Omnichannel for Customer Service

Omnichannel for Customer Service – Co-browse

August 4, 2020

One really cool feature of Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service product is the ability to complete a co-browse with your customers. Imagine how useful it would be to be able to easily guide your customers around your website once co-browse is enabled! In this post I will review how to configure and use this feature.

The co-browse feature can be enabled on your chat widgets with the Ominchannel Administration app. However (as you can see below) before these features can be enabled a third party co-browse sharing application must be installed.

Whilst preparing this post I used several resources for reference material. They are listed below, please check them out. All were useful for me!

The first was documentation on the 3^rd party screen sharing app I selected, ScreenMeet. You can find those details here.
The second resource was a brilliant blog post written by Tricia Sinclair, you can view her post here.
The third was Microsoft’s documentation on co-browse. You can view that here.

I felt the best way to show how co-browse actually operates was to create a very short video of it in operation. Below you will find a very quick demo, this probably doesn’t showcase all of the capabilities of co-browse but hopefully it gives you a good flavour for the customer and agent experiences.

Installing and configuring ScreenMeet to work with Omnichannel for Customer Service was actually pretty straight forward. The install steps I followed are described below;

Install 3^rd party screen share app (ScreenMeet).
Assign required security roles.
Enable co-browse in Omichannel Administration App.
Configure ScreenMeet.
Add code snippet to my portal.

Step One – Install 3^rd Party Screen Share App (ScreenMeet)

Our first step is to install a 3^rd party co-browse product, currently the go to app is “ScreenMeet”. You can find out more about ScreenMeet here. It is an add-in for Dynamics 365 which supports co-browse scenarios.

ScreenMeet is installed from AppSource. Below you can see that I have opened AppSource and searched for ScreenMeet.

Note:
You will of course need to look into the price of ScreenMeet, it is a 3^rd party app which obviously isn’t included in your Dynamics 365 license.

The first step of the install will be to confirm sharing your information with ScreenMeet. This acceptance coupled with other rights you’ll need to grant during the install process means a user with sufficient admin rights must complete this process. In my example, I happened to be a Dynamics 365 System Admin and Global Admin. Meaning I had no issues with permissions!

Next you will need to select your desired organisation and accept the terms.

After a just a few minutes you can see that ScreenMeet had successfully installed.

Step Two – Assign Security Roles

Next I needed to ensure the correct security roles have been enabled for my user(s). There are three new security roles to assign, including;

ScreenMeet Cobrowse Admin
ScreenMeet Cobrowse Agent
ScreenMeet Cobrowse Supervisor

Tip: You may also have to add Customer Service App Access security role and Common Data Service User security role.

Step Three – Enable co-browse in Omnichannel Administration App

Now ScreenMeet co-browse has been enabled I can return to the Omnichannel Administration app and enable co-browse on my chat widget. Because I have a 3^rd party app installed I can enable co-browse and select ScreenMeet as my provider. (When previously I couldn’t select the option to enable co-browse.

Step Four – Configure ScreenMeet

Next I need to configure ScreenMeet.

Notice that a “ScreenMeet Cobrowse” group has been added into the navigation in my Omnichannel Administration app.

Tip:
Whilst installing ScreenMeet my Omnichannel Administration app was already open. Meaning I initially missed these options. If the additional navigation options aren’t showing just try refreshing your browser page. And like magic they might show!

Clicking on the link highlighted above in the configuration option will open ScreenMeet. Simply select Dynamics 365 as your login method.

Now you will enter the URL of your Dynamics 365 instance and select “Omni-channel” as your solution.

Next you will be asked to grant any required permissions. (I was still logged in as system administrator and Global Admin, so I had no issues granting the required permissions!)

At the end of the process the ScreenMeet portal will be open. Here you can see details of screen shares and access recordings etc. You might want to return here later to experiment with some of the features!

Tip:
You can also access details of screen share sessions directly in Dynamics 365!

Step Five – Add code to my Portal Content Snippet

Next I needed to add some code into my portal to allow the user to trigger is dialog, into which they can enter a unique ID when the screen session happens.

<link href="https://cobrowse.screenmeet.com/CobrowseCore.js" rel="preload" as="script">
<script type="text/javascript"  async="true" src="https://cobrowse.screenmeet.com/CobrowseBootstrap.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" >
window.Cobrowse = window.Cobrowse || {};
window.Cobrowse.modal = window.Cobrowse.modal || {
commandQueue:[],
useHotkeys: true
};
</script>

As I am using a Microsoft Portal to test my web chat widget, so I can simply just alter that. You can see below that I added this code into the content snippet used for my chat widget.

Tip: If you have added your chat widget code directly into one (or more) of your web pages, I believe you would need to add this snippet into all the pages that need to support co-browse.

One tip I do have is after making this code change I found I needed to clear my portal cache. To clear your cache, login on the portal as an administrator. The navigate to <>/_services/about. Then use the clear cache option!