Support Case Study

A mid-sized bicycle company would like to deliver the highest level of customer service by providing its customers the ability to initiate cases from the web, phone, or email while instituting service-level agreements ensuring each case is resolved appropriately.

The company would like to focus on the following initiatives:

Create system to allow customers to create cases from the web, phone, or email and have those cases automatically assign to the appropriate queue based on the category of the issue
Build a knowledge article repository for common issues and resolutions so customers have the ability to resolve issues on their own
Create standard working hours for support teams
Service-level agreements should be established to track how long cases remain unresolved and alerts should trigger when cases are about to expire
Charts and dashboards should be created to allow proper support agent management

Solution

Case Management System

At the heart of Microsoft's Customer Service module in Dynamics is the ability for users to create and manage cases, queues, workstreams, routing of tasks, and knowledge articles. The company allows its customers to create cases from their website, SMS, and email.

The company's website leverages Microsoft's Power Pages platform for serving up an external support site, which is linked from their main site. They could have used an Azure App Service but opted to use Power Pages so they would have tighter integration between the site and the backing Customer Service tables in Dynamics. Microsoft provides configuration tables for the company to quickly make changes for supporting case creation, knowledge article searching, and sharing comments between the case agent and the customer. This can be done using Azure App Services as well but it requires more development to integrate the Dataverse API.

For email support, the company leverages Microsoft's built-in mailbox capability for queues. As email is sent to the queue, email activities are created within Dynamics. Automatic Record Creation (ARC) rules control how emails convert to cases along with assigning the case to the proper queue via Power Automate Cloud Flows. Each rule is configured to automatically send a reply when the case is created, resolved, and closed.

For SMS support, Azure Communication Services are used to allow customers the ability to text support issues directly to the company. ARC rules are used for SMS activities to create the cases and assign to the appropriate queue.

Build Knowledge Article Repository

In order to reduce the volume of support cases, the company leverages Customer Service's knowledge articles and Power Pages' ability to allow users to search for their content from the company website. As new customers are created within Dynamics, they're assigned content access level permissions to the knowledge articles via Power Automate Cloud Flows.

Call Center agents have access to the same knowledge article content so they can leverage them while helping resolve issues with customers. Agents build and maintain knowledge article content based on the common issues customers are reporting.

Managers review how often knowledge articles are referenced and from there, they compare the cases created against the published articles to see if any content needs to change to better reduce the amount of cases generated.

Establish Standard Working Hours

The company has several teams, all needing their own weekly schedule. Call center employees used for sales and support have a 7-day schedule while the executive team work a 5-day work week. To make these adjustment easily, the company is leveraging Microsoft Customer Service, which includes out-of-the-box support for setting up default calendars, work days, working hours, and holiday schedules.

The support team calendar is configured to have all days of the week enabled. The company configures different working hours for the weekend since those are the busiest days of the week. While the support team works on holidays, their holiday schedule is shortened so the employees can enjoy some time off. Since the company is located in Virginia, their time zone is set to Eastern Time.

Service-level Agreements

Service-level agreements (SLAs) use calendars created by the company to help speed up the process of resolving customer cases. The Customer Service module automatically displays SLA Timers on each case so the agent understands how much time is left before they need to respond to the customer or how much time is left to resolve the case.

SLA items are configured for each case status so Microsoft will know when the warn or fail the case if the SLA timer has expired. Views are created within Dynamics, showing all active cases with their respective SLA status. These statuses are color-coded to make the viewing of case response times easier for managers. Managers also rely on Charts & Dashboards for monitoring the overall health of their support process.

Charts & Dashboards

Microsoft Dynamics provides the ability for the company to create charts and dashboards covering all of the activity performed by their agents to resolve cases. A dashboard is really just a series of charts bundled together in a view to allow users the ability to filter and drill-down into content.

Through dashboards, managers have the ability to show all queues with their unresolved case counts in one section, another section for showing average wait times a customer experiences before their case is closed, and another chart showing all cases resolved in one business day. These metrics help the company perform reviews with their agents, setup incentive plans and commissions for resolving cases quickly, and improving the overall customer satisfaction for the company. Multiple dashboards can be created within the same view so different departments can have their own dashboard.

< Back