Licensing a Contact Center deal to some can be a special place in hell. For some it’s the equivalent of creating a work of art in the manner of Edvard Munch.
If you’re familiar with the Digital Contact Center Platform or DCCP – you might want to keep reading as there are changes in how the Dynamics 365 Contact Center is licensed.
Lets start by working through the top 3 scenarios or solution types:
Scenario 1: Customer Service Premium with all Native Channels
A customer has a European Contact Center with the below personas:
- 100 agents who focus entirely on voice conversations only
- 50 agents who focus on both voice and chat channels
- 50 customer service representatives who manage cases assigned to them but have no interaction with customers.
- 5 of the customer service representatives are also responsible for managing data access requests. Due to the short SLAs associated to these requests, the company would like requests to automatically be assigned to an agent and would like the agent to be notified.
- 5 supervisors
- 2 admins who are a part of the company’s general IT team
The company does not outsource support to a third party. this done via their IT department.
The company would like to utilise all native channels which include using Microsoft as a carrier for their voice channel. The channels they would like to implement are voice, chat and email initially.
They currently use another CCaaS and utilise an on premise IVR solution that provides handover capabilities. The company sees an opportunity to upgrade their IVR, reduce their technology stack and provide a more conversational led IVR by using Copilot Studio. They will also utilise copilot studio to build chat bots that will help deflect conversations further from their agents.
The main channel used by their customers at the moment is the Telephony channel. They have provided the below volumetrics for their existing channels:
- Incoming Voice: 15,000 calls per month
- Outgoing Voice : 8000 calls per month
- Average number of Chat conversations per month: 5,000 chats per month
- Average number of Emails per month: 3,000
- Average number of cases per month: 26000
- Average number of the cases per month which are classified as data access cases: 1500
- Average Handling Time for Voice Conversations: 12 mins
- Average Handling Time for Chat Conversations:
- Average Handling Time for IVR: 5 mins
- Average Duration of Voice Conversation: 10 mins
- Average number of calls resolved by IVR: 3000
Licenses Required and Calculations
It would be recommended to evaluate the licenses needed per persona. Licences also provide default entitlements which need to be considered later.
| Persona | Customer Service Enterprise | Customer Service Premium |
| Voice Only Agent | 100 | |
| Voice and Chat Agent | 50 | |
| Customer Service Representative | 50 | |
| Supervisors | 5 | |
| Admin | 2 | |
| Total Count | 50 | 157 |
Default Allowances
The below default allowances are available with the purchase of a Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium License.
- unified routing: 50 records per user per month.
- 2000 customer voice responses per tenant per month
- A default allowance of 10 go for dataverse database storage
- 250 Mb per user per month for additional dataverse database storage
- Default allowance of 20 gb for a dataverse file storage
- 35 gb per user per month for additional file storage
- 6000 Call Intelligence minutes per user per month
- 2000 Copilot Studio IVR minutes per user per month
For users with Customer Service Enterprise, the default allowances below apply:
- unified routing: 50 records per user per month.
- 2000 customer voice responses per tenant per month
- A default allowance of 10 go for dataverse database storage
- 250 Mb per user per month for additional dataverse database storage
- Default allowance of 20 gb for a dataverse file storage
- 2 gb per user per month for additional file storage
When factoring in the agent counts above we are able to identify the default allowance we will have available before we then calculate the allowances we will need.
| Persona | Customer Service Enterprise | Customer Service Premium | |
| Voice Only Agent | 100 | ||
| Voice and Chat Agent | 50 | ||
| Customer Service Representative | 50 | ||
| Supervisors | 5 | ||
| Admin | 2 | ||
| Total Count | 50 | 157 | |
| Default Allowance : Unified Routing | 2500 | 7850 | 10350 |
| Default Allowance: Customer Voice Response | 2000 | ||
| Default Allowance: Database Storage | 12500 MB (12GB) | 39250 MB (38 GB) | 60 GB (10 + 12 + 38) |
| Default Allowance: File Storage | 120 GB (20 + (50 *2)) | 5515 GB (20 + (157 * 35)) | 5635 GB |
| Default Allowance : Call Intelligence | 0 | 942,000 mins | 942,000 mins |
| Default Allowance: Copilot Studio IVR | 0 | 314,000 mins | 314,000 mins |
Volume Estimate
When we review the volumetrics provided, we will be able to review what the immediate needs are. I say immediate as we should consider that these figures will fluctuate. Not only that, but the intent of the company will be to improve these figures – this will of course be one of the key drivers for implementing a new contact center. Therefore it’s likely that in some areas, the cost will be reduced in future years.
