We live in exciting times. We can now apply omnichannel capabilities on top of not only Dynamics Customer Service – but also any other Dynamics or Power Platform application!
The Dynamics 365 Contact Center is a continuation of Microsoft’s CCaaS strategy, allowing capabilities that were previously wedded to Dynamics 365 Customer Service to be used in other applications.
Interestingly for customers who have Dynamics Customer Service Enterprise, the capabilities that would be gained with the previous Omnichannel add-ons have not yet significantly changed. However, with the new licensing skus available – it is valuable to understand what should now be considered should you wish to utilise the Dynamics 365 Contact Center with an existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service solution.
Also, what about customers with other Dynamics applications, e.g Dynamics Sales or Field Service? How could these customers take advantage of the Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
Let’s revisit the scenario detailed in part 1 of this blog series:
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 customer utilises Dynamics 365 Customer Service for case management and Dynamics 365 Sales for opportunity and pipeline management. 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 company also sees an opportunity to proactively contact prospective customers based on the opportunity probability noted in Dynamics 365 Sales. They plan to have 5 sales users make outbound calls and would like to utilise a standardised script for specific parts of the call to ensure compliance. The calls made to customers must still be recorded and available for review as well as the ability to see real time sentiment of the prospect as the call is ongoing.
The main channel used by 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
The volumetrics haven’t changed from the initial example. However, the fact that this customer is currently utilising Dynamics 365 Customer Service for case management as well as Dynamics 365 Sales and would like sellers to proactively make outbound calls will have an impact on licensing.
| Persona | Customer Service Enterprise | Dynamics 365 Sales | Dynamics 365 Customer Service Voice Channel Add-in | Dynamics 365 Customer Service Digital Messaging and Voice Add-in | Dynamics 365 Contact Center Voice |
| Voice Only Agent | Already acquired | 100 | |||
| Voice and Chat Agent | Already acquired | 50 | |||
| Customer Service Representative | Already acquired | ||||
| Sales Respresentatives | Already acquired | 5 | |||
| Supervisors | 5 | ||||
| Admins | 2 | ||||
| Total Count | 107 | 50 | 5 |
You may notice and be confused by the license types : Dynamics 365 Customer Service Voice Channel Add In vs Dynamics 365 Contact Center Voice.
Are they in fact the same? No. They provide the same capabilities which allow access to the native voice channel and even the same default allowance. However, the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice Channel Add In provides a level of discount for customers who already have Customer Service Enterprise – which is a pre requisite for this add on. The Dynamics 365 Contact Center Voice license has no pre requisites and can be purchased to apply voice capabilities to any application.
In my previous blog, we uncovered the default allowances provided with the Contact Center Premium Licence. Similarly, there are capabilities that will be available with the purchase of the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Voice Channel Add-in, Dynamics 365 Customer Service Digital Messaging and Voice Add-in and the Dynamics 365 Contact Center license.
The Dynamics 365 Customer Service Voice Channel Add-in as well Dynamics Contact Center Voice provides the below allowances:
- 6000 Call Intelligence minutes per user per month
- 2000 Copilot Studio IVR minutes per user per month
- 35 gb per user per month for additional file storage
The Dynamics 365 Digital Messaging Add provides the allowance of 50 records which can be routed per tenant per month.
With this knowledge we can identify the actual default allowance that we will be entitled to in our scenario.
