Chapter 10. Working with Service

The Service interface for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 is where organizations manage the following:

Support cases

Shared calendar and resources

The knowledge base (referred to as Articles)

Contracts (usually used in support of inbound support cases)

The Service area is most commonly used by call centers and for customer support issues.

A service is basically anything that involves resource time and materials. It differs from a product, for which you have to manage stock and quantities. With a service, the critical considerations are the time allocated to the necessary resources and the stock of materials. For example, suppose that an IT company has two technicians who can repair computers. When one goes to a client to repair a computer, that technician might take an hour or more to perform the work and, depending on the service required, might need to use materials such as a new CD-ROM or computer part. You can schedule such tasks in Microsoft Dynamics CRM via service activities. Although you can also schedule such services as appointments, the difference between them is that a service activity has an associated service. You use appointments for meetings with clients that do not involve performing any service.

When service activities are scheduled, they appear on the user’s CRM calendar (found in the Calendar section); in the Outlook client, they appear as appointments on the Outlook calendar.

The Service area of Microsoft CRM has the following options, by default:

My Work

Dashboards

Activities

Customers

Accounts

Contacts

Social Profiles

Service

Cases

Service Calendar

Queues

Collateral

Articles

Contracts

Products

Services

Goals

Goals

Goal Metrics

Rollup Queries

Tools

Reports

Alerts

Calendar

You can customize these entries from the Site Map entity, as explained in CHAPTER 22, “Customizing Entities.”

The Accounts and Contacts options are covered in CHAPTER 6, “Working with Customers,” and Products is covered in CHAPTER 7, “Working with Sales.”

For example, consider an IT company that has a service called Network Installation, which might take three hours to complete and which requires one of the three technicians to go to the customer’s office. To set up this service example, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Service area and click Services. Then click the + New button on the navigation bar. The New Service form appears (see Figure 10.1). By default, each service has the following required fields:

Name

Initial Status Reason

Default Duration

Start Activities Every

To configure the resources needed to accomplish the service, navigate to the Required Resources tab or scroll down (see Figure 10.2).

2. Double-click the first option from the tree displayed on the right, Choose 1 from the Same Site from <(!) Click to Select Quantity>, to display the window shown in Figure 10.3.

This example requires only one technician to perform the service, so you can close the Edit a Selection Rule dialog by clicking OK. (If you needed more than one technician, you would change the value here to the number needed.) When you close the window, the selected rule is updated to display Choose 1 from the Same Site From, assuming that you left the defaults unchanged, as shown in Figure 10.3.

3. Select the child option that says Click to Add Resources, Resource Groups, or a Selection Rule. The window shown in Figure 10.4 displays the available resources that you want to assign.

4. Select the users you want to include from the left list box and click the Select button to move them to the Selected Records list. When you’re finished with this, click Add to close this dialog.

If you add more than one user, you are asked whether you want to create a new resource group (see Figure 10.5). You should do this if you want to reuse the same group of users on other services instead of selecting the users one by one.

To further work with services, you might need to create Facility/Equipment and Resource Groups, if you haven’t done so yet. You can do this by going to Settings > Service Management.

Facility/Equipment refers to the ability to manage either locations or, as the name implies, equipment, as part of the service-scheduling activity. Resource Groups is just a basic grouping that can be reused.

SEE CHAPTER 17, “Settings,” for detailed information about how to add and manage these kinds of entities.

After you select the required resources, they display as shown in Figure 10.6. (This example shows a resource group created from the selected users shown in Figure 10.5, and that resource group is shown in Figure 10.6.)

These resources are the ones the user must choose when scheduling a service activity.

You also can perform some common tasks related to managing the required resources:

Add a Selection Rule

Add Resources

Add Resource Groups

Edit Selected Item

Remove Selected Item

5. Click the Save & Close button to complete the new service creation.

You have now finished creating a service and allocated one or more resources for the service activity. If you allocated users (or teams and resource groups), the saved service activity appears on their calendars when it is assigned/used.

By default, the service calendar shows the time and usage allocation for facility/equipment and the tasks scheduled for the users.

Each activity state has a different color so that you can easily recognize its status (see Figure 10.8).

