Microsoft’s new “Omnichannel for Customer Service” adds powerful webchat capabilities into Dynamics 365. I’ve been experimenting with some of its latest features…. In this post I’ll explain how visitors to your website can access their chat transcripts.

I have often had a requirement for the customer to be able to access a copy of a chat transcript at the end of a conversation. Each chat solution may address this requirement slightly differently, so how does Omnichannel for Customer Service meet this challenge??

The answer is “very well”. (In my opinion.) As we can tailor if customers can access transcript and also if that is via a download option, an email option or both.

I do like the flexibility to provide two different approaches to obtaining copies of transcripts, as I can see advantages in both. The download option is simple and instant. Email might be considered slightly more involved but it has an advantage! With an email message you’ll have a record of what information has been sent to which customers. I can imagine that might be important in some scenarios. Additionally you could format the email message to include additional marketing information or maybe link to a FormPro survey etc. So, in my opinion, the email approach opens up some interesting possibilities.

Enable Transcripts

When we define the chat channel in Omnichannel for Customer Service a couple of options now exist to control access to transcripts. Below I have opened the “Omnichannel Administration” app and under channels opened one of my chat channels.

You can see that I have two options. Both enabled in my example! “Allow download of transcript” and “Allow email of transcript”.

If you select the allow email of transcript option two further fields appear. One is the template to use for sending emails. (A default is offered but you could easily alter or copy this to add you own additional messaging / branding.) The second field is the mailbox to use for sending emails. Meaning all emailed transcripts for a particular chat widget will be from the same source.

Below you can see that I have opened advanced settings and within the templates area displayed the default email template provided. “Conversation transcript email template”.

The template looks quite complicated! But actually I don’t think it would be that hard to tweak this html to include some personalized branding etc.

Email Setup

If you wish to send email messages there are a few things you might need to check before the messages will operate as expected. I mention them here partly as when I initially tested this option I’d missed making sure these were set correctly!

Firstly you are going to need to ensure that the mailbox is approved and tested correctly. (Hopefully you’ll already be aware of this if you are familiar with Dynamics 365!) Below you can see that I have opened advanced settings. I have then navigated to “Email Configuration” and mailboxes. You will need to ensure that the required mailbox has first been approved by an administrator and then the “Test & Enable” option has been run. Assuming your test is successful you’ll be looking for a green tick and a success status on outgoing emails.

As all the transcript emails will be sent from one generic email address effectively others will be sending emails from this account. Meaning there is a personal option that also has to be set for this mailbox!

Access the personal options for the account linked to the mailbox you wish to send as. This is done from the cog icon. (As shown below.)

Next in the email tab check that the option to allow other users to send emails on your behalf is ticked. By default this will not be selected. So you will need to remember to set this option!

User Experience

Having configured chat transcripts visitors to your website will see two new options in their chat widget. (As shown below.)

Customer’s can use these icons to download or email transcripts as required. (Obviously they may only have one icon if you only enable one approach!)

Below you can see that at the end of a chat the customer will be prompted to use the download options. They could obviously click the icons at any point in the conversation but a reminder at the end of the conversation is useful.

If the select the download icon then the chat will simply be downloaded to their download directory.

Clicking the email option would prompt for an email account. That would be defaulted if they entered an email address in the pre-chat survey.

After clicking send and waiting a few seconds an email will be received by the customer. I have shown an example email below. This has been created using the out of the box template with no changes. Hopefully you can see adding a company logo and maybe some other additional information may be useful.

I hope you agree that this chat transcript function is just one more great feature of Omnichannel for Customer Service. I hope you also enjoy experimenting with it!