Dynamics 365 Customer Service
The customer has already written three times. Your system hasn't kept a record of any of them.As long as requests are sent to a shared inbox, no one knows who has taken on what or by when. The case becomes the unit of work: one owner, one deadline, one history —and a knowledge base that prevents half of the requests before they even arrive.
The shared box always ends the same way
It works very well up to a certain volume. Once that threshold is exceeded, it produces exactly the three situations listed below—in that order, without exception.
No one knows who took the request
Either two people reply to the same customer, or neither does. The message remains marked as unread by one and as read by the other.
The unwritten rule becomes: when in doubt, do nothing.
The promised deadline is nowhere to be found
Your contract states that you will receive a response within twenty-four hours. Nothing verifies this, nothing warns you, nothing tracks it.
You only find out about the violations through the complaint—never before.
The same question, fifty times a month
The answer exists. It's in the minds of two people, in an old email, and maybe in a document that no one can find.
We rewrite it every time, just a little differently.
The Contact Center handles the conversation as it unfolds; Customer Service handles the case it has opened.
This page covers the following topics: the queue, the owner, the due date, the knowledge base, the portal, and the metric. Channels, call routing, and the online agent are covered by Contact Center
How this affects the team handling the response
Six points, written from the perspective of the person who processes requests and the person responsible for reporting on turnaround times.
One request, one owner, one deadline
Every request becomes a tracked item: who is handling it, when it was started, when it’s due, and what has already been responded to. The “I thought you’d taken care of it” disappears.
The commitment is enforced by the system
Due dates are calculated based on your business hours and holidays; they send alerts before they expire, and they are tracked. A single number replaces a printed copy.
The answer is written once
An article that is verified, dated, and well-researched. It serves the agent who responds, the customer who is searching, and the virtual agent who filters. All three draw from the same source.
The portal eliminates the need for a phone call
The customer tracks their request, reviews their history, and finds the answer on their own. The issues that don't reach the team are the least expensive to handle.
Find an expert without having to walk all over the office
A complicated case requires the right person, along with all the background information. The discussion stays tied to the case file instead of getting lost in a private conversation.
We can finally see where the problem lies
Which queue is overflowing, what kind of requests are coming in, what knowledge is missing. We address the root cause rather than adding another person.
The Life Cycle of a Case, and Where the Project Is Won
Out of every 1,000 requests received, here’s how they’re distributed once the portal and knowledge base are in place. Half never reach an agent — and that’s where the return on investment lies.
What we do, and in what order
Five points. The second one is the one everyone pushes back on, and it's the one that determines the outcome.
Queues, Roles, and Time Commitments
What types of requests are there, who processes them, in what order, and within what timeframe— based on your actual working hours and the canton’s holidays, not on a theoretical 24-hour period.
We also describe what happens when the deadline is about to be missed: who is notified, and when.
The knowledge base—without it, nothing works
This is the kind of work everyone puts off because it’s like writing. Yet without reliable articles, neither the portal, nor the virtual agent, nor the agent support system is of any use: all three draw from the same source.
We start with your actual requests from the past six months, select the thirty most frequently asked questions, and have them written and reviewed by those who know the subject.
The Connection
Email and shared mailboxes first—that's where the requests come from— then the customer portal, theERP for orders and invoices, and the contact center if you have one.
The seesaw, and the people
Switching from a shared folder to a folder-based system can feel like being placed under surveillance if it’s explained poorly. We explain it clearly: what’s being tracked is the queue, not the person.
Maintenance
A false knowledge article is worse than no article at all. A thread created for a campaign and never closed skews the metrics. Without review, quality declines within a year.
How long, honestly?
Ranges, based on a clearly stated assumption.
The scenario: a team of eight to fifteen people, three or four categories of requests, data retrieval from shared folders, a simple customer portal, and a manager available half a day per week. Any deviation from these parameters affects the ranges.
Framing
Queues, categories, owners, deadlines, and escalation rules.
Knowledge Base
The first thirty articles, written and approved. The longest—and most useful—period.
Configuration and Portal
Screens, automation systems, customer portal, dashboards.
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Training, commissioning, on-call support, initial measurement.
Nine to fifteen weeks. The second phase is the one that varies the most: it depends entirely on the availability of those who have the answers. A team that writes its articles in three weeks saves a month on the project.
A deadline that no one keeps is a promise made to the customer and no one else.
Measuring it changes behavior before the tool does
Simply displaying one counter per line, visible to the team, shifts priorities as early as the first week—well before any automatic responses kick in.
We measure the line, not the person
That is the key to getting the team to accept the system. A personalized dashboard turns a service tool into a monitoring tool, and adoption plummets.
A deadline that is met is better than a short one
Promising 48 hours and delivering on that consistently is better than promising four hours and failing to meet that promise one out of every three times. We’ll help you scale back your commitments if necessary.
Here are four example tiers. Yours will be different: what matters isn't their value, but that they are recorded, calculated based on your actual hours, and tallied.
What You Need to Know Before Signing
Five points that determine both the budget and the schedule.
The entry-level version isn't everything
The most basic edition covers cases, queues, and deadlines. The features that make the difference—a comprehensive knowledge base, a customer portal, advanced routing, and agent support—are included in the higher-level edition.
Making a mistake is costly either way. We make our decision based on the framing.
The voice isn't included in it
Handling calls within the same console requires the Contact Center add-on or a connected third-party contact center. This is not a product defect, but it is a cost factor that many offers fail to mention.
The customer portal costs more than its license
Setting up a portal means deciding what the customer sees, how they log in, what they can change, and what they are authorized to access. These decisions take more time than the technical implementation.
View the request history
It is essential to review open cases. Reviewing ten years’ worth of closed cases is a project in and of itself, and one of little practical value. We almost always recommend reviewing active cases and archiving the rest, while keeping them accessible for consultation.
Knowledge can't be bought
This is the only part of the project we can’t do for you. We organize, we draft the text with you, we evaluate—but the answers lie with you, and you need to empower the people who have them.
A project where this availability isn't guaranteed takes two more months. This is the point we emphasize most during the scoping phase.
What plugs into it
Customer service is where it all comes together. Here are the three neighbors who have the biggest impact on his daily life.
Contact Center
So that the call and the chat are placed in the same queue as the email, and so that the file is already open when the agent answers the call.
The Contact Center Page UpstreamCopilot Studio
An agent who answers frequently asked questions about your specific items and who handles the matter professionally as soon as they don't know the answer.
The page Copilot Studio The customerCustomer Insights
So that the agent processes a request from a known person, not from an email address— and so that the information the agent learns is updated in the profile.
The Customer Insights PageTell us what you promise your customers
The number of people who respond, the monthly volume, the deadlines you set—and the ones you can’t meet. We’ll come back with a scope, a workload, a timeline, and specific deliverables.
Preparing the proposal is free of charge. Design studies and audits are included in the scope of work. Three agencies: Renens, Sion , and Châtel-Saint-Denis ; a Microsoft partner for sixteen consecutive years.
Count your thirty questions
Before we even talk about tools: take six months’ worth of requests and identify the thirty questions that come up most often. The ranking alone will tell you what can be shifted to a portal and what never will be.
This is a half-day exercise that you can do on your own—and if you bring it to us, we’ll be able to provide you with a much more accurate quote.
Let's talk about it