I have been exposed to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service for over six years. Our typical client is a hundred-billion-dollar company with 10,000 to 20,000 agents who use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a ticketing system. As you can imagine, nothing involving 10,000 people is easy or something that one person can do. At an enterprise level with 10,000-plus agents or a few thousands of agents, implementation takes approximately six months. All of them have private cloud.
It is very good because you can activate this and integrate it across any channel. Because of its integration, it can seamlessly adapt to any kind of channel up front.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is quite easy to use. It is very well integrated with Microsoft Teams and 365 as an overall platform. You can integrate it easily with AI, Microsoft Copilot and Power Automate. The call logs, the history, the data structures, and the visuals are simple and intuitive enough.
The benefit is the purpose that ticketing serves. All these organizations need ticketing as a functionality with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. They need to create tickets or issues that then get tracked through the organization as it flows. Ticketing is used whenever a customer has an issue that you want to take a record of and track through till closure.
The place where you can define the rules is at the back end. That module, where you write the assignment rules or the skill set rules or prioritization rules, has very limited flexibility in these rules engines. More flexible rule-defining back ends that you can customize to your business context more closely than you can right now would be better.
Customization for the information design in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is needed. The foundational information that goes into service management comes as foundational information that you need to program into or load into the service management platform. Right now, you need to change the rules to load them in the format that is required, and this should not be happening.
AI capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service are more focused on the productivity aspects and the backend aspects. It is not personalizing interactions. The CRM part is more where these kinds of front-end customer personalizations take place.
Implementation is not done by one person. The companies and scale that we are talking about are deployments covering thousands of agents and users. When somebody is doing a ticketing system transition at an enterprise level, it is obviously a complex affair involving hundreds of people and tens of teams at various points in the transition or implementation life cycle.
For a 200-member company with 10 people in customer support, it is probably the same as a Freshworks or ServiceNow. It does not matter what you use.
There is a whole team of specialists to plan for it, deploy, change management, technology, business, and everything.
The choice between Microsoft Dynamics or something else depends on the scale at which you are going to use these tools and the customization with which you need to define your workflows. The pricing of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is on par with other enterprise-grade tools. Compared to ServiceNow, Dynamics is priced similarly. Freshworks is on par with Zendesk and slightly less expensive than Dynamics and ServiceNow. Below Freshworks or Zendesk are Zoho and other cheap ticketing tools for small and medium businesses.
There is no challenge specific to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a platform, but any company that is adopting a new ticketing system will have multiple challenges that they face, which is why consultants exist to help them through it. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers standard dashboards that report the number of cases, the number of tickets created, aging analysis, how old each ticket is, how many collaborator hands it has been to, and how many times it has been assigned. You can pull out all of this information or see it easily. It integrates well into Power BI, Microsoft's business intelligence tool, so you can create whatever dashboard you want on Power BI with these data points.
The benefit is the purpose that ticketing serves. If it is a software company, you are paying for their customer support. If it is any kind of company, whether an electronics goods company or a retail company or a consumer goods company that is selling clothes, everybody calls in to get exchanges done, repairs done, or whatever else. It is important to do that work in a structured manner.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is enterprise-grade. If you have 5,000, 10,000, or 20,000 employees who are involved in the business of resolving tickets and providing customer support or who are part of these kinds of processes, that is when Dynamics really shines. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.