Channels in Dynamics 365 Contact Center

  • 8 minutes

Contact Center supports digital and voice channels. Digital channels include live chat, persistent chat and social channels.

Digital channels

The digital channels are chat and social.

Chat

Chat is a widely desired channel through which customers prefer to reach customer support. Customers appreciate being able to chat with customer service representatives (service representatives or representatives) when self-service options don’t allow them to solve their own issues.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers full featured, first-party chat capabilities for service representatives to support customers. Chat transcripts from Copilot Studio or their peers and pre-conversation survey data transfers to live representatives to maintain full context of the customer issue as it moves between channels and people. They can help customers in the language of their choice with real-time translation, and escalate to voice and video if a visual demonstration and audio are needed to help customers. Features like quick replies, whisper, barge, consult, and transfer to other agents ensure that representatives can handle any workflow while chatting with customers.

A chat widget lets your customers connect with your customer service representatives and resolve their queries quickly.

To learn more about the chat channel, see Introduction to the chat channel and the documentation in that section.

Social

The social channels are SMS channels, and social channels like Apple messages, Facebook, WhatsApp, and more. Many customers use social channels for their daily communication needs. The success of social media customer service, like all other customer service, depends on the quality of care provided. Communications from customer service representatives (service representatives or representatives) should be timely, accurate, sensitive, brief, and friendly, which ultimately improves the customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

  • SMS

    • With Azure Communication Services-based short code for SMS, your customer service representatives can send high-volume, time-sensitive messages using preapproved short codes, to make sure of reliable delivery. The provisioning and management of the short codes is simplified for your organization as it can be handled within the Azure ecosystem. To learn more, see Configure an SMS channel using Azure Communication Services.
    • The SMS channel through Twilio allows your organization to connect to customers by using text messages. Your customers can send text messages through Twilio and connect with an appropriate customer service representative (service representative or representative). Service representatives can view incoming SMS requests on their dashboard and respond accordingly. To learn more, see Configure an SMS channel for Twilio.

  • Social -

    • Apple messages - The Apple Messages app also supports Messages for Business, a way to apply iMessage's richer communication capabilities to engage with businesses. The asynchronous nature of this channel gives customers the convenience of resolving their issues when they find time, in contrast to real-time channels such as Chat for Dynamics 365, where the session ends when the chat window is closed. To learn more, see Configure an Apple Messages for Business channel.
    • Facebook - See Configure Facebook channel to learn how to set up a Facebook channel.
    • LINE - See Configure a LINE channel to learn how to set up a LINE channel.
    • WhatsApp - The WhatsApp channel feature lets you integrate WhatsApp through Twilio with either the Customer Service admin center or Contact Center admin center application to engage with customers who prefer to use the WhatsApp channel. See Configure a WhatsApp channel through Twilio to learn how to set up a WhatsApp channel.

Voice channel

Enable your customer service representatives (service representative or representative) to communicate with customers on the phone to resolve issues using the voice channel in Customer Service. While many customers increasingly use chat, SMS messages, and social media to engage and request support from organizations, phone calls continue to be an important communication channel. The voice channel provides representatives with the ability to receive and make public switched telephone network (PSTN) calls through a native calling experience in Dynamics 365. Real-time AI-powered features such as live call transcription, sentiment analysis, and AI-based suggestions are available to boost productivity. The application also provides a rich set of analytics and insights, including AI-driven topic clustering and call insights.

Most organizations manually integrate standalone telephony and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, which result in fragmented experiences for service representatives and customers across engagement channels. Such solutions from multiple providers are complex to roll out and maintain, and create data silos with disconnected insights of customer interactions and service representative performance across channels.

To learn more about the voice channel, see Introduction to the voice channel.

Microsoft Teams

You can also use Microsoft Teams as an engagement channel for support of internal functions—such as technical support, human resources, and finance—to allow organizations to connect their employees with internal support personnel by using the omnichannel capabilities in Contact Center or Customer Service.

To learn more, see Configure Microsoft Teams channel.