(gears buzzing)
- Up next, as part of our series on Dynamics 365,
we're joined by expert Deanna Sparks
to show you how you can set up a proactive
and always connected service organization
from self-service automated actions using intelligent
and conversational chatbots and IoT,
all the way through to high-touch customer agent
and frontline technician support.
So, Deanna, welcome to Microsoft Mechanics.
- Thanks for having me on the show.
- And thanks for joining us today.
So, this is a really topical show.
Over the past year in particular,
most customer facing businesses have had to adapt
to more agile ways of engaging with their customers.
You know, self-service online is now often
the first contact-free point of engagement
to be able to respond to customers fast, and at scale.
And how well that experience goes
can be the difference between keeping or losing business.
- That's true, Jeremy, and creating that experience
is not easy for service organizations.
Today's customers don't just engage in one way anymore.
It's often multiple ways, such as phone, web,
and their preferred social channels.
So, to get this experience right,
it can often involve multiple tools
and a lot of integration work.
That's really the whole premise of Dynamics 365.
We take away all of that complexity
with modular applications that natively work together.
And a lot of this can be automated
to provide your customers with self-service options,
wherever they choose to engage.
For example,
if your customer prefers to solve an issue on their own,
they can, by enabling intelligent virtual agents
using our Power Platform,
extending even further when you enable connected devices
with Azure IoT.
Or you can build intelligent escalation paths
to hand off to the right person.
From there, you can pull in expert support
with seamless collaboration tools.
And if an on-site expert is needed,
since everything is connected,
it's easy to provide your customers
with experienced frontline workers.
These turnkey applications and services
can be configured for your organization.
And today, it's a lot easier to set up
than you might think.
- So, can we see it in action?
- So, let's start with the self-service experience.
I'm on the Contoso Coffee website
and I want to report an issue with the espresso machine
my coffee shop has purchased.
It's connected to Contoso Coffee
via Dynamics 365 and Azure IoT.
Now, most of us are familiar with text-based chat,
but this takes things to the next level
with voice assistance.
I can dial a 1-800 number
and I'll be greeted by a virtual agent.
- [Agent] Hello, Fourth Coffee,
thanks for calling Contoso Coffee support.
Who am I speaking with?
- This is Deanna from the Bellevue location.
- [Agent] How can I help you today, Deanna?
- We have a two group coffee machine
that we purchased from you,
and we've noticed that it's slow to respond to commands.
- [Agent] Okay, let me check on a few things.
- Okay, so while the bot is doing that,
let me explain what is happening behind the scenes.
You can see here in the PVA flow,
that it is instructed to check on the device.
It's tapping into the device readings
in IoT and Dynamics 365,
and it recognizes that the firmware is out of date.
The virtual agent was able to see
the history of the device controller
and that an update was needed.
And by the way,
because the IoT is surfaced through field service,
it's accessible to others in the organization.
So, the virtual agent can now respond to me.
- [Agent] Thanks for waiting.
It looks like your machine's firmware is out of date.
Can I get your permission to update it?
- Yes.
- [Agent] Thanks.
This will take a few moments.
We will update your machine's controller.
- Thank you.
So now, behind the scenes,
the virtual agent is interfacing with field service
and the command gets pushed down through the IoT hub
to my espresso machine to update the firmware.
- Right, and this really feels like a high-touch experience
because of the voice and intelligence
that's baked into the interaction
that really allows the bot then to figure out the situation
and take action.
That said, though,
how do you ensure the quality of the customer experience
for things that might be outside of the realm
of the bot's diagnostic and kind of configuration power?
- Exactly, not every issue can or should be fixed
by software and automated responses.
Let's say the machine is not performing consistently.
Maybe the water isn't flowing properly.
A lot of different variables could cause this.
So, here's a standard text-based exchange.
In this case, the virtual agent has identified the store
as well as the equipment available to troubleshoot.
The virtual agent is asking the customer
to describe the issue.
The customer is concerned about the inconsistent water flow.
Now, behind the scenes
intelligent routing uses AI models and rules
to assess incoming service requests.
This ensures that all customer interactions
are routed to the correct customer service agent
without constant queue supervision.
