Earlier this year, Microsoft published their 2022 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between April 2022 and September 2022. Although it's the first release wave of the year, it offers hundreds of the newest features and enhancements across applications like Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, and more.
While the features included in these updates can help power your digital transformation on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, they can also impact your data in unintended ways, whether through new data being captured and stored, changes to data that already exists, or data getting removed by way of legacy deprecations.
To help you better understand the impact of the new features, we’ve reviewed all of the release wave updates (you can save yourself a ~600 page read!) and highlighted the ones that are more likely to impact your data. We also recently hosted a webinar on this topic, which you can watch on-demand.
In this post, we’ll focus on Customer Service features. You can also read up on how your Marketing and Sales data could be affected.
Customer Service improvements
Agent Experiences - Bulk operations
The short story: In an effort to increase efficiency and productivity through quicker decision making, the Case grid in UI has been modernized to perform bulk operations. Improved agent experiences will enable bulk operations to be carried out at an even faster pace.
Our take: There is no mention of whether or not an ‘undo’ option will be made available to users, increasing the propensity for human error. Human error is statistically a leading cause for data corruptions – having an ability to identify changes and revert them becomes crucial for any organization wanting to adopt this feature.
Agent experiences - Email templates
The short story: Another key customer service deployment includes Email Template enrichments, which promotes even more distribution of targeted emails. The feature gives agents an ability to pick and assign open conversations from inbox in order to triage customer issues.
Our take: Subsequent email sending includes repetitive and recurring messages which could present an increased risk of user error as well as bulk corruption due to bulk email options.
Communities
The short story: Communities adds moderated customer forums, speeding up self-service through peer-to-peer support while driving high quality content at scale. Community managers can now create and manage idea forums, moderate content, and close the feedback loop. There is added emphasis on out-of-the-box features for customers to post suggestions in community forums and collaborate to impact future products by upvoting, commenting, sharing, and flagging, etc.
Our take: The ability to merge duplicate ideas submitted from community users can potentially represent data loss. This can happen if a merge removes one of the two records being merged. Additionally, the release notes show no indication of an unmerge option or any details of what happens to the original merged records, implying a real potential for data loss.
Service-level agreements
The short story: Service-level agreements (SLAs) clearly outline the way businesses ensure customers are supported based on corporate policy. After deploying the new feature, users will be able to customize the calculation warning and failure times of SLA KPIs.
Our take: As a result, standard calculating time in existing cases may inherently affect terminations. The release shows no specific detail explaining whether or not existing data will be overwritten or not, which emphasizes the need for the ability to query and restore from backups in the case of errors.
AI-generated convos
The short story: AI-generated convos enhance collaboration by allowing end users to alter auto-produced content. Conversations in embedded Teams are linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience.
Our take: As users learn the new tool, there is no designation showing whether or not end user changes will be audited. To that point, an ability to compare changes to the new data over time will be critical when assessing user adoption and overall trust of the AI-generated data. The capacity to link and unlink chats to cases and conversations within the Contextual collaboration feature presents another change based need for historical snapshot data. There is no specification or details that suggest any underlying data rows for the linking and unlinking, therefore, the act of unlinking could be seen as a data loss event. It allows end users to change what the AI-generated content says. If an end user does this unknowingly it becomes a data control scenario for the admins and harder for end users to trust the AI generated data and the feature overall.
Unified routing simplifies queue diagnostics
The short story: Unified queue-based routing aims to bolster support by creating SLA efficiencies through account-specified criteria like priority and auto-skills matching. “Administrators and supervisors will be able to see the errors and exceptions that occur during the routing process.”
Our take: Enhancements in diagnostics inherently implies that the system creates its own data corruption based on improperly handled routing automation efforts – having an easily accessible snapshot with the ability to restore any failed scenarios is crucial to the validation and overall success of the new feature.
Deploy new features with confidence using Own
As a leading SaaS data protection company, Own helps customers minimize business disruption when enabling new enhancements by proactively protecting Dynamics 365 CE and Power Platform data.
With Own, run daily, scheduled backups of all of your data, and attachments with the click of a button to back up any or all data at any time instantly. If you suspect data did get changed inadvertently, or you made an error, we make it easy to pinpoint additions, deletions, or changes. Then, should you need to restore data, you can go back in time to restore the exact data you need without bringing down production during a full database restore.
Get started with a custom demo to learn more about how Own can protect your mission-critical data during a migration or implementation.