| Persona | Customer Service Enterprise | Dynamics 365 Sales | Dynamics 365 Customer Service Voice Channel Add-in | Dynamics 365 Customer Service Digital Messaging and Voice Add-in | Dynamics 365 Contact Center Voice | Total Default Allowance |
| Voice Only Agent | Already acquired | 100 | ||||
| Voice and Chat Agent | Already acquired | 50 | ||||
| Customer Service Representative | Already acquired | |||||
| Sales Respresentatives | Already acquired | 5 | ||||
| Supervisors | 5 | |||||
| Admins | 2 | |||||
| Total Count | 107 | 50 | 5 | |||
| Default Allowance – Call Intelligence | (107 * 6000) 642,000 minutes | (50 * 6000) 300,000 minutes | (5 * 6000) 30,000 minutes | 972,000 minutes | ||
| Default Allowance – IVR Allowance | (107 * 2000) 214,000 minutes | (50 * 2000) 100,000 minutes | (5 * 2000) 10,000 minutes | 324,000 minutes | ||
| Default Allowance – Dataverse File Storage | (107 * 35) 3,745 GB* | (50 * 35) 1750 GB* | (5 * 35) 175 GB GB* | 5670 GB | ||
| Default Allowance – Records Based Routing using Unified Routing | 5,350 records* | 5350 records |
* As this scenario states that the customer is an existing user of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Sales, the default allowance provided by these product should be added. We assume of course that the customer is using Dynamics Customer Service Enterprise and Sales Premium.
In the table, these products are not included in the calculations.
We can now use the volumetrics to identify how much allowance will actually be needed and if we may need to purchase any overages.
The company has advised that there are 3000 emails which are managed each month and approximately 1500 cases which are managed by the data access team monthly. While some of the emails could relate data access, it would be safer to assume otherwise as we can scale up or down as needed.
I was previously asked why would the 3000 emails being sent not be included in the records based requirements. However, personally I veer away from using records based routing unless necessary as invariably this will lead to overages for unified routing. I often find also that it’s actually not necessary. Having the case routed to a queue where an agent can pick and work through as needed is adequate in most cases. I’ve previously written about the benefits of using basic queues which lists these benefits in more detail: https://triciasinclair.com/2023/05/04/customer-service-basic-queues-should-you-use-them/
If we included emails the total monthly records which need to be routed initially will be 4500. As the default allowance for unified routing of records is 2500 per month, we would need additional allowances for records based unified routing. The unified routing add on entitles companies to an additional 10,000 records per tenant per month.
However, without emails included, we can be happy with the allowance of 1500.
With the voice channel being used by both sales and service agents, we need to evaluate the overages which may be required for Call Intelligence and IVR.
The voice calculation will be the same as previously calculated in scenario 1. For completeness, I will include the calculation and steps to calculate below.
As the average file size of a call recording made for a call of 20 minute duration is 10.24 MB. The transcript would have a size of 40 KB.
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 5,670 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.
From the volumetrics provided we know that the company manages on average 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 324,000 minutes. Therefore an overage would not be required.
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 972,000. Overage is not required for call intelligence.
Additional azure based voice factors should be considered. I’ve provided a detailed breakdown of the azure costs included in the voice channel and what should be considered especially as it relates to Microsoft being the carrier vs direct routing.
It should be noted that the customer feedback provided natively via customer voice is not included in any contact center allowance without a Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise license and it will be necessary to acquire Copilot Studio chat add ons to allow native chatbots to be used within the solution.
In this blog, we uncovered two scenarios which could happen with the Dynamics Contact Center:
- where an existing dynamics customer service enterprise solution exists and we need to add channels
- where channels may need to be added to a non dynamics 365 customer service product.
To recap on the licenses which would be required:
If a customer already has Dynamics 365 customer service enterprise, acquiring the
Dynamics 365 Customer Service Voice Channel Add-in or Dynamics 365 Customer Service Digital Messaging and Voice Add-in will enable them to include contact center capabilities at a reduced cost. More information on these licences can be found : https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics-365/products/customer-service/pricing#tabs-pill-bar-ocd30e_tab1
Customers without Dynamics Customer Service Enterprise will be able to acquire the Dynamics 365 Contact Center license which enables all channels or could choose the appropriate related licence to include digital or voice channels only. More information on these licences can be found : https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics-365/products/contact-center/pricing#tabs-pill-bar-oc737b_tab1
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