Today’s interview is with Jeff Comstock, CVP of Dynamics 365 Customer Service at Microsoft. Jeff joins me today to talk about Co-Pilot for Service, the impact it is having on the agent experience and also customer/business outcomes, their experience trialling it extensively with their own customer service engineers, how their early adopter clients are leveraging Co-Pilot in Service, what they have done, the outcomes they achieved, how long it took them to achieve those outcomes and, finally, what are the big challenges that organisations need to tackle in order to fully realise the potential of leveraging Generative AI in customer service and experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Personalisation and the pink elephant in the room – Interview with Emma Springham of TSB – and is number 505 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of the annual gathering of experience leaders at Qualtrics X4 in London on June 6th. There you can hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies including Belron, Allianz and Adidas. You can register now at the Qualtrics website.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Jeff:

• When our customers buy our Dynamics 365 Customer Service product, they get Gen AI infused capabilities baked into the product and we’ve had this capability for over a year now.
• We had a lot of interest for our service-related GenAI Copilot capabilities from customers who are using some other CRM systems.
• So, we launched Copilot for service, which takes a lot of the Copilot capabilities from our app and makes it available to any CRM and makes it available within Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook.
• What we really focus on is in the flow of the work of an agent, we’re looking to eliminate wherever we can, the typical drudgery and toil that agents face, particularly when it comes to summarizing conversations and cases.
• The focus is on making agents as productive as possible so they can focus on things like providing a great customer experience.
• Use cases span case summarization, conversation summarization, help me write an email, help me write a response to a chat or so on, but take into account the CRM data of what cases are open, what’s going on with the customer as well as a Q&A knowledge base capability.
• We were extremely lucky at Microsoft to be able to test this across lots of different lines of businesses, from Xbox all the way to to our developers.
• In our commercial business, we’ve seen improvements of 12-16 percent in average handle time, and that number continues to improve.
• We’ve also found that internally, that the need for collaboration has reduced pretty significantly,
• anywhere around 13 % or so, depending on the line of business.
• One of our customers, an energy company, was able to reduce wrap up time by 50%, while Lenovo, another one of our customers improved their handling time by 20% using co-pilot.
• Here’s some of the positive things that we learned from trialling this within our own organisation:
  • They’re thrilled to have the latest technology to use for a change.
  • It’s also making their job more enjoyable because of the repetitive things that we are now able to automate.
• One of the big learnings is how quickly we realised (and our customers realised this, too) that we needed to really focus on our knowledge sources and ensure that they were high-quality and up-to-date.
• To overcome any initial resistance, we utilised a kind of side-car approach for Co-Pilot, where you just allow the agents to go and interact with it and ask the questions and get used to the product and see how it could be useful nd could fit into their work.
• Microsoft’s service organization numbers multiple tens of thousands of people. That’s the ssize and scale of their test.
• You don’t want big siloed sort of tech stacks and isolated data sets. Data is your friend in the world of AI.
• Jeff’s best advice: To start improving the customer and employee experience, just get started. Don’t let perfection stop you progressing towards better.
• Jeff’s Punk XL brand: Lenovo and all of the organizations that are just jumping in right now in terms of experimentation with Generative AI.

About Jeff

Jeff Comstock is the Corporate Vice President leading the global product teams delivering Microsoft’s all-in-one digital contact center solution with Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Jeff has over two decades of product development leadership experience at Microsoft in the areas of SaaS business applications.

Check out Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service product and Co-Pilot in Service. Say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @MSFTDynamics365 and feel free to connect with Jeff on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Petr Macháček on Unsplash