Welcome to Migration Minded.
The Dynamics 365 web series,
where we dig into important modernization
considerations with Dynamics AX and
Dynamics CRM experts to really help
support your cloud transformation
thinking. my name is Tom Wisniewski.
I'm a product marketing
manager for Dynamics 365.
Today we have a great episode for you
were talking to Microsoft MVP
Tricia Sinclair on the benefits that
call centers can see in the cloud.
We're also going to look at how migrations
can impact the customer service experience.
We're going to spend some time really
trying to dispel some common migration
misconceptions. Based in London,
Tricia is the customer service European
lead for Avanade and has spent the
last 15 years in the Dynamics space,
helping customers migrate to the cloud.
So with all that, let's get started.
Hey Tricia, how's it going?
Hi Tom.
Thank you so much for having me. Now Tricia,
I'd love to start with some common
misconceptions around migrating to
the cloud and particularly within call
centers. When customers come to you
wanting to make the move to the cloud,
what are some of the top reasons
that they're making this ask?
So one of the more obvious reasons is
the rapid shift to people working from home.
Now with some companies, especially
companies with smaller
customer service teams
they were already doing this.
But the pandemic really accelerated
this for a lot of companies.
So of course if you have
an on-premise application,
it's kind of hard to have
agents work from home,
so they needed a cloud-based application
a cloud-based contact center solution.
Another reason for this is they
want to leverage all the the new
native great functionality that's
available in a cloud-based solution.
So for example,
being able to have that holistic
view of your customer.
Being able to automate and reduce
the amount of effort for your agents
easily without a lot of development.
These are all things that are just
natively available within a cloud-
based contact center solution and
they want to take advantage of
all the investment that Microsoft
are actually putting into
you know the cloud and the cloud-
based contact center solution.
I would also imagine that leveraging
an Omnichannel strategy would
be pretty attractive to a lot of
call centers and organizations.
Can you run us through what Omnichannel
is and the benefits it can have?
Sure. So customers like myself
I like to say are pretty savvy.
We use social media. We use messaging.
We message our friends on like
different messaging platforms and
we're really trying to resolve things
Ourselves where possible.
So it doesn't mean that the traditional
model of asking customers to just email
or phone in, it won't work anymore.
Yes,
you still need to ensure that your
customers can contact you through phone,
but you should also know who
your customers are.
And you should see you basically need to
identify how they want to reach out to you,
and you should make that possible,
whether that be through social channels,
through messaging applications
or through web chat.
Now Dynamics, customer service Omnichannel
experience allows companies
to have one or more channels which
provide a seamless and unified
customer journey irrespective of how a
customer has initiated contact with you.
So they irrespective of that a
customer will be able to be routed
through to the correct team.
They'll be able to get the same
information and be able to be treated
with the same SlAs or the applicable
SlAs that they are entitled to.
And you know there is a complete
process allows the agent to complete
the query in a in a structured way.
So of course means that customers
are much happier that they don't have
to repeat themselves constantly.
And also agents are more on point
as they don't have to be trained
on multiple contact systems,
so of course with
Omni, agents will have access to
that interface that allows them to
surface third party applications
within the context of the customer,
and this saves so much time
because I remember as an agent myself
having to flick through three or five
different systems to answer questions
that would be asked by the customer
and to make small talk to cover the time,
you know, waiting for those systems to load,
so being able to have the native channels.
But also surface third party
applications is absolutely a benefit.
So Tricia those are some great
reasons to move to cloud.
But you know,
in talking to customers not everyone
is ready to take that step.
Not everyone is the right place.
What are some common apprehensions
that you hear from customers?
And can you help dispel them for us?
Well, it depends on the area of the
business that we're looking at.
So for example,
some IT teams might be very familiar
with when they were building the current
solution that they're implementing,
and when they were building it,
they realized that there were
things that were missing,
and they are still thinking that
those things are still going to
be missing in the new product
because they haven't kept up to date
with where the products move to.
