View customer information on Active Conversation form

Omnichannel for Customer Service offers a suite of capabilities that extend the power of Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise to enable organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers across digital messaging channels. An additional license is required to access Omnichannel for Customer Service. For more information, see the Dynamics 365 Customer Service pricing overview and Dynamics 365 Customer Service pricing plan pages.

One of the major challenges that customers face when contacting customer support is repeatedly giving the same information about the issue to each support agent they talk to. And if they want to review the status of their request later, they have to share the same information with another support agent to explain the context of the engagement. To avoid this situation, support agents need access to all the information the customer has provided, including details about the product or service, issue, case history, related cases, and location.

Having this information ready can help support agents reduce the hold time that they spend retrieving customer information, reduce average handling time, and increase customer satisfaction by resolving issues faster.

What is Active Conversation?

Active Conversation (formerly Customer Summary) is a page that appears when you accept an incoming request from any channel and gives you complete information about a customer. The Active Conversation view provides the following sections:

• Customer (Contact or Account)
• Conversation summary
• Case
• Recent cases
• Timeline

For active conversations, you can view the Active Conversation form on the agent dashboard of the Customer Service workspace or Omnichannel for Customer Service app. The Active Conversation form doesn't display details of closed conversations. To view closed conversations, use the Closed work items section of the agent dashboard. More information: View agent dashboard and conversations

If your administrator has enabled the Customise active conversation form in Customer Service admin center, you'll see the following options on the Active Conversation page:

• Save: You can edit and save standard and custom field values added to the Active Conversation form by your administrator. However, the following Logical column names aren't supported. If a default value is already set for a field, the value appears on the form automatically.
• Refresh: Refreshes the data in the form.
• Queue: The queue through which the conversation has been assigned to you.
• Start time: The time when you started the conversation.
• Related: To select and navigate to the required entities.

Depending on the settings that are enabled for you, you'll see one of the following layouts:

View customer details

This section provides details such as the contact name or account name. For a contact, you can view the location, email, and other details. For an account, you can view location, telephone number, and primary contact person for the account.

Use the customer section to search for an existing contact or account record, and select the record to link it to the conversation. If the record doesn't exist, you can create a new contact or account record by using the Add Contact or Add Account button, respectively. After you create it, search for the record and then select it to link it to the conversation.

Depending on the settings that are enabled for you, you'll see one of the following layouts:

View case details

Use the Case section to search for an existing case, and select the case to link it to the conversation. If the record doesn't exist, you can create a new case by using the Add Case button. After you create it, search for the record and then select it to link it to the conversation. More information: Case management in multisession apps

Depending on the settings that are enabled for you, you'll see one of the following layouts:

View recent cases

This section displays recent cases related to the customer.

Depending on the settings that are enabled for you, you'll see one of the following layouts:

View Conversation summary

Conversation summary changes.

The Conversation summary section provides detailed information about the conversation between the agent and customer. The information shown in the Conversation details area includes the following:

• Engagement channel: The channel, such as live chat or custom channel, through which the conversation is taking place.

• Waiting time: The time the customer had to wait before the conversation was assigned to the agent.

• Skills: The skills that had been attached for routing the conversation. If your administrator has enabled the setting for agents to update skills, you can add or remove skills.

• Queue: The queue through which the conversation has been assigned to you.

• Start time: The time when you started the conversation.

  

In addition, the Conversation summary section includes several tabs:

• Pre-chat survey
• Self service
• Visitor details
• Additional details, if they've been configured and other context variables are available

These tabs are described in the following sections.

View Pre-chat survey

The Pre-chat survey tab displays the customer's answers to the survey questions that were posed by your organization, which helps your interaction with the customer.

View Self service

The Self service tab displays information about the activities that the customer performed before starting a conversation with an agent. This information helps you understand why the customer reached out and helps you provide a personalized service for enhanced customer satisfaction. The activity information, which is categorized into the following action types, appears in reverse chronological order.

To configure the appearance of the Self service tab, see Enable self-service settings for customer actions in a conversation summary.

View Visitor details

The Visitor details tab provides information such as whether the customer is authenticated, the browser the customer used to contact support, the operating system used by the customer, the customer's location, and the language used during the interaction.

If the customer has signed in to the portal to initiate the chat with a support agent, the Authenticated field value is Yes; otherwise, the Authenticated field value is No.

To learn more, see Create chat authentication settings.

View Additional details

If your administrator or developer has configured the Additional details tab and if any other context variables exist, they're displayed on the Additional details tab for live chat channels.

To learn more, see setContextProvider.

View Timeline

This section displays case-related and customer-related activities in the form of a timeline. You can create quick notes based on your discussion with the customer. Use the Linked records field to switch the timeline based on the case, contact, or account record linked to the conversation.

The Linked records field shows the record that's linked to the conversation. For example, if you link a contact and case to the conversation, the Linked records dropdown list shows Contact and Case, respectively.

See also

Search for and share knowledge articles
View communication panel
Monitor real-time customer sentiment
View active conversation for an incoming conversation request
setContextProvider