Unified Routing
If configuring records or case or email based routing, consider the below:
- is unified routing really needed?
- should records be automatically routed to an agent? Or will they be able to select their work item from a queue.
- should agents receive visual notifications to inform them of items assigned to them?
- should agents be able to choose their work items?
In this case, the company has a subset of agents which require records to be routed to them and would like them to be notified. The cases rely on their skill set to be resolved in a timely fashion.
The company has advised that there are approximately 1500 cases which are managed by this team monthly. The default allowance for unified routing of records is 2500 per month. Therefore in this instance, there is no need to purchase unified routing add ons.
Voice Channel
As the company is implementing the voice channel, we need to identify if additional storage is required as call recordings are in fact stored in dataverse. It should be noted though, not all companies will choose to enable call recording or transcription. For legal reasons, some may choose not to. There are other implications to this decision that we can discuss in a future blog post.
The average file size of a call recording made for a call of 20 minute duration is 10240 KB. The transcript would have a size of 40 KB. More information related to this can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-service/administer/voice-channel-configure-transcripts
With 15,000 incoming calls and 8000 outgoing calls as an average per month where the average call duration is 10 minutes for calls which include agents and 5 minutes for IVR resolved conversations, we can calculate that the file storage for call recordings would be approximately 66 GB and file storage for transcripts would be approximately 1 GB. This includes IVR conversations. Therefore the total storage required for calls in Year 1 would be 105GB. The default file storage allowance for the company is 5635 GB. Therefore overage is not required.
Showing the calculation:
With a 20 minute call using 10240 kb of storage, we can ascertain that it would require 512kb per minute of a call.
The total calls handed by an agent with IVR: 15000 – 3000 = 12000
The total calls handed by an IVR: 3000
The total outbound calls :8000
The total minutes for calls handled by an agent: 12000 * 10 = 120000
The total minutes for calls handled by IVR: 3000 * 5 = 15000
The total minutes for outbound calls : 8000 * 10 = 80000
The total minutes : 120000 + 15000 + 80000= 215000
The total storage required for call recording is 215000 * 512 = 110,080,000 kb
Therefore 104 gb
As we would require 4kb per minute for transcription storage:
215000 * 4 = 860000 KB
Therefore 1 GB.
The total storage required for call recording and transcription would be 105 GB.
As the main aim of many companies is to deflect conversations from agents – which can be done with well designed IVRs and bots which provide automation for many of the main requests from customers. This will have an impact on the cost for future years and should also be considered.
The potential additional cost of call intelligence will need to be analysed. Call intelligence covers the ai capabilities provided with native voice. This includes speech to text, sentiment analysis as well as voice based metrics such as talk to listen ratio and talking speed which is used often by supervisors to assess the quality and potential training needs of agents.
To calculate the number of call intelligence minutes that will be needed, we need to look at the average duration of a phone conversation without any IVR included and multiply by the number of voice conversations typically contained in the month. Therefore the total number of call intelligence minutes required would be 230,000. As the default minutes provided is 942,000. Overage is not required for call intelligence.
Copilot Studio
The evaluation of license costs so far is quite consistent with the licences that would be needed for the Digital Contact Center Platform. However, one of the main changes in licensing from the Digital Contact Center Platform and Microsoft Dynamics Contact Center, is there is no entitlement to create chatbots or use via Copilot Studio. There is however, entitlements to create and utilise Copilot Studio for IVR or voice bot conversations.
Therefore, in our example detailed above, it would be necessary to factor in the costs for copilot studio for chat conversations and identify if overage is required for IVR conversations.
IVR via Copilot Studio
As we know from the volumetrics provided we have 15000 calls which we assume will all go via IVR and may or may not be handed to an agent. We also know that the IVR call duration is approximately 5 minutes on average. Therefore the number of minutes required for IVR is 75000. Our default allowance allows voice bot minutes of 314000 minutes. Therefore an overage would not be required.
Chatbot via Copilot Studio
For our chat bot, we would need to purchase a block of messages which allow 25000 messages per block. A message is defined as any action required by the bot. This could be automation or a response or welcome to a customer. Therefore, this estimate entirely depends on our design.
We have now collated the licenses we would require. To recap, would require
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise , Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium and the Copilot Studio messages add on. This will more than adequately allow us to run the contact center and grow into future years.
In part 2, we’ll continue this scenario to uncover the azure consumption costs that should be factored in this scenario.
Happy Licensing!
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