Exploring Omnichannel for Customer Service
The way in which we communicate with each other is always changing and yet many organisations are still making customers engage with them on their own terms. If this sounds familiar, this can mean one of two things: you may be further inconveniencing a customer who could already feel inconvenienced or you could be missing out on the conversation altogether.
Omnichannel for Customer Service allows your customers to connect with you through multiple channels, offering them the choice of which channel is the most convenient for them and giving your employees a single interface to communicate with and support your customers.
Omnichannel supports multiple channels out-of-the-box, from live web chat and SMS to numerous social media channels. Microsoft are also working to add support for new channels, and recently announced the addition of native voice channel support – plus, with backing from Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, you can also configure your own custom messaging channels.
Here, our Technical Architect, Jason Daraz, takes a close look at the web chat service and its features.
An introduction to webchat
Within the Omnichannel Administration app, you can create chat widgets which, once configured, provide a widget script snippet that can be copied and pasted on a webpage of our choice. This function enables customers to start a webchat at the press of a button when they visit your chosen webpage.
Business-side, you’ll be able to see when a customer or prospect chat request comes through in the Omnichannel for Customer Service app, along with any other chat sessions which are active at that moment in time.
You will also find conversation summaries with details on how long the customer was waiting before they got through to an agent, the queue they were routed to and the start time of the conversation. You can also access responses to pre-chat questions and automated responses that have been configured for your live chat channel, if that’s something you have in place.
Customer Service integration
Here, you can also interact with data from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, for example, you can search for a contact or account to link your webchat conversation to, or if you’re speaking with a prospect, you can create a new contact or account.
If your customer is getting in touch with a new question or concern, you have the ability to create a new case, opening this in a new tab and allowing you to easily navigate between the new case record and the conversation summary screen. This, along with the ability to search a knowledge base for useful articles and access other Dynamics 365 apps make this a great tool for handling queries from current and future customers.
Further features
Another fantastic feature is the sentiment tracker which tracks the conversation as it progresses; using the content of the conversation, each chat will receive a sentiment marker from ‘very positive’ through to ‘very negative’ so you and others can easily identify who is already a great prospect, and who may need further attention.
When managing the conversation, we can set pre-defined quick replies or add another user to the conversation to help get a query solved. You can also transfer the conversation completely if there is someone better placed to respond.
Tailor your live chat experience
With each chat widget associated with a workstream, this enables you to choose which of your agents a chat gets routed to and with the ability to define skill attachment rules, the system can choose who that agent is depending on the skills associated to them. The capacity on the workstream can also define how much availability an agent has, ensuring the chat gets directed to someone who isn’t too busy to answer the query.
Other capabilities include the creation of automated messages triggered by defined events and the ability to contact your customer or prospect via voice or video call.
Contact Us
This is only touching the surface…
To discover more about Omnichannel for Customer Service capability and find out whether it’s right for your organisation, get in touch with a member of our team.
