Dynamics 365 for Customer Service: How to Improve Service with the Cloud

How can Dynamics 365 for customer service improve how your business interacts with your customers so that you’re processing their queries and tickets better than your competitors?

When we talk about digital transformation, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Typically, it’ll be technological solutions.

Whether it’s robotic process automation or low-code applications, the business world is teeming with solutions that every SMB is trying to utilize in one way or another.

Related Post: Guide: What Is Low-Code?

Many companies are making use of these technologies in order to improve their business agility and become more competitive in doing so.

An estimated 95% of businesses report improvements in their processes after implementation. For example, automated tasks for processing data entry can free up employees to focus their energies on tasks that require a human touch

They often achieve this by investing in solutions that target common pain points in organizations, such as data silos and repetitive, manual processes.

But improving business processes is one aspect of transformation.

It may surprise you to learn that, in fact, improving customer experience and satisfaction is the top priority of digital transformation for organizations in North America and Europe for 2020.

What we can conclude from this is that as businesses ramp up their budgets and adoption of business technology, at the forefront of the majority of decision makers’ minds is bettering the experience of their consumers.

How an ERP System Like Dynamics 365 Can Improve Your Customer Service

Businesses can use an enterprise resource planning to get an extensive overview of their operations, principally like finance, HR, marketing, project management and other core functions.

Related Post: ERP in 2020: Defining Enterprise Resource Planning

In recent years, the rise of software-as-a-service apps has contributed to a significant uptick in ERP adoption, especially among SMBs.

ERP systems are more accessible than in previous years, and businesses who have or are thinking of implementing them want to know what actionable steps they can take to use an ERP application to improve a process.

The primary advantage of an ERP system is the ability to leverage all the data that flows into your organization.

The vast quantities of data in today’s world has prompted the term “big data”, which is a field dedicated to analyzing and interpreting these enormous data sets.

More than half of businesses now use big data as a central driver for their business decisions, while 90% of business professionals agree that big data and analytics are key to their organization’s digital initiatives

The Key Data an ERP Platform Can Give You

So, you’ve come into work, logged in and booted up your ERP system.

You’ve noticed that there’s a significant increase in cases from customers concerning a particular topic.

New Cases

Take a look at the following image to get an understanding of what the New Cases dashboard looks like.

It gives you an overview of what your customers are asking in their queries, the change in volume for each topic and the resolution rate for each one.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is used to identify popular topics and emerging topics and display them based on how many there are of each.

You’ll also be shown breakdowns of cases by priority, channel (email, phone, social media, web) and timing (showing time of day trends for cases).

Resolutions

The Resolutions dashboard shows you how well your cases are being resolved.

Once again, AI is used to give you an understanding of which topics are causing the biggest positive or negative impacts on resolution time.

It does this by intelligently assessing the language of the customer queries and grouping them into relevant topics.

Customer Satisfaction

Finally, we have the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) dashboard, which gives you an overview of CSAT and uses AI to group together the topics that are having the biggest influencers on your CSAT scores.

An Example of Dynamics 365 for Customer Service

With all that being said, let’s take a look at a situation where an ERP platform can be used to inform and help make a positive decision based on data.

In this instance, we’re talking about Dynamics 365 because that’s the ERP solution we offer to our clients, so bear that in mind.

Let’s look at how you can use Dynamics 365 to improve your customer service.

The Scenario

You’ve noticed that a particular set of related questions, grouped by the ERP application’s AI into groups, is having a significant effect on the performance of your customer service.

For example, there’s been a large uptick in queries regarding your business’ returns policy.

On closer inspection, you discover that customers are frequently asking how long much time they have left to return their products.

The Problem

The issue here is that these types of queries are taking a disproportionate amount of time to solve, considering the simplicity of the question.

This will be reflected in the analytical data you have at your disposal, which will allow you to pinpoint the bottlenecks in your process and gain a clear understanding of what needs to be addressed.

Now, through analysis, you have actionable data from which you can make meaningful change.

The Solution

Now that you have the information you need; you can move on to solving the problem.

In cases like this which require a relatively straightforward answer, you can utilize a bot, Virtual Agent, to pinpoint the nature of certain types of queries.

These bots can be trained to recognize “Trigger Phrases”—questions that frequently occur in queries—and then, once affirmed, interact with the customer in the most appropriate fashion.

Even if you choose not to use a bot, you still have extremely useful data that you can use to you and your employees’ benefit.

You can assess the data and answer time-consuming queries with an FAQ that is written with the data in mind.

Related Infographic: How Not Implementing an ERP Is Costing Your Business

Advantages of Using an ERP Solution for Customer Service

Using analytics to solve these kinds of everyday issues is what makes digital transformation so appealing to modern business.

Consider also that there are several knock-on effects that arise from this kind of solution.

Not only are you addressing a concern that’s affecting your customer service processes, you’re getting things in return, like:

• 24/7 customer service (if a bot is utilized)
• Employees who are freed up to do jobs which are more in need of a human touch
• Improved moral from not having to complete menial and time-consuming tasks
• Reduced costs from having to pay somebody to perform a relatively simple task

And, moreover, there’s an added incentive for you to see what other work processes you can improve after finding success with this.

Final Word

Executives and decision makers can sometimes find themselves turned off by the complexity and often granular nature of digital transformation.

But, as we’ve seen today, there are many simple issues within a modern business that can be quite easily addressed and fixed through the use of technology.

Customer service is just one area of business where you can use an ERP solution to gather actionable data and make the necessary changes to your processes.

ERP systems are an essential part of a modern business’ organizational structure and they help SMBs remain competitive. By leveraging the data insights and analytics capabilities provided by an ERP platform, companies can reduce costs, improve efficiency and achieve better customer satisfaction.

To learn more about what an ERP solution can do for you, take a look at our offering and click here.