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>> In this installment,
we will be discussing Omnichannel for
Customer Service with Dynamics
365s new feature, outbound messaging.
Now, let's take a look at the agenda for this video.
First, we will walk through the problem that this feature solves.
Next, we will discuss our solution.
Then, we will take a quick overview of the demo.
Finally, we will jump into the demo itself.
Outbound messaging enables customer support, sales,
and marketing organizations to proactively reach out to
their customers to notify them regarding upcoming appointments,
status of support tickets, and so on.
To solve this,
Omnichannel outbound messaging enables
organizations to send messages
to their customers automatically or manually through
supported channels based on Power Automate flow logic.
This way, customers can tap into the full power and flexibility of
Flow when designing and
implementing outbound messaging business logic.
In today's demo, we will first walk
through how to get this feature up and running.
Next, we will take a look at how we
integrate with Flow to perform outbound messages.
Finally, we will see how to utilize
outbound message activities to
view the results of an outbound message.
Now, let's jump into the demo.
>> In order to enable this feature,
several prerequisites will be required.
First, an SMS number or a WhatsApp number will need to be added.
Second, a message template will need to be created
so that it can be selected in the outbound message configuration.
To create a message template,
navigate to the message template form and select "New".
Once here, give the template a name,
select the default language,
and enter the message text.
Note here that I am adding the customer name in brackets.
This will allow us to configure our outbound messages to insert
the name of the specific customer
when sending an outbound message.
When we create the flow,
this customer name field will come into play.
Once saved, more languages can be added.
Now, we can create the outbound message configuration.
Navigate to the outbound settings form
and create a new outbound configuration.
In this configuration, the show in timeline,
channel type, channel, and
message template fields must be filled in.
The show in timeline field will decide whether
a success or failure activity will
show in the timeline of the customer's case.
For this demo, we will set this to yes.
Currently, both WhatsApp and
SMS support is available for outbound messaging.
For our demo today, we will showcase SMS.
Once we have selected SMS as the channel type,
select the specific SMS number
from which the messages will be sent,
and finally, the message template we have
just created to be sent to the customer.
Once this outbound configuration record is created,
a flow needs to be created in order to set
the scenario for which the outbound messages will trigger.
Sample flow templates are available to
download and can be imported directly into Flow.
The two templates available include a scenario of
sending a message to a customer on case creation,
as well as sending a message to a group of
customers by manually triggering the flow.
The links to these templates are in
the Download Center and can be
found in the outbound documentation.
For this demo, we will import the flow that will
trigger an outbound message to be sent on case creation.
Navigate to the link of the flow template in a browser.
Once the template has been downloaded,
navigate to Power Automate and import the template.
Once the import is complete,
we can open up this new template and see the steps inside.
As you can see, this first step is when record is created.
In the details, we see that it is
targeting this environment and organization,
as well as the case entity.
This means that any time a new case is created,
this flow will be triggered.
Next, we are initializing a few variables.
First is the contact list,
and then we are initializing the activity relationship.
The activity relationship is initialized so that
the outbound message activity can appear in the case timeline.
Next is a "Get record" step that will
select the contact that is attached to the case.
This is how outbound will
know what contact to send the message to.
Once we have all the information required,
we add our contact information to the contact list.
Here, we can see the mobile phone number from the customer entity,
as well as the channel ID,
opt-in value, and some context items.
These context items are where we need to input
our customer name as we defined in the message template earlier.
We simply add a context item with the same name as
defined in the template connected to the relevant entity field,
and we have our own customized message for each customer.
Next, we have a compose step where we input the contact list.
Finally, we have a step called "Perform an unbound action".
In this step, we will need to copy
the outbound configuration ID from
the configuration created earlier
and then paste it into the configuration field.
Once we've saved this flow template,
we can now come back into the Customer Service Hub
within Dynamics and create a new case.
Once this case is created,
we can come in here and add our contact to the case.
Once this case has been saved,
we can go back into the flow and check that it is in fact running.
You can see here, we've saved the case,
and that has triggered this run.
If we go back into the newly created case and check the timeline,
we can see here that our message has been sent,
and it has succeeded.
That's all we have for today's demo.
We thank you and hope to see you next time.
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