Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

As a support organization, you want to ensure that you're meeting the needs of your customers and fulfilling the promises that you have made to them. One way that organizations accomplish this is by providing support agreements to their customers. A support agreement typically entitles a customer to a specified amount of support over a specified period. For example, a customer might be entitled to 10 hours of phone support over a 6-month period, or they may be able to open 15 cases related to a specific product. Another way that organizations can measure success is through response and resolution times. Based on factors such as who is reporting the issue or the issue type, they may promise different timeframes related to the item. For example, a customer who has a support agreement with your organizations might be promised a faster response time than someone who doesn't have a support contract. Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps organizations manage, track, and enforce these promises by providing two mechanisms for managing the level of service that a customer is entitled to. Service Level Agreements: Tracks and defines what should happen when a case is opened, such as initial response time by a support engineer, or how long it took to resolve the case. Entitlements: Agreements that define the level and type of support to which a customer is entitled. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to meet desired service levels when providing support to customers. Dynamics 365 SLAs allow you to track common KPIs such as First Response and Resolution Time for every case that is submitted. The Image below demonstrates what a typical SLA might look like for different types of customers based on their promised level of service. Example of a SLA. Entitlements define specific support details that were promised to a customer. They include specified coverage dates and specified number of cases, or length of time. For example, during the period in which an entitlement is active, a customer might be entitled to place 35 phone calls to a help desk team. Another customer may be entitled to a total of 100 hours of technical support over multiple channels of communication. Dynamics 365 entitlements can help to support these types of instances, and may be used to manage and enforce various scenarios including: Management of warranty contracts Service specific contracts Incident based support contracts Time based support contracts When you combine all the elements that we've examined, you have a complete end-to-end case management solution. Let’s examine all these pieces working together. Example of the case lifecycle in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Here we're a typical customer service support scenario where a customer has a support agreement with a service center. Here, we have a gold customer with a support contract (referred to as an entitlement). They're entitled to open 15 cases over a one-year period. Cases can be opened from multiple channels. Here, the customer sent an email. After the email is received, a record creation rule examines the email, and a case is automatically created. After the case is created, a routing rule routes it to the Gold queue. A service level agreement adds a first response by KPI that indicates the customer should be contacted within 15 minutes. An agent from the Gold queue picks the case to work on. A pre-configured case resolution process is applied to the case. They'll help guide the agent through the resolution process. Organizations can define different case resolution processes based on their needs. During the researching stage, the agent searches for a knowledge article that contains a potential resolution. They email the article to the customer from the case record. After the customer confirms this solves their issue, the case is resolved in Dynamics 365. After the case is resolved, the customer’s entitlement record is updated to indicate that 14 cases remain on the customer's entitlement. Because the case started as a phone call, the Phone to Case business process flow, which consists of three stages (Identify, Research, and Resolve) is triggered. Identify: The Agent Identifies the Issue and relevant information. They call back Nancy who reported the issue, and identify information such as the customer, contact, and issue. A phone call activity is created that notes what was done and how long (15 minutes) they were on the phone with Nancy. The case is advanced to the next stage. Research: The agent researches and attempts to find a resolution. The agent spends 30 minutes researching and working on Nancy’s issue. They find a resolution to the problem using a knowledge article found in the knowledge base. The article is emailed to Nancy and linked to the case as the resolution. A task is created that describes what was done and how long it took (30 minutes total). Resolve: The agent closes the case as resolved. They call Nancy to ensure the proposed resolution fixed the issue. The spend 15 minutes on the phone with her. The case is closed as resolved. The total time for all activities rolled up to reflect how much time was spent on the issue (1 hour total). Click-through demo: Create and manage cases in Dynamics 365 Customer Service In this click-through demonstration, you will be guided through the typical process of creating and managing a case record in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This process is very common and occurs anytime an issue is reported by a customer and needs to be resolved. Create and manage cases in Dynamics 365 Customer Service As you saw in the demonstration, it is easy to create and manage the resolution of a case record using Dynamics 365 Customer service. As a customer service representative, you can manually create case records as you take phone calls from customers or the application can create case records automatically. Once a case is created, you can easily apply the business process flow to ensure you are performing all the steps needed to complete the case. Supporting activities such as phone calls and tasks can be added to provide additional details about what was done, as well as track the amount of time spent on the item.