Customer Service Workspace – Enhanced Case Experience

We can now enable enhanced case forms within the Customer Service Workspace. (Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service app that supports multiple sessions / tabs.) In this blog post I will explain how to enable this new experience and explain some of its features.

Enabling the new experience is simple enough. As an admin you just open your “Customer Service Admin Center”, locate the “Case settings” option. Then select this “Enhanced case experience” option. As you can see below I can enable full form and quick create forms.

At this point I should probably stress that the new experience is specific to the customer service workspace app. At least that is the statement in the Microsoft documentation. (See note shown below.) Meaning, if you are currently using the customer service hub or another app to maintain cases then you may need to transition to the customer service workspace to gain these benefits. Although as I will describe below you may be able to add some (if not all) of the new components into your existing customer service apps / case forms.)

UPDATE: Despite what Microsoft states above! As a test I manually added the new enhanced form directly into my customer service hub. (Enabling the enhanced form did not add it automatically!) As far as I could tell the form worked perfectly well. So just maybe the statement above is not 100% correct!

After I enabled these settings, I didn’t initially see the new form! The reason is that you may need a “tweak” the form order and or which security roles see this new form.

Therefore I opened my form in make.powerapps and used the form settings option. You will be looking for the forms called “Enhanced full case form” and “Enhanced quick case form”. As shown below.

Below you can see that I reviewed which security roles would see the new form. (Actually for my initial test I simply changes the option to “Everyone”!)

Next, I reviewed my form order making the enhanced forms higher than other forms. Meaning if multiple forms were available to the user they should see the new enhanced experience first.

Now I had my enhanced forms available I could start to explore their capabilities ….

Customer Details Pane

The first thing I noticed when opening cases was the new customer details pane. I liked this feature, as in a pane next to my case I could see and even amend the customer details.

I can also see a list of recent cases which again is useful.

.

Rich Text Case Descriptions

This may seem trivial, but I think a feature we have missed for years!

We can now have rich text descriptions on cases. Meaning text can be bold (etc) and we can even paste images straight into descriptions.

Queue item details

It is often important to view and maintain which queue a case is on and assign (or release) the worked by user.

We always have been able to save cases and route them to queues. Or use the Add to queue ribbon button to change the cases queue. (Or use the queue item details button to view the current queue and worked by information.)

That is fine but does involve the user clicking buttons! So it is useful to now have this information available directly on the case form.

Case Associations

The case associations control is a simple way to view and associated knowledge articles, similar cases, merged cases and child cases. What I like about this view is that all of this can be achieved in a small amount of screen space.

Activity Views

The new activities control is simply showing details of due or overdue activities. Yes, we can see this information in the timeline! But often the timeline is cluttered with many interactions, so being able to quickly see a count of how many activities are due / overdue is useful. (Of course, this is dependent on you setting a due date on activities!)

Also, hovering over the count will show the outstanding activities. Clicking on their like will take you to the normal associated view of open activities. From where the agent could review and update the outstanding activities.

Attachments

The attachments tab is another simple control but also one of my favourite enhancements.

As we can easily attach multiple files directly to the case record. There are many customer service scenarios when we many have pictures of an issue or maybe screen shots showing an error etc. So making it easy to attach and download files directly on the case is useful.

Yes we could have attached the files on notes. But those notes are sometimes hard to find in the timeline.

Or we could have enabled SharePoint integration and uploaded the documents into SharePoint. But that is more involved!

So this simple approach is welcomed.

Notes Improvements

Currently if we want to create a note against a case, we need to save the case and then create the note.

But below you can see that we now have a notes control that shows during case creation. Meaning the agents can begin adding notes even before the case is saved.

This sounds like a minor enhancement and maybe it is! But I have had agents complain before that they have to complete all of the case detail before being able to make notes. And that can be “clicky” or time consuming sometimes.

Below you can see that after my case has been created the note I entered shows in the timeline on the case as normal.

Case Quick Create

Below you can see that in addition to the enhanced case main form we have an improved quick create experience. Maybe as you’d expect the quick create form includes things like the rich text entry to description we have already seen on the main form.

As I created my case, I spotted another enhancement I missed earlier! The case status reason control has a colour coded style.

In fact, this concept of a colour coded choice field values can be applied to other fields. On priority for example!

I missed this feature initially as my case main form didn’t seem to have it enabled by default. But in the form designer, on an optionset if I added a component called “optionset wrapper” then this new style became available. (See the next section where I explain how you can leverage these new controls in your own forms.)

Tip:
Don’t forget we can leverage these new controls on other tables. They are just available on cases! For example, activities have a priority field that we could use the “OptionSet Wrapper” control on!

What if you want some of these features in a custom form???

What if you like one or more of the features described here and you’d like to leverage them in your existing case custom forms. That was exactly what I wanted to do with the queue item control!

So as a test I wanted to prove that each of the controls mentions above could be implemented into existing forms.

Below you can see that I have opened my normal case form and added a 1 column section called “Queue Component”.

I have then used the “Get more components” option to locate the one called “Queue Item Control”. Hopefully you can see we have other additional controls like “Notes Control”, “Attachment Control” etc. Meaning other features mentioned above can also be included into your own forms.

Having clicked add, the “queue item control” is now available to me under the “More components” heading.

If I drag the queue component onto my form, I need to complete a few values. Mainly I need to bind the control to a table column. To be honest I wasn’t 100% which column to select for this control! So I picked “Case title” as that was a mandatory field that would always exist.

My queue item control showed as expected! The only change I did was to select the option to hide the label. As otherwise the label “Case Title” would have shown next to my queue item control!

Once I completed my change I saved and published the form. Now you can see that from within the customer service hub using my “standard” (customized) case form I can use the new queue control to change the worked by field directly on the case form.

Conclusion

So, what do I think?

As mentioned, a few times several of these enhancements could be considered minor. But that is the point! As collectively they should result in fewer “clicks” for the agent. Anyone who has ever worked with contact center agents should understand that reducing clicks and making finding information quicker can very quickly lead to tangible improvements in the quality of service provided. And to that end I am very pleased with this set of simple but useful enhancements. Thanks Microsoft.