Satisfied customers in after sales
With Dynamics 365, you increase the efficiency and quality of customer service and automate many tasks in the service process. In this article, we focus on the functionalities and processes that Microsoft provides as standard in the Service Hub.
Manage service contracts digitally
In industry, and predominantly in mechanical and plant engineering, it is common for a service contract to be concluded directly when the machine is purchased. These contracts specify the warranty services, maintenance intervals and conditions. These contracts and the associated information can be stored, managed and viewed at any time within Dynamics 365. For example, the account manager receives an automatic notification when the contract expires or when maintenance is due and the schedulers need to make a new appointment.
If certain hours or number of tickets are also regulated within the contract, which fall under the warranty or are included annually in the service contract, these can also be documented and recorded. These will then be debited automatically. This gives everyone in the system an overview of whether the customer is still drawing services from the contract or whether additional hours are already involved.
The functions in contract management:
- Assignment of multiple contracts to the customer
- Deposit of contract contingents
- Restrictions on ticket creation when quota is exhausted
- Allocation of contingent to different ticket sources
- Linking tickets to contracts
- Automated contract lifecycle management
- Working with contract templates
Automate tickets
Every request from the customer that contains a problem is recorded and handled as a ticket. Employees can automatically enter tickets from mails or chat notifications or manually create them from phone calls. Depending on how a service organization is structured, tickets can be assigned automatically. This is useful if a service employee is only concerned with a certain product group or area and the ticket is therefore assigned directly to him. If desired, you can also work with a pool, in which each employee assigns the tickets to himself.
Automatic assignment also works in terms of contracts, e.g. if a company has several contracts and they are divided according to different categories. The tickets are automatically assigned to the contract, which is assigned to the respective category. In this way, the hours or number of tickets are debited directly from the correct contract and do not have to be entered manually. Within the ticket mask, the agent also has direct access to the most relevant knowledge management articles. The process searches for keywords that occur in the ticket as well as in the knowledge base and then automatically suggests the most applicable articles.
Useful functions in the tickets:
- Manual and automated creation of the ticket
- Link with contracts
- Assigning a ticket based on predefined criteria
- Automated link with a contract
- Assigning a product to the ticket
- Access to the most relevant knowledge management articles
- Use of templates for answering questions
Capture knowledge centrally
Knowledge management is used to ensure that tickets can be processed more quickly, knowledge is stored in a central location and can be shared externally. Thus, users can search the knowledge base themselves without the case having to result directly in a ticket . It is also possible to create knowledge articles directly from tickets. This is especially helpful for frequently recurring or infrequent problems. To ensure that all entries look the same and have the same structure, employees can work with templates.
As soon as a new article is created, the stored publication process starts. In the publication process, it can be decided who will review and approve the article and in which languages the article must be available before it is published. It is also possible to determine whether an item is a major version (v1.0) or minor version (v.1.1). An article can be entered and approved in different languages with the possibility to involve different people in the publication process depending on the language. So that an article can be found quickly, or the suggestion function can be used correctly on the ticket, these can be keyworded and divided into different categories. Products or product groups can be assigned directly to an article if it only applies to one type of product and should therefore not appear as a suggestion for all tickets.
Knowledge management and its useful functions:
- Automated creation of articles from tickets
- Deposit of templates
- Procedure according to the publication process
- Working with different versions
- Translations in different languages
- Categorization thanks to keywording
- The Dynamics 365 service process
The Dynamics 365 service process
Service should run as smoothly as possible in every company, because in many cases the customer only contacts the service department when there is a problem or a complaint. If not everything works as desired, the customer relationship can quickly suffer. Dynamics 365 therefore offers a wide range of functions in its standard scope, so that even companies without strongly defined processes can maintain a regulated workflow. However, if a company is already working with a process, it can also be implemented or optimized with Microsoft’s standard process.
For many companies, the service process ends after the ticket is resolved. However, the documentation of the case is an important point, which increases the efficiency of the employees in future events. Therefore, it is important to analyze Microsoft’s standard process and compare it with your own process. This is because this process is based on Microsoft’s many years of experience with a wide variety of companies in a wide variety of industries.