Switching to the customer service agent's point of view,
they accept the incoming chat requests.
This loads the previous virtual assistant conversation
with associated cases and customer information.
A benefit here is that it is the same agent experience
whether the customer is reaching out from the web,
email, social channels or phone.
Before the agent greets the customer,
highlighted on the left,
the virtual agent suggests what to investigate first.
In this scenario, it's the water quality issue in the area.
The agent uses quick replies to easily respond
to the personalized greeting.
Now, as the agent reviews,
built-in AI has already linked the conversation
to the proper case, tracking the root cause.
In this scenario,
it's the King County water quality impact case.
While the conversation continues on the left,
on the right, Smart Assist suggests
related knowledge articles.
The top ranked article provides guidance
on how Contoso should handle issues related to water quality
and mineral content.
The agent clicks on the article.
There are recommendations of actions to take,
including in this scenario
sending a technician to install a water filtration system
to fix the issue permanently.
As a premium customer, they have access to a one-day SLA
to provide onsite maintenance,
and now the agent can notify the customer
a technician will be sent.
Next, an automated process creates the work order.
And intelligence scheduling
can pick a time and date within the SLA
for when an appropriate technician can be onsite.
- So, now the appointment is all scheduled,
but what does the field technician's experience
then look like?
- The main experience for a frontline worker
is primarily surfaced through the field service mobile app.
They can see complete information about their day
in a familiar calendar view, similar to Outlook.
When selecting a work order,
the customer's information and location are available.
Once on site, frontline workers
can follow the predefined guided tasks
based off of the type of service they're performing.
Here, I've already completed the first two service tasks.
But let's say I want to follow along the third service task,
which includes the inspection
to ensure the successful installation
of the water filtration system.
This predefined checklist makes it easy for the technician
to perform their work.
In our case, we select the root cause of the installation
as the county water supply.
I mark that Fourth Coffee's installation
is covered under SLA.
As I follow the precise installation process,
I mark each step complete.
When I finish the installation,
I ensure the water is flowing well through the filter system
and make sure there are no leaks.
I move the progress to 100%
and indicate the inspection as passed.
Now that all of the tasks are done,
I scroll up and save my work.
Then at this point, I can go to the notes tab
and capture a signature from the customer
directly from my device.
- So now, the technician's work is done,
but what happens then if the customer has a question
that really falls outside the expertise
of the worker that's on site?
For example, what if they want to know
if their coffee is pouring right?
- Well, that's a great use case for remote assist.
Not all technicians will know
what the perfect cup of coffee looks like.
To avoid sending another technician onsite,
frontline workers can immediately connect
with the Contoso Coffee Brewmasters.
So, we'll launch the remote assist experience.
This connects to a remote expert
that the field tech can share video with.
Then, we'll check the pour of the coffee
and the remote expert can see things
like the speed and color of the pour
to say if everything looks good.
- This all looks pretty awesome.
But what does it take then to set the experience up
and why don't we start with the self-service IVA?
- So, for the self-service experience,
you need two things outside of core customer service
and field service apps, the Omnichannel add-in,
and your Power Virtual Agent.
Once you have acquired the license for Omnichannel,
the application appears in your Power Platform admin center
under D365 apps.
You'll select the environment
and which Omnichannel needs to be set up and select Manage.
This takes you to the Omnichannel page
and the Dynamics 365 admin center.
We provide a guided experience
to set up your different customer communication channels
and additional settings.
The second thing you need
is to create the Virtual Agent flow.
Here on the Power Virtual Agent author in Canvas,
you can see the flow of what I just showed.
You can see there's logic and conditional branching
and the prebuilt connectors make it easy to connect
to Azure IoT for device readings.
- Right, and by the way, we've also recently done
several shows on Power Virtual Agents,
which you can check out at aka.ms/PVAMechanics.
So, how do you get all this to work
with the voice control that we saw?
- Actually, that's the new part.
To do that, you need to follow the previous setup experience
for our new voice channel
and link it to a preexisting Virtual Agent,
just like you saw.
So, starting in the Omnichannel admin center,
click Set up voice demo.
