Chris Goodwill: This does feel like, um, an enterprise and large org play, particularly in terms of benefits it can drive, um, in terms of knowledge bases and other, other data sources that you can pull in, that Copilot will then reference and surface to agents and also surface information to customers direct.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week, we are going deep on Dynamics 365 Contacts and, uh, We're getting a perspective from Chris Goodwill, who works at Symity and is a real specialist in all things Contact Center. So he's come up through the Teams space, a lot of the ecosystem solutions he's worked with, and he's now taken a real deep dive look at Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

So great perspective from him on how Dynamics 365 Contact Center looks, how the licensing works, some of the consumption parts of the licensing, and also which customers it fits with. Where it's a good use case and how it compares to the ecosystem contact centers as well. So many thanks to Chris for joining the pod.

And many thanks to Logi who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Exciting topic this week. We're going to talk all about Dynamics 365 Contact Center. So a couple weeks ago on the podcast we had Alan Ross from the product group, engineering, talking all about it.

Now we're going to get a perspective from kind of partner land and customer land. Chris, do you want to introduce yourself, please? 

Chris Goodwill: Yeah. So, uh, Chris Goodwill, um, I'm Strategic Partner Manager and solution specialist at Symity and I'm focused principally, um, on contact centers. Um, so in the Microsoft world only.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So you bring a really interesting perspective. You're one of the people I talked to, to kind of decode some of this, because You've obviously come from Teams world, contact center world. You've looked at and worked with lots of the ecosystem contact centres in Teams. So you've got a perspective on Teams and native and QS app.

You've got a perspective on the, you know, ecosystem contact centers, the, the Landis, the 10 fours, the Luware's the, and, and you've been going really deep on DCCP, Dynamics Contact Center Platform before and now Dynamics 365 Contact Center. 

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, I mean, I know we've had this conversation before, probably like a year ago, maybe even longer, but.

Been waiting really for Microsoft to pull the trigger on a native solution and they through through evolution, then they've reached this point today. You know, they started as far back as I'm just going to look at my slide. I've got here. It's like 2003 was the customer care framework. And that was built that was then turned into the unified service desk that was a bolt on for Dynamics CRM from that Dynamics turned into Dynamics 365 as a suite.

They had the customer service product that was spun up. And then Omnichannel was added to that. We then saw the framework, um, Digital Contact Center Platform, which I know we talked about before, and we talked about it with Alan, like the kind of origins, and that was very much a framework for building a contact center solution through the acquisition of Nuance and their AI capabilities, particularly in the IVR space.

You then had all the kind of tools, really, to be able to build something. But Dynamics 365 Contact Center is in itself a CCaaS play, which is completely new for Microsoft. Yes, it's got all the origins and there's all these bits and pieces that kind of have built it, but with the investment they've put into Copilot, um, you know, for the last couple of years and this real drive forward, by making that a pivotal part of the product and also decoupling it, From Dynamics 365 CRM, then it is as true CCaaS play, and it's really interesting, you know, we would start the year of spending lots of time on DCCP, and then sure enough, like the announcement came for Dynamics 365 Contact Center, part of me does think that it could almost be called something else, though.

It feels 

Tom Arbuthnot: like Copilot Contact Center is the biggest market opportunity. Like that would have just ridden the wave of we are the AI first contact center. I'm guessing the Dynamics team quite rightly like their team's name in the product name, but I agree with you. The first conversation I always have to have is, you don't need to be a Dynamics customer, which sounds weird when it's Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, for partners entering into the space and, and spinning up practice or diversifying, then that is a conversation you're going to have to kind of demystify what it actually is. So it can be headless. It can just be a contact center in its own right. It doesn't have to be plumbed into a CRM. Equally, it's decoupled from Dynamics 365 as a CRM.

So, the benefit to clients and for partners as well is if a customer's got their own CRM or alternative kind of, um, if they're using Salesforce or ServiceNow, there's connectors for that. So Yeah, that's available, available to them, but they don't have to have Dynamics 365 or I suppose that's. That's something we're going to have to explain to the marketplace a little bit.

Yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: as you say, this is two big, two big changes from kind of the strategies of old, which were kind of half a toe in, half a toe out, kind of, sorry, like there are dedicated SKUs. So you can literally buy the CCaaS as a product and we'll talk about the licensing and some of the fun consumption things there in a minute, um, and decoupling it from Dynamics.

