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Dynamics 365 Community / Blogs / Dynamics 365 FastTrack Blog / Dynamics 365 Customer Servi...

Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Channel Based Agent Presence @ Gardens Alive!

Joe Thomas Profile Picture Joe Thomas
Authors: Meenu Laul, Joseph Thomas

Summary

Our Dynamics 365 Customer Service customer, Gardens Alive! wanted to be able to allow their Agents to directly control which records were routed to them, via Unified Routing. In the normal course of business, third party voice would be routing calls to the Agent, based on their Presence and Unified routing would be routing Cases and Chats to Agent based on their capacity. For example, an Agent may be on a live time-consuming call with a customer, they are fine having Cases routed to them, but they don’t want to have any live chats routed to them while they are on this call. Therefore, they wanted the Agent to be able to select ‘Chat’, ‘Email’, or both and have that selection reflect, in real-time, reflecting Assignment rulesets setup in Unified Routing. Working directly with the Call Center Manager, Taswan Mims, Contact Center Coordinator, Karla Lawson, Jeremy Close, the IT Project Leader, Rajiv Kaushik, the Dynamics SA, and under the leadership of Laura Schuman, VP and CFO, we determined their requirements would be met with this solution.

Analysis

The mechanism to achieve moving Agents in and out of Advanced Queues is to remove their user record from a Queue. There are a few challenges with this. First, because of on-going operational factors within Dynamics 365 Customer Service, any changes to Unified Routing can take up to 15 minutes to be reflected. More importantly, most customers have dozens of Queues setup and having to rely on a customer service manager to move Agents in and out of queues all day is not an efficient way to operate a call center.

Solution

The recently published Microsoft FastTrack component library solution Channel Based Presence met their requirements nicely. The solution avoids any programmatic interaction between the Agents selection of what records they want to accept and the update to their user record. Deploying the solution for ‘Channel Based Presence’, provides the Agents with intuitive and direct access to a modified version of their user record. A custom button added to the ribbon, next to the Agents Presence indicator, pops out the modified user record that shows just the three Boolean options.
The solution includes a custom button (see below) that sits next to the Presence indicator.
Once an agent hits this button, they have direct access to modify their selections (see below)
 
 
As soon as the Agent makes their selections and hits ‘Save & Close’, immediately, the next record that hits that Assignment Rule will route according to the Agents sections.
In the Customer Service admin center there is only a simple modification that needs to occur to the Assignment rulesets within each Queue. A simple condition is added, to other conditions that may be in place, to check whether our custom Boolean field ‘Chat’ on the user record equals ‘Opt-in’ (see below).
 
 
Working with Rajiv Kaushik at Gardens Alive! the deployment of this solution was able to be completed quickly into their development environment. There they were able to make the necessary modifications to the Assignment rulesets for testing, add those changes to the solution and moved into production shortly thereafter.
This solution is available on the Microsoft FastTrack component library solution center under Channel Based Presence. There are Managed and Unmanaged versions as well as versions that do not contain the customize ribbon shown above in case your organization has already customized your ribbon. This and many other resources for your implementation are available here Dynamics 365 Guidance. More specifically, Microsoft has published a sample library to aid you in your implementation and setup here Dynamics 365 Customer Service implementation optimization resources. There is a wealth of details available born out of real customer deployments designed to significantly reduce your time to value.
Gardens Alive! is primarily a multi-title multi-channel retailer who specializes in horticultural & non horticulture goods.  They are one of the largest distributors of gardening products serving the United States and Canada. Gardens Alive! grows and ships millions of plants, seeds, trees & bulbs on an annual basis, their brands offering exclusive and specialty plant varieties grown both directly as well as sourced through their corporate partners around the globe. 
 

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