Global Content Lead - Tech & Consulting
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Excellent customer service is proportionate to an organization’s success as it directly impacts customer loyalty, retention, profitability, and business reputation. Why is customer service important? McKinsey research indicates exceptional customer experiences can boost sales revenue by 2 to 7 percent and profitability by 1 to 2 percent. Moreover, companies that invest in experience-led growth strategies see a 5-10% increase in wallet share and 20-30% higher customer satisfaction and engagement.
Since great customer service is vital to an organization’s success, it’s important to follow customer service best practices in this domain. To stay competitive and address your team’s customer service challenges, investing in modern solutions becomes imperative. This includes software with self-service capabilities and solutions that leverage customer service AI. Offering support to customers on their preferred channels and touchpoints, providing self-service options, and empowering customer support agents with the necessary information and expertise to resolve issues swiftly are some of the key strategies for achieving excellent customer service.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service in the era of AI
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can be a great investment in offering excellent service, growing customer lifetime value, and boosting profitability. It equips your service agents with the tools to deliver fast, seamless, personalized experiences across any channel. Dynamics 365 Customer Service also simplifies and automates support agent processes with Copilot (combining customer service and AI together), enabling quicker support experiences for customers.
If you’re wondering whether it’s the right investment, this blog demonstrates the potential financial impact Dynamics 365 Customer Service can have on an organization.
Unveiling the financial impact of Dynamics 365 Customer Service through Total Economic Impact (TEI) study
Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may achieve by Dynamics 365 Customer Service implementation.
In case you are wondering, Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study is a methodology developed to help companies navigate the complexities of procuring technology solutions and to assist technology vendors in objectively evaluating and communicating their solutions’ value propositions.
According to the results of the study, Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered benefits worth $14.70 million over three years to a composite organization. With a total investment of $3.54 million over the same period, the study reported an ROI of 315% and a payback period of less than six months.
The 2024 TEI study projects financial impacts based on a composite organization developed by Forrester through real-world interviews with five businesses using Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The experiences and data from these interviews were aggregated to create a representative composite organization. This hypothetical organization is a $1 billion industry-agnostic entity with multiple global locations, 5,000 employees, and 500 customer support agents. Each agent works an average of six hours a day, spending 75% of that time on support interactions.
Key customer service challenges faced by the organizations
During the interviews for this TEI study, organizations identified several common challenges:
- Outdated customer support and CRM solutions: Many organizations were using a disparate stack of aging customer support and CRM solutions.
- Siloed customer data: Isolated data resulted in suboptimal support experiences.
- Increasing support demands: There was a growing need to expand support capacity.
- Inconsistent customer experience: Customers received an inconsistent, one-size-fits-all experience.
Given these challenges and customer service concerns, the organizations sought a customer service solution that could:
- Seamlessly Integrate with Microsoft tech stack: Integrate smoothly with other Microsoft solutions, including Dynamics 365 modules, Power BI, and Teams.
- Leverage automation and AI: Utilize automation and AI-driven insights to enhance the customer support function, allowing agents to provide better support while minimizing the need for additional agents.
- Establish a knowledgebase: Help create and manage a knowledgebase to support the customer experience further.
The quantifiable benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service equips service agents with the necessary tools to provide fast, seamless, and personalized experiences across all channels. This solution streamlines and automates support processes with Microsoft Copilot, enhancing the speed and quality of customer interactions. The result is improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue.
Forrester’s study identified four key areas of quantifiable impact: enhanced handling times, boosting agent productivity, better first-call resolution and fewer misrouted calls, increased sales pipeline generation leading to higher revenue, and cost savings from retiring other customer service solutions.
Let’s explore each of these areas to understand how Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivers value to customer support organizations:
Reduction in call handling time by 40%
Interviewees identified various inefficiencies in their previous customer service solutions:
- They utilized multiple solutions for different support functions, resulting in siloed customer data and fragmented support information.
- There was limited visibility into customer histories and best practices for service and issue resolution.
- A one-size-fits-all approach to service-case routing was in place, often leading to suboptimal handling of customer inquiries.
- Common support tasks lacked automation, requiring agents to handle routine responsibilities manually.
Upon implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, organizations automated these manual tasks, significantly reducing agents’ time searching for customer information and best practices. This automation led to shorter and more efficient customer interactions, resulting in an average annual savings of 468 hours per agent for the composite organization.
Improvement in first-call resolution by 20% and decrease in misroutes by 15%
With their previous customer support tools, agents in the study’s participant organizations faced challenges such as lacking an easily accessible customer knowledge base containing records of common support issues. Additionally, they struggled to locate specialists efficiently, resulting in frequent misrouting of calls to incorrect personnel.
Implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service enabled automated routing of support cases to appropriate specialists based on the case nature. This enhancement led to a 20% increase in first-call resolution rates and reduced overall interaction times. Moreover, misrouted calls to incorrect specialists decreased by 15%. As a result, agents in the composite organization saved up to 292 hours per year.
Increase in sales pipeline generation for additional profitability
Several interviewees highlighted the positive revenue impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service in their organizations. A CRM product manager from a travel and hospitality company explained that with Dynamics 365 Customer Service automating most agent searches, their agents can allocate more time to revenue-generating interactions. Similarly, a representative from a manufacturing firm noted that Dynamics 365 Customer Service facilitates seamless sharing of customer information and leads between support agents and sales teams using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. This integration enables salespeople to track customer interactions effectively and identify new revenue opportunities.
$978,000 cost savings in comparison to the retired customer service solution(s)
Implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service allowed participant organizations to replace previous customer service solutions, resulting in significant cost savings on license fees, infrastructure, and personnel maintenance hours. For instance, interviewees from a manufacturing organization reported annual savings of nearly $100,000 by decommissioning two redundant third-party customer service solutions due to Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Transform your customer service operations with Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Tackle your customer service challenges head-on with Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Through the notable Dynamics 365 Customer Service features, empower your team to deliver exceptional experiences with a modern, future-ready solution. Dynamics 365 Customer Service, implemented by Confiz, streamlines operations, enhances agent productivity and provides invaluable customer insights. Harness the power of Copilot’s AI-driven guidance to optimize every customer interaction. Contact us today at marketing@confiz.com to unlock the full potential of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and revolutionize your customer service operations.
