How to transform your contact center with Dynamics 365 and Copilot

A Cognizant guide to delivering exceptional service experiences with generative AI

In today's competitive and fast-changing business landscape, customer service is not just a function, but a strategic differentiator. Customers expect exceptional service across every channel and touchpoint, and they are willing to switch brands or providers if their expectations are not met. AI is revolutionizing the customer experience. Generative AI solutions help businesses save up to 3 billion working hours for customer support agents each year as chatbots and IVR respond to more and more customer requests.*

However, delivering exceptional service is not easy, especially when most contact centers are plagued by fragmentation, complexity, and inefficiency. Many contact centers rely on outdated systems and processes that create silos of data and inconsistent experiences for customers and agents. They also lack the agility and scalability to keep pace with the demands of digital business and the evolving needs of customers. As a result, customers often encounter long wait times, frustrating self-service options, and agents who lack the information and tools to resolve their issues effectively.

How can organizations overcome these challenges and transform their contact centers into a source of competitive advantage? The answer lies in a holistic approach that leverages the power of Microsoft Cloud and generative AI to unify data and experiences across the entire service journey. In this thought leadership piece, we will explore how Cognizant’s Dynamics 365 Contact Center offering, a Copilot-first solution, can help organizations modernize their contact centers and deliver frictionless service for customers and agents.?

Deliver AI-powered self-service

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is a complete solution for contact center modernization that enables frictionless service for customers and agents across voice and digital channels. It is built to work with your existing CRM, or with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and it is powered by Microsoft Copilot, a generative AI engine that connects and synthesizes data, and drives action through recommendation, automation, and insight.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center helps organizations transform the service experience with generative AI, and it covers four key areas of the service journey:

· ? ? ? Self-service: It provides intelligent, contextualized self-service experiences in almost any engagement channel, such as voice, SMS, chat, email, and social media. Customers can get immediate assistance and resolve their own issues faster, improving self-service containment and reducing the burden on live agents.

· ? ? ? Unified routing: It ensures customers connect with the right agent in any channel, every time, through AI-powered unified routing. It assigns requests based on AI analysis of customer sentiment, estimated effort, intent, agent skills, and availability. It also improves resolution rates by routing service requests based on data from your existing CRM.

· ? ? ? Agent-assist: It empowers agents to work smarter and improve outcomes with Copilot's generative AI capabilities embedded into their everyday experience. It helps agents save time and improve outcomes through automatic conversation summaries, suggested responses, and universal knowledge chat. It also gives agents a 360-degree view of each customer, including valuable context from self-service and previous interactions, plus AI conversation tools like sentiment analysis, real-time transcription, and translation.

· ? ? ? Operations: It helps organizations drive efficiency and reduce costs by establishing a single view of truth across disparate data and support channels, plus the tools to optimize contact center operations. It provides real-time dashboards and historical reporting to visualize key metrics, detect emerging trends, and make data-driven decisions. It also measures and optimizes generative AI impact, leverages advanced forecasting and scheduling capabilities, and integrates with existing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions.

How Cognizant helped a leading hospitality provider improve customer service with Dynamics 365 Contact Center

One of the challenges faced by the hospitality industry is to provide consistent and personalized service to customers across multiple channels and touchpoints. Customers expect quick and accurate responses to their inquiries, as well as convenient options for self-service and booking. However, many hospitality providers rely on outdated and fragmented systems that create inefficiencies, errors, and frustration for both customers and agents.

Cognizant partnered with a leading hospitality provider in North America to modernize their contact center with Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a complete solution powered by generative AI that enables frictionless service for customers and a scalable business model built for the future. The provider operates destination resorts in several states, offering hotel, casino, dining, entertainment, and spa services to millions of guests each year.

The provider's existing contact center infrastructure was based on legacy platforms that were costly to maintain, difficult to integrate, and limited in functionality. The provider wanted to transform their customer service operations by leveraging the latest technologies and capabilities from Microsoft, such as omnichannel engagement, intelligent self-service, unified routing, agent assistance, and real-time analytics.

Cognizant helped the provider design and implement a Dynamics 365 Contact Center solution that integrated with their existing CRM, reservation system, and knowledge base. The solution also leveraged Copilot Studio, a low-code tool for creating and managing conversational AI applications, to build customer-facing chatbots and voice bots that provided engaging and contextualized self-service across web, mobile, SMS, and voice channels. The solution also used Copilot's generative AI capabilities to assist agents with automatic conversation summaries, suggested responses, and universal knowledge chat.

By partnering with Cognizant and Microsoft, the provider was able to reimagine their contact center with a Copilot-first solution that brought intelligence, automation, and efficiency to every engagement channel. This boosted customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue, while reducing> costs and improving agent productivity.

Getting started with Cognizant’s Dynamics 365 Contact Center solution

Cognizant excels in transforming contact centers across people, processes, and platforms, leveraging our existing tools and accelerators and our extensive experience in contact center modernization. We can also help you leverage Copilot Studio, a low-code development environment that allows you to easily create and manage your own generative AI applications for your contact center.

Whether your organization is looking to upgrade a legacy Dynamics 365 Customer service environment, migrate an existing environment, or deploy a brand-new Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Cognizant can assist you in creating a Copilot-first Dynamics contact center.

Source:

*https://www.tidio.com/blog/ai-customer-service-statistics/