>> Hello. In this week's episode of Less Code, More Power,
you will learn how your customers can help themselves and if not,
how you can help them with Omni Channel. Don't miss out.
[MUSIC]
>> Hi, everyone.
Welcome to another episode of Less Code, More Power.
Dona and I are so happy to have Tricia on the show today.
Tricia, could you go ahead and just
introduce yourself to everyone and really tell
people what's going on for you because you've been
up to so much stuff lately with the global quiz.
You've been getting involved with
Omni Channel engagement for quite some time, and also,
you've got this huge amazing background in
DevOps and Governance for really enterprise-level system.
Go ahead and introduce yourself and we'll take it from there.
>>Okay. My name is Tricia Sinclair and at the moment,
I'm a D365 Resell Solutions Consultant from DXC.
I've been involved in Dynamics for around like over 10 years now.
I started out this year as a junior.
Basically, as I did projects,
I felt the need or felt that I wanted
to see how it can be done better.
Then I started learning about DevOps.
I didn't actually go to the university and learned DevOps,
I actually learned DevOps my spare time to try to
make the processes that we were doing better.
Then it grew from there.
What I do now is I want to share that understanding,
that experience with other people to
show how they can actually improve the quality of their projects,
not just by using Pipelines,
but by using the rest of the modules included in DevOps.
Then actually when I was at University,
I worked my way through as a call center agent, believe it or not.
>> Wow.
>> So that's my absolute fascination with Omni Channel
because I've done projects using the Unified Service Desk,
and that is extremely complicated to set
up if you don't know what you're doing, but with Omni,
the ease of which you're able to just spin
something up and get going with just a remote,
simple-to-use call center system reduces a lot of
the pressure and a lot of the issues that
agents like me back in the day would feel.
I just find that amazing.
I blog about that as well,
and yeah, I mean,
I work with a lot of other power platform stuff.
That's that's basically me.
>> I love it. That is such a cool background.
I love the fact that you study DevOps,
on your own because you were just curious about it.
It's not a thing you are forced to study at Uni.
You didn't know how you're going to use it in your work,
but you know it's useful and you knew
that it's something that you want to learn on your own.
Can you tell us a little bit about Omni Channel?
What does it mean specifically to you?
How do you explain it to
others who may not have your customer help desk background?
>> Okay. Think about it this way.
When you call a bank or when you call any organization,
who's actually behind the scenes is an agent.
That agent is expected to know pretty much everything about you,
the reason that you're calling
the problem that you're having and how to fix it,
but those agents are actually people themselves.
They might have just been employed,
they might've just actually started getting into
the grips of things at that company. They're going to need help.
On an agent standpoint, in terms of
that person behind the scenes trying to help you out.
They need, for example,
guidance about the standard business
processes that that company is going to have,
they need support on
the products that they're trying to serve you with.
They need help with the type of offers.
There's a lot of things that are going on behind the scenes.
Invariably, what happens is that
companies have all these different systems left,
right, and center that they need to go and refer to.
Imagine having just one system that
you can log into and have everything at
your fingertips in order to address your issue so you
can actually get off the phone much quicker.
That's pretty much what Omni Channel is.
It's a multi-session, multi-tech experience that allows
multiple applications to be grouped together
to allow agents to service the customer.
>> I love that.
I love that you have mentioned.
>>Yeah, I love that you asked that Dona,
because I think that we can always
get so stuck in where we come from and things seem so easy,
but Tricia, because you've had that agent experience,
you'll come in, I think this is why I really like
about a lot of your material is the fact that
you include that agent experience as well.
Because ultimately, we all want to
finish that conversation, and we all do it.
I'm trying to get a new offer at the moment,
and we'll come off the phone one tend to be happy and well,
problem resolves and there's
so many different moving parts to that.
This is so relevant for everyone.
>> Yeah, definitely.
>> Tell me a little bit about where this passion for
government compliance comes from
because that is not a normal thing.
People are like, "I love governance."
>> So true.
>> Honestly, I don't know.
I think it stems from my first ever role.
They were really, really high and key on documentation.
I've always liked processes.
If something is a mess,
the first thing that I try to do is try
to make sense of it somehow.
Between my weird love for documentation and my need for process,
thus basically, led to my love for governance, compliance.
On top of that,
it's also, for me,
it reduces a lot of the headache that you
typically get at the end of a project,
because at the beginning of a project,
everyone loves each other.
It's an absolute love fest.
That's the time things slip.
At the end of the project,
the customer is trying to get their money back.
They're trying to basically say,
"Hey, this project is over budget," but guess what?
The project is over budget because they asked throughout
the project for a variety of things which were not in scope.
But where's it documented?
It's probably documented in
someone's e-mail and yet that person probably left the company.
You have no proof that this was ever asked for.