This will kick off an automated process
to set up the work stream, acquire a phone number,
set up your voice channel, create a queue service
and wire up the Power Virtual Agent services.
Once these automatic processes are complete,
you can instantly try it by clicking on Open voice demo.
At this point,
you can test out the voice-to-agent escalation
by calling the number and opening the agent experience.
Since we just got this configured,
you'll land on a fresh agent dashboard.
Now, you'll see the call is coming in,
so, I'll accept the call.
Accepting the call opens the ongoing conversation page.
Notice the live voice-to-text transcript
happening in real time.
And you can even determine your customer's mood
by looking at the customer sentiment
at the top of the conversation.
- What happens if I want to have a different phone number,
or maybe I want to bring in my own phone number
to the service?
- You can either acquire a different phone number,
or bring your existing one into the service.
You can do that from the new Omnichannel admin center,
just click Set up voice.
And from there, you can configure your phone number
or get a new one.
- Okay, so once that's configured,
your call center is now set up,
but how does the routing work then
to get to the right agent? - So, that's out-of-the-box,
so, it's also pretty easy.
We actually showed that earlier in our example.
Still in the Omnichannel admin center,
I'll click into the work distribution.
These settings define how conversations
should be allocated to agents within a queue.
And now, we're ready to add our Virtual Agent,
the same one that I showed you earlier.
To do that, I'll select Add Bot, and from the dropdown list,
I'll select my Power Virtual Agent.
Now, my phone number is linked to my Power Virtual Agent,
and it's ready to go.
- One thing to note here is that behind the scenes,
we're actually using Azure Communication Services
that leverages the same enterprise-grade foundation
for Microsoft Teams that brings in voice and PSTN calling
and integration with Power Virtual Agents.
Moving on further into our setup experience,
another pivotal part of the experience that you showed
was that escalation to the customer service agent
from the bot and how they have the knowledge articles
that they needed to troubleshoot further
with the help of Smart Assist.
How do you get all that working?
- Again, this is pretty easy
to enable in the same admin center.
Here, if I click into the Analytics and insights setting,
you'll see that I've already enabled
Omnichannel historical analytics and topic clustering.
Historical analytics gives you
a complete view of your service organization
with things such as caseload volume by channel,
escalation rate, sentiment, and CSAT, just to name a few.
And topic clustering uses natural language understanding
to synthesize the root causes
for why your customers are calling.
And to get the matching Smart Assist
knowledge articles to appear,
you need to enable premium AI,
which I'll do by simply clicking into Manage.
All I need to do
to leverage Microsoft's powerful machine learning models
is to enable similar cases
and knowledge article suggestions.
I also have the option to update the data mapping
to tailor results to how my organization collects data,
but I'll leave that for later and click Save and Close.
- Let's switch gears to the field technician.
What did you have to do to set up the mobile app?
Was that easy to configure as well?
- There are just a couple steps to get that configured.
With the latest update to field service,
the mobile app will appear automatically in your tenant.
So, here in the apps menu,
from the Field Service Mobile app tile,
we'll select Manage roles,
then choose all of the field service roles here,
admin, dispatcher, inventory, resource manager, and save it.
This will give anyone with the right permissions
to access the application,
using their existing field service login credentials.
Now, we'll open it in the app designer,
and this is just like customizing any other power app.
You just select the components you want to display,
and those will be available to anyone
who uses the app with appropriate permissions.
- And this is really an awesome example
of how you can combine automation and intelligence
and live personnel engagement
to take customer support to the next level.
But what would you recommend for the folks watching
who want to learn more? - So, in the interest of time,
we showed you the core experience and setup,
but we have much more detailed guidance
on everything that I showed you,
from setting up Dynamics 365 modules
to configuring Dynamics 365 with Azure IoT,
available at aka.ms/DynamicsAlwaysConnected.
- Thanks, Deanna, this is amazing stuff.
And to get familiar with all of what's possible
with Dynamics 365,
I really recommend that you check out our series
with Vanessa Fournier at aka.ms/Dynamics365forIT.
Be sure to subscribe to Mechanics
if you haven't already yet.
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
(air whooshing) (device beeping)
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