You can display the service calendar by month, week, or day, and you can also display it within a custom date range.

To view it by month, week, or day, select the View option in the lower right of the interface. For a custom date range, navigate to the bottom of the calendar view and enter the date range.

If you have many resources and a lot of equipment, you can easily locate a resource by using the search box at the top by typing the first few letters of the resource name.

The service calendar shows the two types of activities you can create from this interface: service activity and appointment activities.

To create a new service activity from the service calendar interface, click the Service Activity button on the command bar. The New Service Activity window appears (see Figure 10.9).

When creating a new service activity, you are required to enter a subject, a service, and the time (start and end dates) for the activity. Depending on the service selected, you might also be required to select one or more resources or equipment. If so, after selecting the service or equipment, click the Schedule button on the command bar.

A new window opens for scheduling a service. In this example (see Figure 10.10), the form assistant displays the resources available for completion in the Resources field when you click the resource lookup field. When the Resources field has the focus, you see service rule options in the form assistant that must be selected. In this example, one of the displayed resources must be selected (see Figure 10.11).

You can select one of the resources from the form assistant or click the Find Available Times button to list all the available resources and times (see Figure 10.12).

Select the resource that matches your desired time availability and click the Schedule button. Notice that you might have to select more than one resource, depending on how the service was initially defined.

Finally, click Save and Close to finish creating the service activity. You now see the scheduled activity on the service calendar, and each affected user sees the service activity on his or her calendar (see Figure 10.13).

You can easily reschedule service activities, if necessary. For example, suppose that a customer has to reschedule an appointment. A customer service representative could easily handle that by clicking the Reschedule button and then checking the next available time to verify availability of the resources for the service to be rescheduled.

A hidden pane at the bottom of the window shows resources and facility details. If you click the black arrow located in the middle bottom of the main service calendar window, the selected resource details appear, as shown in Figure 10.13.

Suppose that the user Bill is going on vacation for a few days. You can easily set up these days as time off to prevent other users from scheduling appointments or service activities with him. From the Set Up menu inside the Monthly View tab, click Time Off to configure the vacation time on the dialog shown in Figure 10.16.

Figure 10.17 shows how the work hours are displayed after you schedule the time off.

You can also use this process to configure sick days, personal errands, and similar situations.

For general holidays when the business will be closed, use the business closures calendar under Settings > Service Management, as shown in Figure 10.18.

The required fields for the appointment are the Subject field and the Start Time and End Time fields. If you want, you can specify the required resources or materials necessary for the appointment and the optional resources.

After the appointment is created, you can save the activity as completed, or you can convert the activity to an opportunity or a case.

When you create a service activity, you can set its initial status to Open (and then either Requested or Tentative) or Scheduled (and then Pending, Reserved, In Progress, or Arrived). To change the status of a service activity, select the activity and then click the Change Status button (see Figure 10.20).

After you click the Change Status button, the dialog displayed in Figure 10.21 appears, giving you the option to change the service activity’s status. You can also close the activity and complete it.

Users can create a recurring appointment (or edit an uncompleted one). For example, if you have to meet a client once a week for two months, you can configure this by clicking the Recurrence option on the navigation bar. Figure 10.22 shows the options you can use to set the recurrence; they are the same options you are familiar with from Microsoft Outlook.

Before you start to work with cases, it is a good idea to prepare and define the subject tree as explained later in this chapter. To create a new case, click New. Even though this is not required by default, you can enter the subject in the Subject field, as shown in Figure 10.24.

After selecting the subject and entering a title and customer, you can move to the Contract and Product Information section and look up the Knowledge base (KB) articles associated with the selected subject. You can do this by selecting the magnifying glass next to the Knowledge Base Article field to open the Add Article dialog (see Figure 10.25).

After entering the required values, click Save & Close to create the new case.

After you create a case, you can perform these actions, as described in the following sections:

Add Related Activities

Delete Case

Resolve Case

Cancel Case

In addition, by looking at the process flow at the top of the screen, you can easily see the recommended process to follow for case closeout. (The example in this chapter is Phone to Case, which you can easily access by clicking the Phone Support button instead of clicking + New.)

