Dynamics Customer Service form – Simple yet functional

This post is a part of a series of posts for Customer Service. The complete GUIDE can be found here

Before we complete it all I will clean the form a bit. The demo I will be focusing on is the B2B space. If you use the B2C part of support, you might not need any of this. Just continue to the next post:)

Before

It looks good out of the box, but it doesn’t provide a great amount of value.

1. Business Process Flow on the top of this case is close to useless. It only indicates that you can have a process that looks nice. The steps don’t make sense, and as always with BPF…. You can’t create a step without a mandatory field present. 😒
   
2. The first quick view shows a view of the company information. It takes up a lot of space, and in my opinion displays relatively irrelevant information about the customer. If you want quick info about customer, you can “hover over” the customer field.
   
3. The right side is setup with reference panels. I wrote an article about loving them a while back, but Customers seem to prefer normal subgrids when actually navigating. Recent Cases is actually just a quick view, and that doesn’t do us much good. Try opening one of the cases, and you won’t see much. We will have to clean this up for it to actually work. We will also remove entitlements, because it’s too much of a hassle in a simple Customer Service scenario.
   
4. I hide the tabs on top for now, because I simply don’t need them. If at one point you want to expand, you can reintroduce them.
   
5. Subjects.. Are they staying or going. I am not sure what the future holds for this. It’s quite confusing. At some parts of history it seemed very central for Customer Service and Knowledge Articles. Then Categories came along. I would like some clear information what is what. For simplicity I will use subjects for demo. Personally not to happy about it.
   
6. The customer field here is as confusing at the customer field was originally for Opportunity. If you are using Customer Service for B2B this has to be linked to an account and not contact. If you use B2C I guess you can just leave it and never really see it as a problem. In my cases I always have to change this to store Account, and then use the Contact field for Contact. Opportunity has managed to change from Customer field to Account & Contact. Don’t see why Case can’t do the same…

Cleanup

1. BPF – Business Process Flow removal

Start off by deactivating the BPF from customization. Then we have to delete all records of the process running. Open Advanced Find, and look for the table that has the same name as the Business Process Flow

PS: If you happen to have a demo setup, it might also include Field Service demo data. Then you have to repeat the process for “Case to Work Order Business Process”.

2. Quick View

Does not give any extra added value. I am replacing this function with a similar value, but different way of working. I open in form editor and remove.

3. Remove Entitlements in Reference Panel

First make sure to remove the Entitlements

Then make sure that the view is set to Recent Cases. Don’t trust that the name of the subgrid is correct. You actually have to make sure that you have the Recent Cases view here.

Create a new section for Recent Cases, and move the Recent Cases out of the Reference Panel. This way we can actually click on a case and open it from the Quick View.

4. Hide tabs

Just hide it. Don’t need it for now

5. Fix Customer field – B2B scenario

In the B2B scenario we need to make a few adjustments to the customer field, and add some onload logic for the agent. In the B2B scenario we need the customer data to be good, and therefore we can’t accept cases where the contact is unknown.

Check this article on how to fix the Customer/Contact fields

6. Subject

Remove unwanted subjects.

Result

Let’s just agree that this doesn’t look very exciting, but it does the job. It does the job quite well!

This is how I want it to look. I have hidden a bunch of components that Microsoft includes as standard Customer Service. Normally it is just a little too much. This will lead to an easy training and a simple customer service view for the agent.

Removing the Business process flow we loose a lot of colors, but this is for actual production. Not a fancy demo to excite someone buying.