How to increase the quality of customer service thanks to the Unified Service Desk?
Unified Service Desk is an add-on to Customer Engagement apps that allows you to quickly configure your customer support apps. Solutions based on the Unified Service Desk for Dynamics 365 model allow collecting information from various business systems in one place, thanks to which an employee responsible for customer service has the possibility of full insight into the history of contact and interaction with the customer within a 360 ° view.
This gives the agent immediate access to key information and facilitates effective contact with the client, as well as answering their questions and solving problems. USD is quite simple to set up with Customer Engagement or Dynamics 365 apps.
Who is the Unified Service Desk for?
USD is most often used as a tool for creating applications for call centers, but its functionality is not limited to this only. Features such as telephone integration, session management, and agent scripts have potential that is beyond this type of business.
However, let’s focus on the example of a call center. A person responsible for customer service faces many challenges on a daily basis related to the efficiency and the level of complexity and multithreading of tasks. That’s why the unified 360 ° view of key customer information is especially helpful, allowing to handle inquiries and reported issues faster and more accurately.
Suppose you run a business that sells various types of financial products. Within your organization, you have a team of agents who are responsible for processing customer inquiries and issues reported via the company’s communication channels (telephone, social media, email, website). Using USD, employees can record all details regarding, for example, a phone call in the CRM system and create cases assigned to individual clients. Then, from the USD level, a given case can be assigned to a specific agent who will be responsible for solving it. After a case is being opened, appropriate records related to the customer are automatically created. As a result, USD shortens the process of case management and resolution, which allows agents to more precisely resolve more cases in a shorter time.
How will Unified Service Desk help your company?
Unified Service Desk provides a configurable framework for rapidly building customer service support applications that provide unified access to customer information that is stored in Microsoft Dataverse.
Here are the key benefits of Unified Service Desk:
- Unified access to customer information. USD provides agents with an interface to access all the most important information about customers in Dataverse, enabling them to service faster and more accurately.
- A framework that allows quick configuration. It allows adapting the application to the requirements of the organization, in a short time, while maintaining relatively low costs and commitment of resources. Note that while USD provides high application customization and rule creation with minimal developer involvement, proper configuration of the solution requires experience, knowledge, and technical skills.
- Configurable and manageable from Dataverse. It allows configuring and managing agent applications from the Dataverse interface.
- Session management capabilities. Agents can handle multiple client sessions simultaneously, and the application provides the ability to maintain contextual information in each session.
- Safe access to data. USD uses the Dataverse security model to manage access to entities and configuration data. In addition, it allows you to configure and manage security in USD, by grouping users and assigning them the appropriate permissions.
- Facilitating the work of those responsible for customer service. The organization can provide guidance to its employees using the so-called agent scripts. Thanks to this, employees have full access to the knowledge necessary to perform the task, how to perform it, and knowledge about interactions with the client so far, e.g. from other agents. This translates into facilitating work and building consistency of customer service, and thus also higher customer satisfaction.
- Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) support. Unified Service Desk provides a structure for CTI adapters that can be used in the application responsible for supporting the work of agents responsible for customer service, among others via call forwarding, softphone control and other CTI functions.
How does Unified Service Desk work?
The USD client is an application that can run on a local machine, but the configuration and maintenance tasks are performed on the Dynamics 365 server. However, you cannot perform configuration work on the local machine.
When installing USD, some solutions are added to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps, which create entities in the Dynamics 365 CE instance. The USD configuration is stored in the above entities.
When a user opens USD, all configuration information is automatically cached on the client’s system. It is possible to combine the telephony service system with older versions of the application.
You can also extend and add new functionality to USD with code where you need to implement hosted controls and adapters.
How to start using Unified Service Desk?
First, make sure your Dynamics 365 license includes Unified Service Desk. USD is a relatively new feature and is only available in newer versions of Microsoft’s CRM. In case of an older CRM license, please update it.
USD can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. When the runtime file is running, sample application packages are available are being shipped with USD. You can install one of the sample application packages during the USD installation, which will provide more possibilities when developing applications for customer service agents. With the package deployment tool, you can also connect to CRM. Once installed, all USD components can be found in Dynamics 365 / CRM settings.
Summary
USD is one of the most advanced tools for creating applications for e.g. call center. It requires a limited amount of programming, provides one unified view for agents, allows you to handle all types of queries and significantly translates into shortening the response time, building consistency of customer service, as well as increasing its quality.
Do you want to learn more about Unified Service Desk or implement it in your company?
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