These are the available reports:

Activities

Case Summary Table

Neglected Cases

Top Knowledge Base Articles

Service Activity Volume

Figure 10.29 shows the Case Summary Table report.

For more information about working with reports, SEE CHAPTER 16, “Reporting and Dashboards.” To learn more about accounts and contacts, refer to CHAPTER 6.

An article has a small predefined workflow:

1. Anyone who has the right permissions can create articles.

2. Articles are submitted for review.

3. A higher-level-permissions user reviews articles and then approves or rejects them.

4. When approved, articles are published.

Figure 10.30 shows the steps in this workflow.

Before you start writing articles, consider the following:

Be sure to prepare the right article templates so that you have a consistent knowledge base of articles. You can manage templates under Settings > Templates > Articles Templates (see Figure 10.31).

Be sure to set up the topics where you want people to submit their articles so that users can search for them more easily after they are published. You can do this under Settings > Service Management > Subjects (see Figure 10.32).

Be sure to set up the right permissions for the users who can write and submit articles, the users who can approve or reject the articles, and the users who can publish the articles.

Figure 10.33 shows the default interface when you access the articles interface as the Administrator role. This interface is divided into the following views:

All Articles

Draft Articles

Published Articles

Unapproved Articles

Unpublished Articles

No matter which view you are using, you can always create a new article. To create a new article, follow these steps:

1. Click the +New button on the command bar. The window shown in Figure 10.34 opens.

2. Select the language and select a template from the list. Notice that the internal templates vary depending on the language selected. Click OK to continue. Figure 10.35 shows the New Article interface.

3. Enter the title and subject. The body format of the article depends on the selected template. You should enter keywords for a faster search and lookup of the articles.

4. Click Save & Close.

An article must be submitted before it can be approved or rejected. To submit an article, you must move to the Draft Articles view, select the article you want to submit, and click the Submit button on the command bar. You then receive a dialog alert to confirm the operation, as shown in Figure 10.37.

Click OK to submit the article, and the article is moved to the Unapproved Articles view.

Approved articles move to the Published Articles view, where they are ready and available for other users.

After you click OK, the article moves back to the Draft Articles view. If the user who wrote the article wants to see the comments and reason for the rejection, he or she must move to the Draft queue, double-click the article to open it, and then look at the Comments tab to see the rejection reasons (see Figure 10.40).

SEE CHAPTER 26 for more information about how to create custom workflows.

To create new contracts, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Service > Contracts and click New.

2. Select a template (see Figure 10.42) and click Select.

SEE CHAPTER 17 for more information on how to manage and create new templates.

3. Fill in the required fields: Contract Name, Customer, Contract Start Date, Contract End Date, and Customer (see Figure 10.43). Click Save.

4. Go to the Contract Lines section on the form and click the + icon.

5. Fill in the required fields (see Figure 10.44).

6. Click Save & Close to complete the contract line.

Each contract line has a specific calendar associated with it. You can access it by clicking the Set Calendar button on the command bar of the contract line form. This is useful when a customer service representative needs to know whether the client should be supported 24 × 7 or only at regular business times such as 9 to 5. You can easily convert the calendar to 24 × 7 support by clicking the check box shown at the bottom of Figure 10.45.

After the contract is created, its status is draft. To make a contract active, you must open the contract record and click the Invoice Contract button on the command bar.

Refer to CHAPTER 7 for information related to goals, goal metrics, and rollup queries.

The Service Management area is divided in five sections, as shown in Figure 10.46 and described in the following sections:

Case Settings with Record Creation and Update Rules

Service Terms

Knowledge Base Management

Templates

Service Scheduling

Queues

Parent and Child Case Settings

Routing Rule Sets

Automatic Record Creation and Update Rules

Subjects

Because by default every user and team has a default queue created by the system (prefaced with < and suffixed with >), you probably don’t need to create new queues to start working with them. You often use queues when you are working with activities. To access them, go to Service > Activities.

To add items to a queue, you select an activity and click ... > Add to Queue (see Figure 10.47).

The dialog shown in Figure 10.48 asks you to enter the name of the queue.

To view the items that are assigned to each queue, go to the Service area select Service > Queues. Change the view to All Items. (The first time you enter into this section, the default view shows the Items I Am Working On view, which is empty.) Select the queue to which you added items to view the items so you can work with them (see Figure 10.49).

