Are you looking to connect Dynamics 365 for Customer Service to a chat solution? Website chat to customer service or sales is a typical business use case in the CRM game. Microsoft offers various options within the Power Platform such as Omnichannel, Virtual Agent, bots, etc. However, the additional licensing and setup might be a heavy lift for a small organization.
LiveChat is a popular chat solution. I tested a LiveChat to Dynamics 365 Customer Service connector from Sikora Works. I haven’t spent a ton of time on it or put it through rigorous testing. But it’s pretty easy to use, inexpensive and worked OK.
How you get started
If you’re a Dynamics 365 Customer Service org and use LiveChat, find the connector on the LiveChat marketplace. The published price is $5/agent/month but you can start with a trial. The connector requires some admin-level setup so seek help from an admin or partner if necessary.
Putting it to work
Let’s recreate a typical use case–customer-initiated chat converted to a Customer Service case record. Our imaginary visitor wants help with Dynamics 365 dashboards. Here’s what the visitor sees.
The LiveChat agent sees an icon on the upper right.
Click on that little guy, and up pops a form. This is where we’ll input data about this visitor and case. If the connector recognizes the web visitor’s email address, it will pull up their Dynamics 365 Contact record and other data, such as their existing open service cases. You can update the Contact record from here if needed. If the visitor is new, create a new Contact record. Info the visitor entered in the chat form will pass to the form automatically. That’s a nice little time saver.
Next, create the Customer Service record by inputting a title or case name.
Note in the image below; other active cases also appear in the form. Click “Create Case”. Now you can see the new and existing cases within Dynamics 365.
Here is the new case record in Dynamics 365. You can see the contact information as well as the chat transcript.
A version of this that connected to the Dynamics 365 Sales app would be nice.
For additional help
If you have questions about this or any aspect of Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement, feel free to reach out.
Mark Abes, Vice President, Dyn365Pros, Microsoft Dynamics 365 partner, San Diego, Southern California