You have no proof that what was asked
for is a change or taken out of scope.
This is basically where DevOps board becomes so important.
A lot of people focus on DevOps.
To them it's just the builds,
the release, continuous deployment.
It's so much more than that.
It's being able to fully
trace your requirements from the customer saying,
I want this, to I have it delivered, there it is.
I mean, and this is going to save the company a lot of money.
It's going to save the development team a lot of time,
because they're not going to have to be
proving that they've delivered something.
It's there in black and white.
They're not going to have to prove that it's actually
a change request or something that's out of scope.
It's literally there.
That's facts for me where I found the need for DevOps coming from.
It's basically being able to prove and save time.
I'm all about time-saving as well.
>> And cost-saving.
>> Yeah, exactly.
>> I like that.
>> I like to save my time.
>> And stress and not to be stressed.
>> Oh, yes, the stress.
>> You're so right where at
the beginning a room is like very optimistic.
Like yeah, let's all do this.
It's going to be amazing and no one writes anything down ever.
How true that when it's time to deliver,
that's when people start to randomly disappear,
and then it's hard.
I've never thought about it that way in
terms of governance and compliance at the very beginning.
Write everything down, figure out
your plan and stick to it rather than getting excited
and creative and adding
all the scope to it that the customer can't afford
or need and the creators can't deliver. That's cool.
>> Yeah. You can add things,
but if you add things,
there is also a process there.
You follow the process,
then everybody's still happy.
>> Right. Add things as needed.
>> Add things as needed. Definitely.
>> So I hear you brought something to show us today.
>> I did. So one of the things as I mentioned,
I'm really passionate about is Omni.
So that's my current favorite thing to show.
So what I'm going to show is,
a scenario where I'm working a lot with
public sector organizations here in the UK at the moment.
So what tends to happen is,
if you move into a new neighborhood or a new city,
and you have to call them up,
and you have to set up what's known as
your Council Tax and pay that,
but it's one of my hate-of-things to do,
because I always want to call them to make
sure that they have my debit details
to make sure that I'm off the previous record and onto them.
It takes ages to actually get them to answer the phone,
and it also takes ages to get anything set up.
I actually don't understand why,
or what their processes are.
So what I've done is,
I basically built out a process
in Omni Channel to show what that could look like.
Now, I don't know the internal process to
get to the Council Tax actually setup. That doesn't matter.
What I'm going to show, is how that process
could actually look like inside of Omni Channel.
So basically, what we have,
is we have our lovely little Chat Button and this Chat Button
is pretty much just a widget
that's created when I create an Omni Channel.
So when I initiate the chats,
the first thing it's going to ask me for some details that will
allow me to direct the conversation to an agent.
So a lot of the times, obviously in public sector,
there are different departments,
and each department has a different skill.
They have a different education in terms of
how to deal with the issues they're experiencing.
The reason I'm messaging is,
I want to interact,
I want to let them know about the Council Tax inquiry.
Now, bear in mind, I'm doing this as a chat,
but with Omni Channel,
it has so many other channels that are available
such as your Facebook, your Twitter, WhatsApp,
etc, and the beauty about it,
is it doesn't matter the channel that it originates from.
The customer experience is always going to be the same
because they have the same functionality inside an Omni Channel.
So here for GDPR purposes, we can prompt them,
let them know that we're going to keep a copy of
the conversation or any privacy URLs that we need them to read,
and then I'm going to submit.
Now, another thing as well with Omni,
is one of the main aims,
is I don't want my agents have to deal with this issue.
So how can we reduce
the number of conversations going through to an agent?
Well, we can actually leverage
Power Virtual Agents coupled
with Omni Channel in order to do this.
So here, we have my Power Virtual Agent,
but that's going to be by first point of deflection,
actually, my second point of deflection because as you can see,
I'm actually having knowledge articles here, which as a customer,
I would have expected them to check here to see how could I
actually set up a Council Tax record with you,
and if they can't find it on the knowledge articles,
than they initiate the chat,
and then you have the second line of deflection,
which is a Power Virtual Agent,
which will guide me as the customer through a series of
questions and ultimately, even helps set up
the Council Tax record without me going through to an agent.
But I want to go through to an agent.
What I'm going to do, is I'm going to push it to do that.
So if I'm not paying council tax,
it's not that it direct me through to that agent.
So I'm not going to wait,
I'm going to go straight in here,
and what you'll see is a little pop up here.
So you can see that the agent sees the reason for the chat,
and this is actually coming directly from Power Virtual Agent.
So if I accept it,
it's going to show the information that
the that the bots and the agents,
that the bot and the customer had.
So I'm not starting from scratch.
I understand what the previous conversation
was about, and I can continue.
