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Dynamics 365 Contact Center Release Coming Next Month

The latest of Microsoft's AI-boosted CRM products, Dynamics 365 Contact Center, is set to become generally available on July 1.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center will join the previously released Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Service products in Microsoft's ongoing effort to "modernize customer service" via CRM products that incorporate Copilot's generative AI capabilities, according to a blog post Tuesday by Dynamics Corporate Vice President Jeff Comstock.

Comstock describes Dynamics 365 Contact Center as a standalone, "Copilot-first" contact-center-as-a-service product that runs on Microsoft's cloud datacenters and "infuses generative AI throughout the contact center workflow -- spanning the channels of communication, self-service, intelligent routing, agent-assisted service and operations."

Dynamics 365 Contact Center comes with prebuilt Copilots. It's also integrated with Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code AI application development tool, and incorporates speech recognition and intelligent voice tools Microsoft acquired from its 2022 purchase of Nuance. Using these capabilities, organizations will be able to create customizable and intelligent self-service experiences for customers, in both chat and spoken communications.

For person-to-person customer interactions, Dynamics 365 Contact Center uses AI to route callers to the most applicable customer service agent or department. AI-based tools like sentiment analysis and live transcription and translation are designed to help agents accurately assess customer needs in real time.

There are also AI tools for contact center help desks. "We've built a solution that helps service teams detect issues early, improve critical KPIs and adapt quickly," Comstock wrote.

Microsoft is extolling the virtues of AI-powered customer service systems, using its own Customer Service and Support (CSS) team as an example. Before moving to Microsoft's first-party CRM tools, the CSS team used "16 different systems and over 500 individual tools," per Comstock. Post-Copilot adoption, he said, the team's efficiency improved.

"[T]he CSS team achieved a 12 percent decrease in average handle time for chat engagements and 13 percent decrease in agents requiring peer assistance to resolve an incident," Comstock said. "And more broadly, CSS has seen a 31 percent increase in first call resolution and a 20 percent reduction in missed routes."

About the Author

Gladys Rama (@GladysRama3) is the editorial director of Converge360.

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