I think Dynamics CRM has. 8, 10 percent of the market, something like that. So immediately they're addressable market. If they were tied to a Dynamics customer is much smaller. Whereas now, theoretically, Microsoft and partners like Symity can go after any customer. It doesn't matter what their legacy systems or even, um, as Alan said in his podcast a few weeks ago, they might have multiple CRMs in play.

They might be M&A, they might be acquisition. This is a more flexible platform to bring in a new world AI First Omni Channel Contact Center, that can integrate an overlay with the existing products in play. 

Chris Goodwill: Yeah. I think there's a, I think there's a number of scenarios, you know. I've been trying to map them out actually to try and make sense for ourselves.

And also for account directors and technical specialists who work here, you know. A situation where a customer's got a non Microsoft telephony platform and is non Microsofting themselves, that's going to be a real low play. Um, but where there is that investment in Microsoft 365 and they've got Teams telephony already, they are now Microsoft able to address without going to their ISV kind of ecosystem.

So that's, that ecosystem has developed. You know, really since link, isn't it? You know, you and I know that, and for link to Skype and then for Teams. So these ISVs now have got a direct compete with Microsoft. 

Tom Arbuthnot: It's interesting though, isn't it? Because it's, uh, it absolutely is a compete and particularly is a Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

It feels very enterprising to me in terms of its feature set and integration requirements, but you can buy it from 1 seat and up. So theoretically a. You know, a few hundred seat customer could be choosing between ecosystem and dynamics, but the approach is quite different, isn't it? Ecosystem is tightly into the single pane of Teams glass, single experience, whereas Dynamics is a completely standalone contact center built on the same foundations as Teams, but its own client, its own experience.

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, absolutely. There's, it's going to. It'll be a, it'll make conversations with clients really interesting. I think for partners, they've really got to distill. They've got to understand the requirements of that client, what their needs are, what they want to really drive. Obviously, budget's going to come into it and prices.

Price has become really competitive in the CCaaS space. Um, But if it's a real small requirement, then something from, you know, Luware and anywhere who we work with might be more appropriate. This does feel like an enterprise and large org play, particularly in terms of benefits it can drive. In terms of knowledge bases and other other data sources that you can pull in, that Copilot will then reference and surface to agents and also surface information to customers direct.

So it is going to have to have a requirement like Copilot in itself of having, you know, clean data, well maintained data, secure data, et cetera. So, but yeah, Price 

Tom Arbuthnot: point wise from a licensing point of view, you've got a better eye on this market than me, but. The 100, $120 seat prices at the higher end compared to the ecosystem vendors, is that fair?

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, I would say so. So the, the, the digital and voice combined license is $110 and then the voice or digital on its own. If, you know, if the customer just wanted it to be voice only, it's $95. You've then got the complexity of, um, you can have an add on if the customer's got customer service already and there's a dedicated customer service premium, Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium License, which gives them the CRM and gives them the contact center functionality.

But at that kind of price point, I wasn't surprised, to be honest, you know, based on kind of how things looked in terms of building a contact center through DCCP. But there's probably better value for lower need contact centers. But for a customer who is invested in Microsoft, wants to continue to leverage that, if they are a Dynamics 365 CRM customer already, an absolute no brainer for them.

Um, equally, if they're looking to integrate their existing. Um, CRMs and data sources, then yeah, this is going to be a good play for them. Something to bear in mind though, you mentioned it, is, is the actual licensing costs. So, beyond those core licensing, there is consumption licensing. So, you get Um, a base amount of, for example, like record routing, just looking again for a reference because there's so many different ones.

Yeah, you've got 

Tom Arbuthnot: to. 

Chris Goodwill: I 

Tom Arbuthnot: know. The good thing is, like, like the audience on the podcast is like 90 percent audio, like 5 percent video. So to all the audio listeners, you just sound like you're reading it off the top of your head, Chris. 

Chris Goodwill: Great. I sound like I know what I'm talking about, but yeah, recording, recording routing.

For example, you know, you get 50 record routes per user per month and that excludes chats, calls and text messages. So, um, that is pooled on a tenant basis, but anything beyond that, then you do get into additional licensing. Intelligent VoiceBot Minutes, again, you get 2000 minutes per user per month. Again, anything beyond that and call intelligence minutes is 6, 000 minutes per month.

So you also 

Tom Arbuthnot: pay consumption based on routing minutes in, don't you? So you either buy phone numbers from Microsoft or you bring direct routing, Azure direct routing. Azure charges you, ACS, Azure Communications Services charges you for routing calls as well. So there are a lot of, to understand your total cost of ownership and ongoing costs, there's quite a lot of consumption fees there.