When you select one or more items, you can select any of the following actions for the queue items:

Route—Use this option to move the queue item to another queue.

Pick—Use this option to have a queue item displayed in the Items I am Working On view.

Release—Use this option to release a queue item so it will be removed from the Items I am Working On view.

Remove—Use this option to remove the queue item from the queue.

Queues help users assign records to themselves without taking the ownership of the record. For example, user A can be the owner of a record, and user B can be working on that record. Only one person can work on a queue item at a time, preventing other users from picking records that someone else is working on.

Not all the entity types are queue enabled by default. If you create a custom entity or have one of the existing system entities, like Account or Contact, and want users to add their records to queues, you need to select the Queues check box on the General tab, as shown in Figure 10.50. (After you select this option and save the change, you cannot uncheck it.) If the entity you created has the ownership set to user or team, you also have the option to automatically move the records to the owners’ default queue when a record is created or assigned.

You can also set whether the case can be closed if there are child cases open and whether to close all child cases when the parent case is closed.

The ability to work with child cases was new in Dynamics CRM 2015 and is also available in CRM 2016. You can split a case into child cases that are hierarchy related. To create a child case, you must be working with a case record. You go to Service > Cases and open any case record, and then click the Create Child Case button in the command bar (see Figure 10.52).

When you click this button, a quick create form appears, with the prepopulated fields you defined in Case Settings (see Figure 10.53).

By default, there are no routing rules created. You can create a new Routing Rule by clicking + New in the command bar. The form shown in Figure 10.55 appears.

Enter a name and then click Save in the command bar to create rule items. After it has been saved, then click the + icon that is on the Rule Item subgrid.

Enter the name for your new rule item and then enter the criteria. Figure 10.56 shows the creation of a simple rule to route the cases with the origin equal to Email to the info queue. Click Save & Close when you are done. You must now activate your new routing rule set by clicking Activate in the command bar.

You can now use the new routing rules. When you work with a case record, you now see a Save & Route button. If you click it, you see the confirmation dialog shown in Figure 10.57. If you click Route, the rules are applied.

If you want to apply these rules to more than one record, you can do so by going to Cases and selecting the records from any view. You then see the button Apply Routing Rule. Click it and then confirm your choice in the dialog that appears.

To create a new rule, click + New, enter a name for the rule, and specify the conditions for record creation, including the source type, which can be any activity entity, such as Email, Phone, or a custom activity (see Figure 10.59).

After you save the rule, you can add conditions to perform other operations, such as creating records, updating records, sending emails, or starting a child workflow (see Figure 10.60).

Service Level Agreement

Entitlements

Holiday Schedule

Service Configuration Settings

Customer Service Schedule

When you create a new SLA, you must enter a name for it and enter a value in the Applicable From field, which can be any of the following:

Created On

Modified On

Follow Up By

Record Created On

Resolved By

First Response By

Escalated On

Last On Hold Time

You must also select the SLA type, which can be either standard or enhanced. For more information about the enhanced SLA type, see the section “Enhanced Case SLAs,” later in this chapter. Finally, you must specify whether you want to allow pause and resume or not (see Figure 10.61).

Optionally, you can set the Business Hours field by going to the Customer Service Schedule option, as described in the following sections.

After you saved the new SLA, you can start entering its details. As shown in Figure 10.62, you can configure criteria where you want the SLA to be applicable.

You can specify the time after which you can consider the SLA item to be a failure and the time after which you want to receive a warning. After you save the record, you can add actions as steps for the failure or success events.

You can perform the following actions in the SLA details for success and/or failure events (see Figure 10.63):

Send Email

Create Record

Update Record

Assign Record

Change Status

The Allocation Type field can be set to either Number of Cases or Number of Hours. Depending which allocation type you enter, the Total Terms field counts either cases or hours. The value you enter for Total Terms is decreased depending on the case resolution or case creation if you configure the allocation type to count the number of cases; otherwise this decrease field is locked.

After you save a new entitlement, you can add entitlement channels, which can be any of the following:

Email

Phone

Web

Facebook

Twitter

For each channel line you can set a specific value for Total Terms, and you see the value in Remaining Terms when it is in use (see Figure 10.65).