Now, as we all know, Microsoft
does actually
add or produce new features every six months,
which means that the CRM that
you're currently using if you're
not using the cloud version,
is not the CRM that is available in the
cloud, which is the most up to date
solution for Microsoft that you could
actually have because it's continuously,
you know being updated,
ensuring that you have the
security patches that are all
wrapped up there okay. Another thing
that I've heard is
the fact that when they're actually
implementing these solutions,
it's often the case,
especially in a contact center
that you might have
One solution for one channel that you
might have, like a voice solution.
You might have a separate chat
solution. You might then have a separate CRM,
so there are all these different
solutions and if you remove one or make
a change in one then they're totally
afraid of what could potentially happen.
It's basically a very fragile setup, right?
So moving to the
cloud is not going to be
an easy thing to do, but not because
it's not going to be an easy thing to do,
means that you should totally ignore it,
because the longer you leave it is the more
fragile those systems will become because
you're just going to be adding more and more.
Another thing as well is that there
are some companies that are stuck
in long term licensing agreements,
and because of that they are afraid
that if they do move to the cloud,
they'll lose those licensing agreements.
But the thing is,
you do have the ability to still
to move to the cloud
while still leveraging that licensing
agreement just by discussing it with
your Microsoft account manager.
And then the final thing I wanted
to talk about was security.
I have heard this quite a lot that they
feel that the cloud is not secure,
but on that I would really,
really really encourage them to
actually do some investigation there
because the cloud is actually a
lot more secure than having an on-
premise application or an
on-premise system because Microsoft
actually invest a lot more than
an actual standard business
would typically invest in security.
Complexity,
costs and security are definitely
some concerns we hear a lot.
Another one is the Unified service desk.
What solutions are available to
customers that are currently
dependent on a legacy system?
Customers who are leveraging
USD can take advantage of the
Omnichannel engagement hub,
which is a part of the Dynamics
customer service Omni experience,
because it actually is very similar.
So if you're using USD,
you already are aware that you have the
multi-session, multi-agent experience.
Meaning that you can resolve and handle
all the different conversations coming in,
but of course with Omni channel you
get that same experience but with
the added benefit that you now also
have native channels so you've got
your own inbuilt chat functionality,
your own inbuilt voice functionality
which is not available with USD. Now with
the added benefit that you can now
leverage that's solution from anywhere.
I just need my laptop and a
working internet connection.
That's not something that
is possible with USD,
so it is necessary for you to consider you
know what what you're actually getting there.
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Some might be holding on
to USD because they think,
okay,
you know you've got legacy systems
and
I can't move away from that because
I need USD to interact with that
legacy on-premise application.
Well,
the beauty about it is when we
factor in the Power Platform,
which is something I talked
about before Power Platform has
this this concept called
desktop flows which is pretty
much desktop automation software.
It allows us to integrate with
applications which don't natively
have a direct route of integration.
So if I wanted to automate or trigger
something from my Omnichannel
as an agent, trigger something from
Omnichannel and have it go off and do
something on you know on a separate
legacy system, I can now do that,
which this basically means that I don't
have that as a blocker anymore.
I can interact with legacy applications
directly from my Omnichannel agent desktop.
So we addressed some common concerns,
but what about differences?
How does the cloud stack up to on-
prem instances and say particularly
to feature parity?
So you also can factor in that
you get the
added benefit of one of my favorite
things that have come out of
Microsoft out of the last few years, and that's the Power Platform.
And the Power Platform basically
allows - it's -
I don't know how to say this.
OK, so with the Power Platform
you're able to not only leverage
data from other systems as well,
you can surface it up
in business applications and how much,
how many months and how much money have
you typically spent as an organization,
You might actually think it would
be great if we could like have
an easier way to get data to be
entered into a system or for someone
to actually get like see data.
This is all what the Power Platform does.
It removes the barrier between
the business and IT and allows the business
to get on with just doing the
job of making more money right?