It's not stopping at the 100, $110. 

Chris Goodwill: No, and that does present challenges for partners. We've spent some time recently building a pricing calculator and it's surprising how complex it is. So, You know, in the Dynamics 365 world, in the business applications world, which is new for Symity you know, we're a modern work partner.

We have all the wealth of experience in contact center. We've stepped into this apps world and to be honest, Dynamics licensing has always been You know, it's not been quite as straightforward as probably the customers would like or the partners would like. So yeah, there's this complexity. You know a colleague like Marcus Walder was saying, you know, why haven't they done sort of Amazon Connect model where it's just consumption, you know, and that's it.

So it's interesting. I think we'll see it evolve. Um, certainly in terms of The actual, um, capacities that are provided, it's, it's going to be adequate for some businesses, but where they're really driving heavy on things like, um, kind of intelligent voice bot side of things, they may need to license more, and we've seen that with some of the ISV solutions where it's been based on, say, concurrent dialogues, and you need to kind of At least predict.

I think that I think the difficult thing is that thinking about a conversation with a client today is they may not know how much they need because they they're not doing it already. This is new to them. So, um, so yeah, there's going to be some scaling there. And obviously in terms of the platform, it's built to scale.

It's not going to cause some issues. In my head, 

Tom Arbuthnot: that speaks to enterprise use cases, right? Because when you're talking to big orgs, they're like, cool, there's a bit of consumption here and there. Fine. It's part of our total budget. Whereas if you're talking to like, uh, 20 seat opportunity they're like wait a minute.

I'm going to try and make you understand to the minute what it's all going to cost me. It's like, well, we can't really, because who knows how many calls you get, how much AI you're going to use. It's very, I'm guessing you tell me, but it's probably hard to definitively predict on a consumption model. 

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, it's going to be, um, not necessarily a moving target, but it's going to be complex really.

On I think, you know, we're talking about the ISB partner ecosystem and Symity, you know, do partner with, um, Anywhere 365 and Luware. I'm very happy with those as tier one partners. And we can give, we can predict and forecast costs relatively accurately with those. And that makes it, that conversation with the client makes it easier.

And then thinking about bidding and tenders, Then where price is pivotal, then how are we going to be able to position this again? If it's in a large scale enterprise organization who are. Exhibiting, they want the investment in Microsoft to continue and they have dynamics, it's going to require some time for the messaging to seep out into the kind of client space for them to understand it and it not just be the solution over there, it wants to be forefront in their mind if it, if it's going to be, um, it's going to be successful for Microsoft.

Yeah, I guess a lot 

Tom Arbuthnot: of big customers have a pre committed spend as well in a lot of cases, so they're like. Mentally, they're like, we've already attributed this much spend on Azure. I'm guessing some of that can be spent on these, you know, Copilot Studio type scenarios or Azure scenarios. 

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. In terms of the opportunities for partners though, I kind of spoke about. Symity, we're not a business applications partner, and we do have a partnership with Expedition, actually, who are a dynamic specialist. And so, for us, actually, forming that partnership, where there's anything beyond the contact center, there's a requirement, then we're going to be able to draw on that knowledge.

Because thinking about, You know, a partner who is modern work only, then this can be quite daunting for them to step into it. I don't think it should be. I think it's just a question of being able to apply the knowledge that you've got from Microsoft Teams Telephony and Contact Center into this new world.

And actually it is a good opportunity for partners because it is going to require a reasonable amount of consultancy. And that's again where it's going to sit into the larger enterprise side of things. Rather than just a kind of plug and play. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. That's quite a big, that's quite an important separation, isn't it?

I mean, I've done webinars with Luware and, and where we've done, you know, deployment live on the webinar and had it all working and ringing. Like, like you can, you know, you can, super fast. Yeah. Cause it's all a giant SAS and it's really easy. Whereas, Dynamics 365 Concert Center doesn't feel like that.

Obviously I'm sure you can set it up in a reasonable amount of time, but the voice routing is a separate thing because you're not using Teams, but more importantly, all the, all the configuration and all the potential to take huge advantage of it. relies on that AI extensibility integration to line of business stuff.

That's really the beginning, isn't it? 

Chris Goodwill: Yeah. And, you know, this is where partners who are skilled are going to add real, real value. You know, I was thinking about, um, I've written about recently sort of, um, the intelligent kind of chatbot side of things. So, so one thing, one of the pivotal pillars really is delivering this kind of, um, driving self service.

