Describe the functionality for workload management
Customers needing support can submit help requests in many ways. Historically the most common way was through a phone call. Support agents would create cases as they received calls from customers. Today, support requests can be submitted from almost anywhere. Cases can be created through a chat request on your website, a social channel, or automatically from an IoT device alert or event.
In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, cases can be created in multiple ways based on the needs of the organizations.
Manually: Support agents can create cases manually as they take incoming calls from customers. For example, a support agent might manually convert an incoming phone call activity they receive from a customer into a case.
In many instances, cases might also be manually created directly from a customer record such as accounts and contacts.Automatically: Record creation rules can be defined that create new case records automatically from different types of records in the application. For example, when a new email is received, a rule automatically creates a case record and populate the details of the case based on who sent the email.
Once in the system, it's important to ensure the most appropriate person is working on the case. Organizations handle cases differently, based on their unique circumstances. For example, organizations with small call volumes might not need to route cases because their staff can support all their different scenarios. Larger organizations, however, need to be able to automatically route cases based on different scenarios. For example, if a case is related to a specific product, they might want to route the case to an agent who is skilled in that product.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service uses queues to help with workload management. A queue is a holding container for cases. Organizations typically create multiple queues based on how they want to route cases. For example, you might create a queue that represents each of the different departments that handle cases.
Cases can be routed to queues in multiple ways. Agents can manually place cases into specific queues, or routing rules can be created to help automatically route items to queues. Dynamics 365 Customer Service includes two types of routing:
Basic: Typically used to route records such as cases, leads, emails, etc. to individuals, teams, or queues based on different defined rule criteria. The criteria used with the basic routing feature are typically basic and simple.
Advanced (Unified Routing): Provides more advanced routing capabilities that direct incoming work to the best suited queue and agent. Unified routing provides more advanced routing capabilities.
For example: A basic routing rule set might contain the following rule items:
Gold Route: Route any case with a service level of gold to the gold queue.
Silver Route: Route any case with a service level of silver to the silver queue.
Bronze Route: Route any case with a service level of bronze to the bronze queue.
Organizations can tailor their solution delivery process by manually and automatically creating and routing cases based on their specific needs.
The image shows a common example of using both case and queues in Dynamics 365:
A gold customer opens a new case by calling into support.
The case is routed to a gold queue.
- Records in the gold queue are only visible to members of the gold queue.
An agent can pick one or more specific items to work on.
The item is placed into the agent’s personal queue.
Once the agent resolves the case, it's removed from their personal queue.
- If the agent isn't able to complete work on the specific queue item, they can release the item and it's placed back into the gold queue.
Now that we saw cases can be created and routed, let’s examine Dynamics 365’s knowledge management capabilities.