The News: Microsoft announced that its Dynamics 365 Contact Center is now generally available. The company’s Copilot-first contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) solution runs on and leverages the stability, reliability, and scalability of the Azure cloud platform. Microsoft also announced the pricing and features of the offering, which is designed to be CRM-agnostic.You can read a blog post about the product on Microsoft’s website.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center Goes GA
Analyst Take: Microsoft announced on July 1 that Dynamics 365 Contact Center, the company’s CRM-agnostic CCaaS solution, is now generally available. According to Microsoft, the solution is fully composable and offers new native capabilities such as generative AI, IVR technology from Nuance, unified routing, real-time reporting, and a host of technologies designed to aid companies in understanding customer sentiment and intent.
The solution is delivered on Microsoft Azure, providing scalability and reliability, and is designed to wrap around an organization’s CRM system, which does not need to be a Dynamics product. The inclusion of features designed to help organizations understand and draw insights from interactions is designed to help create what Microsoft is calling a “360-degree view of customers,” which is essential in creating personalized and relevant experiences.
Key Dynamics 365 Contact Center Features
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center is designed to support self-service, human-assisted service, and greater agent efficiency initiatives. The solution enables customers to engage across voice, SMS, chat, email, and social media apps and leverages pre-integrated copilots for digital channels to drive context-aware, personalized conversations for rich self-service experiences. Incorporating conversational, interactive voice response (IVR) technology from Nuance enables a natural, human-like interaction through these self-service channels.
Realizing that many interactions require – and some customers still prefer – human interactions, the platform incorporates features designed to help customers quickly connect with human agents. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center features intelligent unified routing that steers incoming requests that require a human touch to the agent who is best suited to help while providing agents with the relevant customer and interaction data required to streamline service. AI features, delivered by Copilot, help automate repetitive agent tasks such as conversation summaries, drafting emails, suggested responses, and knowledge searches.
Furthermore, the platform leverages generative AI-based real-time reporting, which allows service leaders to optimize contact center operations across all support channels. This also enables them to match their workforce staffing to demand.
Copilot can also be connected to the organization’s existing data and business applications using more than 1,200 pre-built connectors that eliminate expensive IT integration costs while allowing AI functions to incorporate data held across the organization. Furthermore, Microsoft Teams can be used as a secure, integrated engagement channel to deliver employee helpdesk and human resources functions.
Microsoft’s Pricing Provides Clarity, Transparency
One key challenge facing contact center managers is assessing the true cost of implementing software. Microsoft has announced pricing for Dynamics 365 Contact Center, which is available on a per-seat basis at $110 per user per month. It includes digital and voice channels, as well as additional channel options for purchase.
Microsoft is also offering Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium, a new offer combining Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise with Dynamics 365 Contact Center for customers seeking to consolidate on an integrated, generative AI-powered contact center and CRM service solution that delivers personalized customer journeys. This package is available now for $195 per user/month.
The big question for contact centers is determining whether the recurring, per-user, per-month charges incurred by using CCaaS software will deliver the promised ROI, in terms of increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, among other customer-defined metrics. The integration of Copilot features certainly should help to surface and activate relevant customer data to aid in personalization and ensure that both customers and agents are served timely and relevant information during interactions.
However, the equation isn’t influenced solely by technological solutions; proper agent training and consistent, clear customer policies are also key factors in driving customer satisfaction. Organizations seeking to deploy new contact center solutions need to take a holistic approach to modernization to underpin their technology investments with the right strategies for success.
From an industry perspective, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center is an interesting and solid platform that is clearly banking on the strength of Copilot and the Azure cloud infrastructure to separate itself from other CCaaS solutions. As robustness, reliability, and scalability are key concerns of many buyers, the solution likely will be included on the short list of many CIOs. The open question is whether these features and capabilities will be enough to convince buyers to implement the platform over more established CCaaS vendors’ solutions, which also incorporate generative AI-based features and functions.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