So where possible, in fact, there was a couple of case studies I was reading this week, um, from local government organizations where they have, um, pivoted to essentially like 90 percent in terms of their digital services that they can provide. That's increased CSAT and also reduced the workload on agents.

Well, that's exactly what Dynamics 365 Contact Center is going to bring. So the, with Nuance, um, the kind of. AI driven IVR. You're going to have a case where you can pretty much, if you're plumbed into the right knowledge bases, you're going to be able to answer a lot of questions for the customer already.

Where it can't, it will then use the AI side of things to measure things like sentiment analysis and call intent to be able to add subject and topic, so it's it's looking at the cool summarization of that conversation to then be able to route it to the to the correct, um, agent, so the efficiency there is going to.

You know, if you think about the moment, we don't have platforms that do that work really well. Copilot is the engine in Dynamics 365. It's going to look at all of those things, you know, and in terms of, um, kind of workforce management and kind of planning of agent skills, it's going to deliver it to the right person.

Do you think some of 

Tom Arbuthnot: that, I'm seeing some of the ecosystem, we keep saying ecosystem because it kind of is, I guess, for anybody coming in more on the Dynamics side. So Teams certified. Contact Centers. Yes. They're doing AI stuff as well. Are you seeing some of that AI? Because I guess they have access to the API models and the API keys in Azure and everything else.

Some of that cleverness will probably come to those as well, do you think? 

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, definitely. I mean, that ecosystem won't go away. It will develop. We might see some consolidation in the marketplace with some of the smaller players. There might be acquisitions. I think it's all like Puzzle have acquired um, an AI business.

I think I saw that from the CEO today and same way Anywhere 365 have acquired DeepDesk. And so that AI capabilities is being built into those, um, ISV kind of ecosystem offerings. And we've worked with customers with Anywhere 365, for example, where they have built chatbot solutions. I think the attractive thing with the Dynamics 365 Contact Center is that it's all part of just one, one solution.

It's all in there, even though it is bits that are driving it together in terms of Nuance and Copilot. I guess you're also investing in 

Tom Arbuthnot: Microsoft's commitment and innovation in that market, right? They're, they're going to inherit. All the AI benefits as they come because they're using their own tech, obviously.

Chris Goodwill: Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, yeah, it's really exciting. I mean, seeing the, you know, stepping back in time, we'd have been thinking about how to, you know, um, go back two years, like translate to call. Transcribe a call, and then what are we going to do with it? We're going to inject it into like a CRM. That's all pretty seamless now with this platform.

It's not beyond the realms of kind of capabilities at all. It's going to be commonplace. So. You know, a chatbot conversation. So again, you know, um, I'm going to use councils just because they're in my head at the moment, but councils in terms of like environmental highways, um, kind of waste, you know, the, the, my bins being not being collected, you know, benefits, all of these things can be answered relatively easily by the chatbot.

So, okay, chatbots have been around for a while. That conversation gets more complex, requires more information. You've then got the handoff of that information, that case summarization to the human agent, so they can instantly see. What what the customer wants, so it's not repeating. We're not having to repeat what we want to the human agent, which has been a bit of a disconnection that we've had in terms of customer service.

So you can see how time is going to be saved and you can see how CSAT is going to go up. And also hopefully the agent's going to be happier if you flip it to the agent side of things, they are trying to help their customer. They can leverage Copilot like we can today to be able to surface information from the organization to be able to quickly answer those questions that the customer is asking rather than the can I call you back situation.

So there's twofold benefits there. One customer facing and one internal customer facing, if you like, the agents. So hopefully we're going to see CSAT, you know, kind of improve across the board. And that will be the case with the ecosystem solutions as well. So, you know, rather than, oh my goodness, it's a chatbot, you know, it's going to be, you know, there's going to be answers.

Yeah, our expectations 

Tom Arbuthnot: are going to get a lot higher of, you know, Having played with things like Copilot and ChatGPT of what a chatbot should be now, that the early days of them were very, you know, very on the rails, it was very, I can only answer these six questions. It should, should theoretically get a lot better.

Chris Goodwill: Yeah. And there's, um, I came across a new video actually on, um, from Microsoft on customer service side, like multilingual chatbot, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's going to be able to recognize language the same way as the Nuance kind of IVR can as well, and instead of having separate instances for a chatbot, where it's in a different language, in terms of what's connected to it, people are going to be able to converse, you know, converse smoothly with the chatbot.

