Need to ensure your agents have the correct information to reference about your products and services at an easy quick glance, without them having to go searching in different places for it? In Dynamics 365, we have the concept of knowledge tools, with knowledge articles being one of the stems and repositories of knowledge data in Dynamics. When using this toolset, various other features in Dynamics 365 enable the agent, and create an experience which makes answering a customers queries easier than ever.
Today, with the new capabilities in Microsoft products, specifically Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot further enables agents to spend less time searching for and through that article that has the answer they’re looking for, and rather allows them to have a natural language-based conversation with an AI bot which will provide them with the answers they need, and even assist them in writing back to the customer! 🤖
Introduction
So, in this post, I’ll show you how to start using knowledge tools in Dynamics 365 Customer Service & Omnichannel! We’ll start with the simple element of creating knowledge articles and then utilising them in an email scenario in Omnichannel, and then in future posts we’ll look at other features in more detail! 🚀
Creating knowledge articles
So, to create knowledge articles in Dynamics 365, we’ll need to head over to the Customer Service Hub app in our Dynamics 365 environment. Start by selecting knowledge articles in the left-hand navigation.
Content building
From here select ‘New’ or ‘New from template’ if you’ve already got templates configured to build knowledge articles out from.
Now we can give the knowledge article a title and then start to populate it’s content. We can do lots here, either using the designer to build out rich text content with formatting we’d like to use, or we can get even more custom and write HTML which we can drop in the HTML tab.
If you’d like to use CSS styling across your HTML file, without having to use inline tag styling you can add it within head tags in the HTML document at the top.
Here’s an example I’ve built out using the HTML option. I’ve just taken a page of content from my swim club’s website and dropped it into Customer Service and there we are!
Adding tags
The next thing we need to do is tag our knowledge article with relevant keywords and give it a description. Here we can use the power of AI to adopt suggested keywords and descriptions based on the article title and content.
Select the view button to continue and then choose the tags and adopt the description provided if it fits.
File attachments
The next thing we’re able to do is attach files to the knowledge article if there are supporting documents that are more lengthy but that we still wish to include.
Once documents are attached they will appear in Dynamics as below. These will also appear on the knowledge article when it is being viewed from the agent experience.
Reviewing articles
The next thing we can do is move the article to a review where someone with the appropriate rights in Dynamics 365 will be able to come to the same record and approve and publish the article. To do this the review stage of the business process flow needs to be completed, then making it possible to move to the publish stage where we can fill out the final things needed to publish the article.
Product associations
Before publishing the article, a reviewer is able to do one last thing which includes setting product associations for the article. Here we’re saying this article is about product A for example. To do this select the more icon on the ribbon of the knowledge article, and select product.
Publish
Finally we can publish the article which is done at the final step of the business process flow.
Agent experience
Now let’s take a very quick look a the non-AI agent experience in Customer Service. In a future post we’ll look at maximising the agent experience with Copilot and other features. For now, we’ll keep things simple. I’m going to send an email into a mailbox I have configured in Omnichannel and we’ll look at what tools agents get to help answer their queries in Customer Service.
So here it looks like I’ve got an email requesting detail about how someone should make payment for their monthly fees. If we take a look at Smart assist, straight away it has suggested an article which will support me in answering this query!
Then when selecting the article I see the full HTML formatted page as a new tab in my current session in the Customer Service workspace app.
I also get any attachments in the article to select, download and open, and I can then select the blue icon to associate the article with the case in case in need to come back to this, or I can email the contents of the article too!
Did you like this content? 💖
Did you like this content? Check out some of the other posts on my blog, and if you like those too, be sure to subscribe to get my posts directly in your inbox for free!