Dynamics 365 – Send a Customer Case with Azure SMS

One of the most common customer service practices is to notify the customer when they have submitted a new incident with the incident number and a message about the expected resolution time.  Historically this was done with an email sent to the customer’s email address for their tracking purposes, but that was so 2010!  It’s 2024, so a lot of customers would prefer to track the progress of their incident with an Azure SMS text message.

We can accomplish this using some of the tools in our Power Toolbox.

Dynamics 365 CE + Power Automate + Azure SMS

Of course our trigger for this will be creating or updating a case record in our Dynamics 365 Customer Service application.

Once our Power Automate flow has been triggered, we simply need to get our customer contact record for our case and pass this along to our Send SMS connector in our flow.

Now that we have established “who” we want to message and “what” we want to message them in our SMS, we need a way to deliver our message with SMS.  Although there are other SMS connectors available for Power Automate like Twilio or TeleSign, we will be using an MS Azure Communication Service to send our SMS from Power Automate.  Communication Services is a new feature in Azure and at the time of this blog writing is in Preview.  The Azure Communication Service requires that you “Get a Phone Number” with Azure if your subscription supports this feature.  This will be the phone number your message is sent from to the customer.  When selecting a phone number, you can select the type “plan” to use for sending your messages.  Currently only U.S. numbers supported.

You will need to setup a new communication service in Azure to handle the sending of your SMS message.  Once you have setup your communication service in Azure, then you will add a connection to the Send SMS step in your Power Automate flow to use the connection you have created by providing a connection name and connection string.

Now you are ready to notify your customers by SMS about their Cases from your D365 Customer Service and Power Automate.  They will be notified anytime a Case is created or updated…of course you may want to give them an opt out option, but that is another topic for another day.