Introduction
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps organizations provide service to their customers in many ways, depending on the specific needs of the customer, the organization's service model, and other determining factors. This module examines the Customer Service elements that you can use to support a case management solution.
Before you begin, go through the following section to learn more about cases.
Overview of a case
Typically, a case represents a situation or incident that a customer reports that requires a resolution. From a customer service standpoint, the case could represent any number of potential items, such as:
Question - A specific question that a customer has about a product or service. For example, a customer might contact a support representative to ask for specific information about their insurance policy, such as detectable or benefit amounts.
Request - A specific request that a customer has, such as requesting more information or some type of action. For example, a customer might contact an organization to request that someone come out and perform a property inspection.
Issue - A problem that a customer is having that needs to be resolved, such as a warranty claim, billing dispute, or a flaw in a product. For example, a customer might contact a support center because of a billing error on their mobile data plan.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service contains several components that work together to provide an end-to-end case management solution. It helps you identify a case and route it to the most appropriate representative to provide guidance and resolve it. The most used components include:
Cases - Represents a single incident of service or anything in the context of a customer interaction that requires some type of resolution or answer. A customer could have multiple cases associated with them at any one time.
Activities - Represent interactions with a customer. A case might have multiple activities associated with it. Activities could be phone calls or other items.
Entitlements - Specify the level of support services that a customer is entitled to. Consider entitlements as similar to support contracts.
Knowledge articles - The knowledge base is a repository of informational articles that customer service representatives can use to resolve cases.
Queues - A place to organize and store activities and cases that are waiting to be processed.
Service-level agreement (SLA) - A way of tracking and defining what should happen when a case is opened, such as how long it takes to respond to a customer.
Record creation and update rules - Rules that the system applies to different activity types to automatically create Microsoft Dynamics 365 records.
Routing rules - Rules that the system applies to cases that automatically route a case to a specific queue or user.
Agent scripts - Provide guidance to representatives as they work with a customer. Agent scripts can assist representatives in identifying what to say, provide instructions on what to do, and automate tasks such as creating records.
Smart assist - AI-backed suggestions that provide representatives with related knowledge articles and similar cases that might help the representative in resolving the current case.
The following example shows how these different elements can work together to provide an end-to-end solution.
The preceding image shows the workflow for a gold customer's case resolution business process. This gold customer has an entitlement record associated with them that entitles them to open 15 cases with your organization.
The customer can open these cases from multiple channels, including phone, mobile app, social media, or email. (In the preceding example, the customer sent an email.)
When the system receives the request, record creation rules identify who the email came from and the content of the email to create a new case in the application.
After the case is created, a routing rule automatically routes the case to the gold customer queue. The rule uses a service-level agreement (SLA) to determine that initial contact with the customer needs to be completed within 15 minutes.
A support representative, who has access to the gold queue, takes the case from the queue and is now responsible for working to resolve it.
An agent script assists the representative as they work through resolving the case.
The Smart assist feature suggests knowledge articles that could potentially help resolve the case.
The agent emails the article to the customer and resolves the case.
The customer's entitlement record is updated to reflect that they now have 14 cases remaining on their entitlement.
Over the remainder of this module, you learn more details about working with cases in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This work includes how to create cases, manage case workloads, use autocreation scenarios, and work with case status reason transitions.