Which is basically what everybody wants to do.
You have for example, Power Apps.
You've got Power Virtual Agent.
You've got Power BI,
and you've got Power Automate
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and all of these basically provides
more power to the business.
This is not really possible with
the on-premise solution
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to be honest though,
it is possible with on-premise,
but it's just harder and
not all the Power
Platform modules will be
possible. So for example,
we're talking about contact center.
We're talking about call centers and
and helping them, Power Virtual Agent
is a low code chat bot solution which
you could leverage if you are in the cloud.
But if you are on-prem,
that will not be possible,
so you're not going to be able to
deflect customers away from your
agents and save your agents a lot
of time and allow them to focus
on the more complicated cases.
It sounds like there are some
great work arounds in the cloud,
but what's the bottom line?
How can a migration impact
both the customer service experience
for the call centers themselves
and for those customers you know
the ones calling in? Basically a
customer will definitely be impacted
with the move to the cloud
because the agents will be impacted.
One of the things that isn't
often talked about is how the
agent experience directly affects
the customer experience. If you remove
a lot of barriers from the agents
then the customer gets their
questions answered a lot quicker.
They get a happier
agent definitely and they get you
know the correct information as well.
So providing the applicable information
to the agent in one screen.
Maybe not one screen but
in one application as opposed to
have them having to jump around -
time saving - the second thing is
having a streamlined contact center
solution where it is directly for case
management and
you can adapt it to your process
whatever process you need as a business
that ensures that your agents are
following the same process
and irrespective of where that customer
has come into you know
whichever channel they're coming in from.
They're going to have that same process,
which means that they are then happier.
And of course it means that you probably
have less complaints like that
someone actually said something or
did something you have less of that.
You also have the ability for agents
to remove a lot of repetitive
tasks that they typically have,
so you know having to sit there and
constantly put in the same information.
If it's a particular type of case.
You can automate that with the
click of a button.
You know if you migrate away
to Dynamics Omnichannel,
so that's also great.
And another thing as well is of
course taking advantage of the Power
platform taking advantage of the
Power Platform is it's a bit bigger
and wider than the contact center.
It will be applicable for other
areas of your business as well,
but it is definitely another thing
that will impact your agents to
remove a lot of the
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headache and the
manual tasks that they tend to have
to do. Now from the customer side of things.
Of course,
I talked about being a savvy customer
and how I want to be able to look
into and resolve things for myself.
A lot of the a lot of the reasons why
a lot of the reasons
that doesn't tend to be possible is because
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we're still basically in an age
where we're looking at, you know,
just standard websites.
Now,
what if I can't find the information
on the website I'm going to be
forced to contact you,
but what if there was, you know,
another route.
What if I could basically speak to
a bot that was tailored to know
who I am and provide valuable
targeted contextual information to
what I'm actually asking it.
So if I wanted to just know okay and
need to speak with someone to see if
there's a deal that's going to be
beneficial to me that I'm
actually eligible for and having
that bot know that okay this is
Tricia speaking and Tricia is eligible
for these types of products and this
product is perfect for her referral.
Suggests that product to her.
That means I'm not speaking to an agent
that agent I would have spoken to is now
able to deal with a more urgent case.
Or another urgent case or
another more challenging case so to speak.
So it does help from both sides.
My final thoughts on this is don't
be afraid to look into the migration
to the cloud
I'm not saying that it's going to be easy,
nothing good, nothing valuable is,
you know, but the value is there.
The benefits are there,
and if you would like to continue
the conversation,
there is so much information that's
available that's going to show
you how you can actually do this.
And provide guidance into what
you need to consider.
Thanks so much for joining us.
This has been Migration Minded.
If you have migration questions
join our Dynamics 365 migration
community where you can connect
with experts like Tricia there.
And if you're just getting started,
I highly recommend the materials around
our standard migration assessment.
It's really the first step in this process
and really gets you going on that journey.
So until next time thanks so much.