more effectively. The Customer Service Hub in Dynamics 365 provides your team with a unified interface that is easy to navigate. The interactive dashboards provide a one-stop workplace where agents can review their caseload and take action without navigating to different parts of the application. For instance, instead of searching for a case, an agent can open and update the case right from the dashboard. This saves time and boosts productivity in the long run as agents can work across multiple open cases without losing context or work in progress. You can also set up rules for automatically creating or updating cases automatically from emails, social media activity, phone calls, and other activities.
D365 Customer Service Benefit 3: Easy to manage knowledge base & community portal
D365 Customer Service provides numerous self-service options for your customers to reduce call handling times. For instance, the knowledge management module is available out of the box and lets you create and manage knowledge articles. You can use the rich text editor to format your content, embed videos and images, and add file attachments. It’s easy to manage updates to your knowledge articles without disrupting the live or published articles. You can also track your knowledge content and view analytics such as views, feedback, rating, and case usage, to better understand how your content is helping customers, which cases have used it, and where you can improve. There’s also a community portal add-on that you can use to build a forum where users can collaborate, share tips, and get insights from experts and external users.
D365 Customer Service Benefit 4: AI-powered capabilities
There are numerous AI-powered capabilities you can leverage with D365 Customer Service enterprise package. For instance, you can use AI to automatically assign customer inquiries and support requests to the best-suited agent and resolve issues faster. Use AI to help your service team get answers faster through AI-powered suggestions that will recommend similar knowledge articles or cases to the one an agent is working on. You can also enhance support delivery by using built-in AI to detect emerging trends and automation opportunities across support topics, agents, engagement channels, and knowledge management. Finally, you can integrate a Power Virtual Agents bot to automate routine conversations, which allow agents to focus on higher-value interactions.
D365 Customer Service Benefit 5: Integrates easily with other Microsoft apps
D365 Customer Service has seamless integration with any of the other Dynamics 365 applications as well as other Microsoft products like Power BI, Teams, Excel, etc. In fact, with the Enterprise package, Microsoft Teams is embedded into the agent desktop to easily collaborate and connect with other teams and experts to resolve complex cases. If AI suggestions are enabled, your agents can view suggested contacts who have resolved similar cases. As is the case with any Dynamics 365 app, you can also easily extend your solution through Microsoft AppSource through add-on applications.
D365 Customer Service Benefit 6: Easily extend your solution
You can easily extend your solution with omnichannel capabilities as business needs change. With the enterprise package, there are three add-ins available: the voice channel, digital messaging, and live chat. The latest feature is the voice channel, which can expand your solution to an all-in-one digital contact center. In just a few clicks, you can be up and running with a phone number and a conversational Power Virtual Agent, which will allow you to start making and receiving calls right away. With the addition of real-time transcription, live sentiment analysis, real-time translation if required, and AI-driven recommendations for similar cases and knowledge articles, agents are empowered to resolve customer issues more quickly.
D365 Customer Service Benefit 7: Cloud-based solution
Dynamics 365 Customer Service is an all-in-one SaaS solution built on the Microsoft Cloud, which allows you to leverage numerous cloud benefits. For one, the solution is available anywhere, on any device. This means your service team can work remotely when required or on the go with full capabilities on their desktop, tablet, or mobile. Cloud solutions, in general, are also easier to scale, more cost-effective, and offer more robust data security protections than their on-premises counterparts. For more on this, check out our article "Benefits of moving to the cloud."
Get Started with D365 Customer Service with Kwixand Solutions
Consistent and personalized customer service is key to maintaining your customers, and an integrated cloud solution like D365 Customer Service can help you deliver quality service and meet customer expectations. To find out if it’s a good fit for your organization, schedule a personalized demo to see it in action.
Kwixand Solutions can help you get started with Dynamics 365 Customer Service. We are a Silver Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner based in Canada, and we help organizations across North America digitally transform and thrive with Dynamics 365. Contact us today to get started.
