Key Features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

One of the most powerful yet often ignored features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is Customer Service.

Customer Service allows you to increase customer satisfaction while reducing the amount of time and money spent on each support case or service call.

Dynamics 365 empowers your team to:

• Set up cases
• Record all interactions related to a case
• Create queues to route cases to the right channel
• Share information in a knowledge base
• Define service terms through Entitlements
• Create and schedule services
• Manage performance and productivity through reports and dashboards

Key Features of Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Customer service is broken down into two sections.

Service Management – designed to support incident-based service called Cases.

• Cases/Incidents
• Queues
• Entitlements
• Knowledge Base
• Articles
• SLA 

Service Scheduling – helps organizations to track service scheduling, manage different service types and the resources needed to complete the job.

• Service Calendar
• Service Scheduler

Key features of Service Management 

You can use Service management to establish service agreements and subscriptions, handle customer inquiries and service orders. You can also manage and analyze how services are delivered to your customers.

 What is an Incident?

An Incident is a failure in a:

• System
• Process
• Product

What is a Queue?

• A Queue is simply a list of “work items” including cases, activities, or other entity types.
• Queues are a place to organize and store “jobs” waiting to be processed.
• Queues allow you to set of distinct entity records, such as cases with the ability to claim or work on the queue item. It also allows users to know who is working on what.

What is Entitlement?

• Entitlements specify the support term based on a number of hours or number of cases. The customer’s support level can vary based on the product or the service purchased.
• Customers who purchased different products can be entitled to different support.

 Case Management in Dynamics 365

• The case entity provides Incident-based tracking for customer issues.
• When a customer service representative creates an incident (case) to track a customer request, question or a problem, all actions and communications can be tracked in the incident entity.
• An incident can be in one of the three states of Active, Resolved or Cancelled

 Service Level Agreement(SLA)

• Service Level Agreement (SLA) offer an easy way to track the time it takes your

service representatives to solve support requests.

• SLA allow users to pause the timer depending on the status reason of the support

request. For example: if a service representative is waiting on certain information from the customer, the status reason “waiting on customer” will pause the timer until the status reason changes.

 Standard Dynamics 365 Articles

• Dynamics 365 offers users the ability to generate articles which contain knowledge base information that may be surfaced within various records.
• These articles are stored directly within the Dynamics 365 and are based on templates that are set-up within the services administration area.
• Articles may be created and access by users with the correct user roles and permissions.

 Key Features of Service Scheduling

Using Scheduling you can plan and schedule service activities for your customers by bringing together all your resources.

 Service Scheduling

• The Service scheduler enables you to set up rules that will help you schedule services more efficiently.
• Instead of listing individual people, you are able to group people with similar skills into resource groups which are treated as pools.
• Once the service activity is scheduled, it appears on the service calendar.
• Users that are being assigned services can look at their calendar and see what they have to do on a specific day.

Service Calendar

• Service Calendar is in Service Scheduling
• All the Scheduled Service activities appeared in the Service Calendar.
• The Service Calendar is separate from the other CRM Calendar.

Entities That Belong to Service Scheduling

• Resources: includes people, locations or equipment required for a specific service.
• Resource Group: association of resources with the same skill sets.
• Work hours: allows you to set up the availability of the user.
• Services: services that you offer to your clients that require one or more resources.

Although it can take extra resources, time and money, good customer service is directly related to the growth of your business. Microsoft Dynamics 365 makes this easier for you.

Ask the Crowe CRM team for a demo of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Contact our team to start the discussion at crminfo@crowe.com or 877-600-2253.

By Manuj Gupta, Crowe LLP, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner, www.CroweCRM.com

Follow us on Twitter: @CroweCRM