So again, you can put that in any situation, but thinking about a council where it's got citizens and they're from a diverse, diverse backgrounds and speak different languages, then. Yeah, the council's going to be able to provide a much wider service digitally. It's a bit out 

Tom Arbuthnot: there, but you've probably seen the, um, the more natural voice variants, which haven't, have only hit the market in preview from Open AI.

Like that, you can see where that's going, that it's becoming much more genuinely plausible to have a conversation with a bot and then you put in multilingual and suddenly you could have a, a virtual translator scenario. It's all, yeah, very exciting what the possibilities are there. 

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, definitely. And this is only the start of it.

I think we're going to see. I don't know, in terms of language and geos, then there's some availability issues at the moment, but it's all roadmaps. And for the majority of the languages, they're beyond the core languages available today. Then the roadmap that Microsoft have shown, most of those are available by the end of the year.

And we're just going to see more and more, um, feature rich experience come to the contact center. Awesome. So 

Tom Arbuthnot: as we wrap up putting you kind of a little bit on the spot, if a customer comes to you and says, Am I well suited to what's in the box with Teams and the new Qs app? Obviously we've been waiting a little bit longer for that, but you've got, I know you've got some visibility of it.

Am I a, am I an ecosystem contact centre use case or am I a dynamics contact centre use case? How would you help them understand where they might fit? 

Chris Goodwill: I think it's going to come down to their appetite for, um, embracing Embracing the new technologies that we're talking about, that we've talked about.

For a range of organizations, they are not going to have um, data that they can draw on. For example, it might be relatively straightforward in terms of voice only. It could be omni channel, it could have some other, um, you know, they could be using social media, they could be using a chatbot, etc. It's relatively simple.

For a simpler, um, Situations where they don't necessarily want to spend time and invest in the configuration of the platform, etc. Then I think a simpler solution is probably going to fit. However, you know, I think AI is a differentiator in the marketplace for any organization that's adopting it. So we're going to see those, those organizations who, who do embrace it and to drive forward with it, um, are going to see benefits.

We've already seen kind of stats on time saving. Some of the big column, Microsoft itself, obviously has used it in its customer service environment, MSC. There's a shipping company as well. Some of the bigger case studies that have come out and they will have been on kind of virtually like DCCP customer service.

Now dynamics, you know, there is there is a path to be able to move to to the new SKUs, but um, but yeah, I think it is a large and enterprise play, um, or for an organization that's going to grow, as we know, and they have already put the foundations in place in terms of Microsoft technologies and want to drive this forward.

So, yeah, we've got, we've got a couple of situations. We've also got, you mentioned the kind of QsTeams app as well, which is going to come and probably fill some of that lower end kind of, requirements for contact centerl. 

So there's a low play, there's a medium ground where the customers looking to probably use Omnichannel, do a few bits and pieces, and then there's kind of full bore, and yeah, we genuinely think that Microsoft are on You know, this is, this is an important play. Um, like you mentioned, kind of CEO Satya has mentioned it in kind of keynote speech and it is an investment path they're going to be on.

They're going to go for a bigger, bigger kind of slice of the, of the marketplace. So yeah, exciting times. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Chris, well, thanks for giving us that kind of insight more from, from the ground with the customers. People want to find out more. I know you're doing loads on LinkedIn around Dynamics 365 Content Center.

Yeah, 

Chris Goodwill: just, uh, yeah, look me up on, um, on LinkedIn and connect. Always happy to connect with people. I'm always looking for new content. either from Microsoft, um, or elsewhere in the community where other peers are putting together content. I've created a dedicated LinkedIn group which is called Dynamics 365 Contact Center Professionals.

So if anyone wants to join that, I've only been going for like two or three weeks. It was like, I sent the thing out saying it was 300 members on Friday, it's now 400. So there's people joining, and yeah, it's just a great place to, you know, it's not about promotion of the organization. It's about promotion of the product and knowledge, um, and just off the back of that, then, you know, Microsoft themselves have some dedicated pages for the product.

Do look at those, subscribe to their newsletters. If you're a modern work partner, and you're thinking about stepping into the space, yeah, it does require some time and effort, but. You know, the resources are going to be there. There's technical deep dives actually kicking off, um, this month. There's six of them on contact center modernization run by Microsoft.

So again, look those up or look at some of my posts. You'll find the links to register. But yeah, always happy to connect with people, Tom. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Chris, thanks for joining the pod. Really appreciate your point of view and, uh, I think we'll give it a little bit of time and then maybe we can pull in one of your, uh, your customers and get a bit of a, uh, a Chris and customer perspective.

Chris Goodwill: Yeah, that'd be great. Right. Thanks a lot. Thanks.