On top of that, because I actually
initiated as a carbon tax inquiry on the bot,
it actually routed to that specific agent guidance.
So remember what I mentioned before about,
as an agent, I need
some guidance in terms of what to say and what to do.
Well, with agent guidance,
I can actually do that,
I can also verify who the customer is,
leveraging information directly from the contact record or
even the case record to
validate that the customer is who they say they are,
before going back to the welcome screen.
Not only that, I can quickly create
an inquiry or a case record here that
will bring everything that it knows about
the conversation and pre-populate the case record with it.
So just with a click of a button,
I'm able to create a case record or
any other records that I need to.
I don't think that I want to show you with Omni is,
as you actually interact with the customer,
what's actually happening is,
Omni is actually listening to your conversation,
not in a weird CD way,
but it's actually listening to see how it can help you.
So if I basically,
as a customer said, hey,
I want to set up an appointment-
>> Yeah.
>> -then what's going to happen here,
is you can see an appointment card is created.
Now this appointment card is prompting me as an agent to say,
"Hey, this customer is asking for an appointment."
So what we recommend that you do,
is create an appointment.
Now, this is known as Smart Assist and this is
my favorite feature of Omni Channel because,
when I was an agent,
I'd actually have to put myself on mute, ask my colleague,
wait for them to put themselves on mute, ask my colleague,
"Hey, they've asked me for this,
how do I do this?"
Then they tell me,
and then I have to then do it.
But with Smart Assist,
what this can then do is,
this can actually do that,
this could be the helping hand on your left shoulder
guiding you based on
the conversation that you're having with the agent,
or even based on what you're actually doing within the system.
>> Okay.
>> This is amazing.
>> I can just click on "Create Appointment" here,
and again, similar to create case,
it's going to create an appointment,
prepopulate [inaudible] with
all the information it knows about you.
So here, we have an appointment for my Council Tax inquiry.
I could just save that,
is then associated to
my contact record or to the customer's contact record,
and there we go.
>> So what I loved about that is,
you start with a place where a customer can help themselves.
You say, here's some knowledge articles, so,
you don't actually have to call us on the phone immediately.
Read these articles, if they don't
fulfill self-service using the Bot,
and if you didn't get stuck,
then bounce over to Omni Channel,
and the chat history is freaking there.
So you're not starting over with,
what does this person know? What are they trying to do?
>> Well, like, "Hey, Dona, Can you just repeat
the question like 10 times?"
>> I love that and I love that
there's the continuity between the Bot and Omni Channel,
the way you set it up, so,
you go back and make an appointment
and the appointment card shows up.
You do something in the Omni Channel it
shows that the chat is aware.
I think that's just brilliant
because you really are making it, so,
the Bot and the human,
they work together rather than it being like
a complete hand off and start over from Step zero.
So I think that is super cool. Yeah, I love that.
>> This is all low code.
So what I showed is it doesn't actually take
any actual development knowledge with
the exception of the smartest says,
which is the last feature.
Everything else that I showed is just based on the Power Platform.
>> Wow.
>> That's amazing.
>>That is.
>> So Tricia, you have some homework for our audience.
Tell us what that is.
>> So my homework is,
I want everyone to see how easy it
is to get started with Omni Channel.
You can take 30 minutes.
With just 30 minutes,
you can actually create a chat widget and get started.
That's it. Just create a chat widget and
actually initiate a chat conversation. That's your homework.
>> Yeah. I love that.
>> Nice and simple as well because it's direct,
it's go ahead and create a chat widget
using Omni Channel engagement.
That's so awesome.
>> All right, folks, viewers,
listeners, you heard the woman.
Go create a Chat Widget
because it doesn't matter if you run a company or
not run a company, at some point,
you're going to have to do customer engagement,
and it is a way better experience for everybody
if your customers are able to first help themselves and if not,
then you are able to help them through some predictable means.
So thank you, Tricia, so much for sharing that with us today.
I learned a lot. I am going to use this.
I run a retail company right here.
All my customer questions are all answered through
e-mail or through a Chat Bot,
but I loved this Omni Channel idea,
so that me or my partner can
answer and we have to transition between what
has happened and what we can do to further help customers.
I'm totally going to try this out now.
>> So you're going to do the homework, right?
>> I'm going to do the homework.
I'm going to do it for a real, real, real issue.
>> Yeah.
>> Thank you so much, Tricia.
It's been amazing to have you as guest on the show.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Thank you.
>> I'm so glad I got to meet you finally.
You're going to get volunteered for all kinds of speaking gigs
because this thing is going to get thrown in lots of places.
I am super excited about this.
>> Okay. Awesome.
>> All right, everyone, thank you for tuning
in to Less Code, More Power. I'm Dona.
>> I'm Sarah.
>> Our guest today was Tricia.
See you next time.