Keeping a customer happy is the most basic and essential favor that any organization can do to increase sales and get the business to grow. It’s a fact that getting business from an existing customer is 5 to 10 times cheaper than to get a new customer. This however totally depends on the relationship, trust, and service. Here the buzzword is “Service”. It’s thrilling to grow a business and see the sales zoom, but that is when the next level of challenge seeps in. This is keeping a customer happy. The best way to keep a customer happy is to provide best services, answer and address their queries, troubleshoot their issues and fix the problems as they come. All the above fall under the category of Customer Service. All organizations are facing this as the biggest challenge and while there are multiple tools available in the market, I would like to tell some wonderful features that are available in MS Dynamics 365 for Service Management. MS D365 Service Management comes packaged with Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement. As the name suggests, Microsoft Dynamics 365 keeps customers engaged by addressing customer issues in the form of Cases or Incidents.
There are multiple important sections that give an organization a holistic area to address the complete customer service. Here is the list of main components comprising MS Dynamics Service section:
- Cases
- Knowledge Articles
- Service Level Agreements
- Contracts
- Entitlements
1. Cases :
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Cases are the incidents that are created whenever a customer (Account or Contact) is raising an issue, with a product or service. This case is assigned to customer service representatives or the service team. The Vanilla CRM comes with all features of an incident like priority, complete trackability, and routing from the point a case entered the system till its closure. Cases also come with some powerful features of automatic routing that we can further discuss in future discussions. first reported to a resolution of the issue.
While the standard interface of Case comes with almost all the features of the standard incident, the best part about Dynamics 365 is that it is completely customizable to suit every unique organization.
2. Knowledge Articles :
These are the knowledge base that an organization maintains. It develops and grows over the period for the way customer service representatives can help customers. It is a repository of data on how to respond or resolve issues of a type. These Knowledge Articles can be categorized based on subjects. There are various templates in which these articles can be drafted. These can be procedures, question and answers, solution to a problem and so on.
3. Service Level Agreements :
Service Level Agreements or SLAs define the level of service to a customer. It normally defines how much time can the service team take to address, respond and close an issue or case. Service Level Agreements server as the KPIs (key performance indicators) for the service organization and sets the benchmark against the competition. The support team can look at them as timers on indicating the time they have to solve a case and the time elapsed since the inception.
4. Contracts :
Contracts contain the level of service or support that would be provided to customers. Though these contracts continue to show up under the menu, the Contracts and related records like Contract Line Items, and Contract Templates have been deprecated with July 2017 update for Dynamics 365. This has been replaced by entitlements.
5. Entitlements :
In the latest releases, Entitlements are used to define the level of support that the customers are entitled for. These Entitlements can be selected at the Case level and the customer service representatives can check the support and entitlements that the customers have based on the entitlement terms. There are different types of Entitlement that can be created for customers. Entitlement also can depend on the product or service being purchased. The types of entitlements can be a number of cases or service hours varying case to case.
6. Reports and Visibility :
The most powerful feature of Microsoft Dynamics as I would call is the reports and dashboards. The Customer Service module comes in-built with some very powerful dashboards that can be used to see the complete picture of the service department in a snapshot. These include
- Customer Service Manager Service Dashboard
- Customer Service Operations Dashboard
- Customer Service Performance Dashboard
- Customer Service Representative Dashboard
- Customer Service Representative Social Dashboard
Not to count the multiple reports that come along which are very handy in day to day to track customer service to the last level. In addition to all the above, the latest features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 enrich the overall experience of the service team and the customer multi-fold. Some of the great features that have come up with Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the recent releases that would multiply the efficiency are :
7. The Unified Interface :
Starting with Version 9.0, Unified Interface has been introduced and it is a fully responsive interface that gives the flexibility of supporting the system from any interface regardless of the device.
8. Automated Insights and Analytics:
Microsoft has come up with Insights that use the data gathered by organizations combined with power of AI and ML to provide insights that are useful as well as trackable. From an organization point of view, this is a valuable list getting them more engaged with the customers.
Integrated Productivity Experience:
Microsoft has moved Office 365 into the direction of a complete business suite. Microsoft Dynamics 365 completely integrated with Office 365 and desktop tools like Outlook, Skype, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Groups, Yammer and so on. This not only increases the productivity but gives immense power to all Service team to be available and productive from any location, any device and any time. In a nutshell, Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service Management is one of the most powerful tools available for Service Management. It can be completely customized to suit the specialties of any unique organizations and give your customers a top-notch industry support experience.
Conclusion :
There are many more features of Customer Service that we would like to discuss in detail in our next blogs, but if you would like to know more about the MS Dynamics 365 Customer Service, contact us.
Below are a few more blogs that you can consider reading :-
- Why use Kanban Board for Dynamics 365
