Product Updates - General Availability of Messaging & Conversational AI Features
We are pleased to announce that the new messaging platform and conversational AI features are now generally available to our customers! Here are some highlights of what is new and available now:
Messaging
Our new messaging platform comprises a number of different parts that work together, including a new widget for messaging agents, a new engagement type for web messaging, support for social and other messaging channels, and new tools for managers/supervisors.
New messaging agent widget
For messaging agents, there is a new agent widget for Dynamics 365 that enables agents to handle conversations over asynchronous messaging channels. The new widget maintains many of the familiar features of the chat widget, including shortcuts, cobrowse, voice and video escalation, and case/contact linking in Dynamics. The new widget also supports multiple browser tab sessions.
Read the article "The New Messaging Widget" to learn about the new features.
New messaging channels
Messaging agents can handle conversations that originate from any of the supported messaging channels, including Web, SMS, social networks, business messengers, and mobile.
Read the article "Creating Web Engagements" to learn how to create a web messaging engagement that you can route to your new messaging agents.
The article "Setting up Social Network connectors for Messaging" will show you how to start setting up social channels.
New manager/supervisor tools
To help messaging agent managers and supervisors, there are new tools dedicated to monitoring and managing messaging queues. These include an "all conversations" view, live metrics showing agent and bot activity, and the ability for managers to join in progress conversations.
Read the article "The New Manager Tools" to learn more.
Mobile SDK support for messaging
The LiveAssist for Dynamics 365 Android and iOS SDKs now include support for messaging engagements.
Conversational AI
Conversation Builder Bots
The Conversation Builder allows you to quickly and easily build intelligent bots that can respond to customers in any messaging channel and escalate to human agents if desired. The following articles will help get you started:
- What is Conversation Builder?
- Deploying a Bot
- Create a Routing Bot
- Creating a Post Conversation Survey Bot
- Creating a Pre-Chat Survey Bot
Intent Manager
The Intent Manager helps you to build real-time consumer intent detection that can be used by conversation builder bots. A library of predefined intents for various industry verticals is provided to help you get started.
See the article "What are Intents?" to learn more.
Known Limitations
Our team is continuously working to continuously improve our new Messaging product and offer 'like for like' feature parity with the current Chat product where possible. There are some known differences and limitations, though, and these are described in the article "Outline of Known Differences & Limitations for Messaging GA Release".