Updated · Originally published
is an extension of Dynamics Customer Service that enables unified communication between your Agents and your customers. With Omnichannel, employees get a single platform that provides all the customer data, communication channels, and tools in one place.
The concept of an Omnichannel Contact Center application got it's start from the Call Center. While a Call Center is a single channel operation, taking or making phone calls only, a Contact Center incorporates multiple channels. As technology improved and the preferences of customers changed, the Contact Center incorporated additional channels beyond Voice and Email, and now includes channels like web chat, SMS test messaging, and even Social Media.
Microsoft's solution
With the recent addition of a Voice channel, Microsoft can now offer an "". Businesses can leverage the built-in AI tools across all channels for intelligent routing, transcriptions, Virtual Agents, sentiment analysis, and similar case recommendations. The available channels that can be incorporated into the Microsoft platform are:
- Chat
- SMS
- Voice
- Microsoft Teams
- Social Media
Dynamics Omnichannel for Customer Service has some capabilities that are uniquely Microsoft. It offers native integration across all Microsoft 365 applications, including , , , , and the rest. Meaning you can easily incorporate other Microsoft applications into your Agent's tools or for management. Microsoft products such as , Azure Chat Bot, or Dynamics customer surveys can be used without large integration efforts.
All data is housed in the using the open source Common Data Model, giving business access to 100's of to third party applications. Additionally, reporting is very robust and able to pull in data from across your Microsoft environment.
Who is this for?
So who should be seriously considering Omnichannel for Customer Service? Any company or organization that has already invested in Microsoft Dynamics, or looking to move in this direction, should certainly give this platform consideration ()