Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – Phone Call Tagging…You’re It!
One of the many issues facing businesses is not only how to track different types of activities with their contacts and accounts, but “what” was the context of this activity. One of the most common activities in Dynamics 365 is the phone call. While the phone call activity does provide a subject field, this field is a free text field that allows the agent or user to enter anything they would like into this field…and as we know users love typing out a subject in their activities, wink, wink. Dynamics 365 Sales has also provided a couple of other out of the box fields: Category & Sub-Category.
Again, the problem with these fields is that they are free text fields which leaves way too much “creativity” for the agent, and more likely they will leave it empty if it’s not required. If one is building an activity report or a query to extract phone calls on let’s say “billing questions”, then one of these fields containing “billing” can be selected. It becomes difficult to track the context of the phone call made or received.
What if one could “Tag” the phone call with pre-defined subjects, categories, #hashtags?
Tag…you’re it! The multi-select option set field is a relatively newer field type in Dynamics 365 version 9.x, but it can be very useful in situations like this to help solve such challenges. By adding a new custom field of type multi-select to the phone call form, a useful feature can be achieved to allow “categorizing” phone calls by tagging them. Here, we are defining a new field called “Tag” with options for agents to select for any phone call activities.
Once defined this field for the Phone Call form, then the agents will be able to select multiple options from the option set for each phone call record.
By using a multi-select field, if an agent discusses various topics on the phone call activity, then this will allow them to choose multiple “tags” for this activity. Now by adding tags to the phone call activity, we would be able to build reports, views or Power BI based on these tags to present users with a filtered set of phone calls based on the context of the conversation of the call! Don’t worry…we won’t report it to the authorities.
Following this path it becomes much easier to view the context of each of the phone calls to know what the possible reason for the phone call activity was for this interaction.
So now that you have learned how to tag your phone calls…get to tagging! Tag, YOU ARE IT!