Dynamics 365 - 2023 Wave-1 - Customer Service part-1

Published Monday, March 27, 2023

We are back again, this time for the 2023 wave-1 update on Microsoft Dynamics 365. This blog will focus on some of the Dynamics 365 - Customer Service update that can be expected in April 2023.

1. Knowledge base updates . I have worked with many clients who are using the built in Microsoft Dynamics 365 knowledge base (KB). Clients service reps are using the knowledge base articles available in the Customer Service app in a call center environments. Many of the Clients also showcase the knowledge base articles on their Customer or Partner Portal.

Now the Customer Service Reps can add the KB articles to their favorite list. This helps them to refer back to the KB articles quickly. This is shown in the pic below.

Mark KB article as favorite

Additionally now you can add external sources as knowledge base. This will help organizations that have the KB stored in for example Sharepoint to upload the KB articles and make it available for the Customer Service agents to do a search. I think this is very useful for Clients who have an existing Knowledge base site.

This is enabled by adding External Search Providers in the Customer Service Admin App > Agent experience > Knowledge section. Refer to the pic below.

External Search Provide options

There are 3 options to add external search providers

1. Cross Organizational Search - This will allow you to select any Dynamics 365 org within the same tenant. Thus you can add the KB articles from another org into your Dynamics 365 org.

2. SharePoint - You can add any SharePoint site URL within the same tenant. If you are maintaining a SharePoint site with information, you can add the URL and the users will be able to do a search for information on the SharePoint site from within Dynamics 365.

3. Microsoft Graph connector - If you have implemented Microsoft Graph you can add the connection ID.

One thing to note is that the Customer Service Rep doing the External Search will also need access to the external data in SharePoint or Dynamics 365 org or the Graph connector.

Below pic shows how the external data will show up when doing a KB search from within a Case record.