Microsoft announce contact center: Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Big news in the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) space, at Microsoft Ignite today Microsoft has announced “voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service”, aka “Dynamics 365 Customer Service expands to become the all-in-one digital contact center solution” to quote the Microsoft blog

This is Dynamics 365 Customer Service leveraging Azure Communication Service, the underlying platform that supports Microsoft Teams. It can leverage Power Virtual Agents as voice bots.

The initial realise is voice/PSTN, but Microsoft says “Video is not far behind”, which makes sense as it’s Azure Communications Services based so the video capability is there. We see a preview of that in the Microsoft blog post:

With the addition of the voice channel, Dynamics 365 Customer Service out-of-the-box enables:

• A consistent, 360-degree view of the customer across all channels, allowing agents to quickly understand the full customer journey so customers never have to repeat themselves.
• An intelligent, conversational Power Virtual Agent that can be used as an interactive voice response (IVR) for the voice channel and versatile enough to be used as a chatbot for SMS, live chat, and social messaging channels.
• AI-based routing of incoming calls to the best-skilled agent, consistent with all other channels.
• Increased collaboration with other agents and subject matter experts globally using embedded Microsoft Teams to resolve issues faster.

While Microsoft is now offering a first-party SaaS contact center, they make note that they will continue to support other contact center vendors and integrations with Dynamics 365: “And, when it comes to your business, you have a choice. We continue to support integrations with key partners such as Five9, Genesys, NICE, Solgari, Tenfold, Vonage and others who are building connectors to enable their voice solutions within Dynamics 365 Customer Service.”.

The Microsoft Teams certified contact center solution also continues to support integrating contact center solutions to Teams.

The new Dynamics 365 Customer Service with voice channel is available for trial right now here.

We will get more detail in the Ignite breakout session #234 Introducing the Voice Channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service on November 3 at 11:30 AM PT—register here.

I will update the blog and have more blogs on all the Microsoft Ignite Microsoft Teams news as we get more details, be sure to subscribe for all the latest Teams and now Voice Channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service news!

Reference:

Introducing voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service