You can also set products and contacts for where you want the entitlement to be applied, as shown in Figure 10.66.

When you create a new holiday schedule, you must supply a name and a description, as shown in Figure 10.67.

After you click Create, you can open the created holiday schedule to define the days, as shown in Figure 10.68.

On this tab, you can disable the SLAs on case records, apply an SLA after a manual override, and select the on hold case status.

When you click + New to create a new customer service schedule, you get the dialog shown in Figure 10.70, where you must enter the name and click Create.

After you create the record, you can configure the recurring weekly schedule. There are the main options you have (see Figure 10.71):

Work Hours Are the Same Each Day

Work Hours Vary by Day

24 × 7 support

If you selected the work hours to be the same each day, you can click on Set Work Hours link to configure the hours (as shown in Figure 10.72).

If you select Work Hours Vary by Day, then you must configure the work hours for each day, as shown in Figure 10.73.

You can then use the customer service schedules you have created in your SLAs.

You can also configure the Knowledge Solution field to either of the following:

Dynamics CRM

Parature

If you have an external knowledge base solution, you can check the Use an External Portal option and then enter the URL of your custom/external knowledge base application.

Entitlement templates

Email templates

Article templates

Contract templates

You can also access email, article, and contract templates by going to Settings > Templates. However, the Templates section is the only place to get the entitlement templates.

Creating a new entitlement template is very similar to creating an entitlement, except that you don’t need to enter the customer and the contacts, and you are not required to set the start and end dates (see Figure 10.75).

When you have templates set, you can go to the Entitlement option and click New to see the option to create a new entitlement from a template. Here you are asked to select one of the entitlement templates you created (see Figure 10.76).

Business Closure

Services

Facilities/Equipment

Resource Groups

Sites

These options are described earlier in this chapter, in the section “Services.”

Case on hold support

Auto pause and resume of time calculation

Support for success actions

Creation of dashboards and reports based on the SLA KPI instance entity

You can put a case on hold for an unlimited period of time, until a reply from a customer is received. This stops the timer and calculations that might apply to the SLA.

To see how enhanced SLA works, create an SLA with two SLA details, one for each KPI type, as shown in Figure 10.77.

Save the SLA and make sure you activate it. Also make it the default SLA by clicking the Set as Default button on the command bar.

To test the SLA, create a new case, save it, and go to the Enhanced SLA Details tab, as shown in Figure 10.78.

You can pause the case by changing the status to On Hold. You can resume the case by changing the status back to In Progress.

After the amount of time specified in the Warn After field elapses, you see a warning like the one shown in Figure 10.79.

After the time amount of time specified in the Failure After elapses, you see a warning like the one shown in Figure 10.80.

Dynamics CRM 2016 comes with some out-of-the-box dashboards that make use of the SLA and entitlement entities:

Customer Service Manager Dashboard

Customer Service Performance Dashboard

Customer Service Representative Social Dashboard

When working with cases, keep in mind that the summary of the activities that make up the case (and therefore the case resolution) are the resultant work effort—something neither expressed nor available on the main Case entity by default. Organizations often request the ability to see case resolution times and the ability to quickly/easily track times directly against the Case entity. (An example of this might be a spinning/countdown clock when a form is opened/being worked on.) Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not support this requirement without custom development. However, the work required to put this in place is actually quite minimal. The majority of effort in putting something like this together is in defining the business process and deciding how best to implement it. (For example, does the clock start automatically on open, or does the user click a button to start it? What happens on form load? Does the clock stop, or does it stay open until it is proactively stopped?)

In this chapter you have learned how to work with services in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 by using the service calendar, working with cases to track customer issues, working with contracts, and managing articles to share typical business procedures.

This chapter shows that case configurations are now grouped on a dedicated page under Settings > Case Management.

Finally, this chapter explains how to use SLAs and entitlements, and it provides an example of how to work with enhanced SLAs to manage cases and support in a more controlled way.

Two features in the Service area are not discussed in this chapter: integrated service hub (see Chapter 11) and FieldOne (see Chapter 33, “FieldOne”).