Enhance customer service with advanced prioritization
Efficient workload management is essential in customer service environments where diverse customer interactions flow through multiple channels. With advanced prioritization capabilities in Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Dynamics 365 Customer Service, organizations can provide tiered service levels based on customer value, respond to customer sentiment, and ensure adherence to SLAs.
Why use advanced prioritization?
Prioritization in Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers organizations to:
- Offer dynamically tiered service levels: Traditionally, SLA commitments in contact centers were enforced through entitlements and queue-specific configurations. With cross-queue prioritization, organizations can now centrally define and dynamically enforce service tiers based on real-time factors like customer value, sentiment, or business context. This approach makes it easier to configure, scale, and adjust prioritization rules across queues, reducing administrative overhead while improving consistency and responsiveness.
- React to SLAs dynamically: Contact centers can use prioritization rules to meet time-sensitive commitments across queues.
These capabilities extend across multiple configuration points, including our newest offering to prioritize work across contact center queues.
Contact center level prioritization
Contact center or “cross-queue” prioritization provides flexibility in routing and enhances business outcomes by:
- Enabling channel-level priorities: Respond to voice calls first, then chat conversations, then cases.
- Supporting business priorities: Prioritize refund queues over sales inquiry queues to align with organizational goals.
The second type of prioritization occurs within a queue for added control over SLA commitment, urgency, sentiment and so on.
Advanced prioritization business scenarios
Example 1: Prioritize by customer channel
Consider a scenario where a customer service team prioritizes interactions across channels. The voice channel is the most urgent channel, followed by chat, and then case. The administrator sets the queue priority attribute to reflect these priorities, so agents receive phone calls immediately.
Example 2: Prioritize by customer and inquiry type
A company, Contoso Coffee, operates four queues:
- VIP Case Queue (Priority: 1)
- Premium Support Queue (Priority: 2)
- General Support Queue, prioritized by severity (Priority: 3)
- Billing Inquiries Queue (Priority: 4)
Agents handle work items using the following process:
- Agents handle VIP cases first to ensure top-tier customers receive white-glove support.
- Once agents clear the VIP items, the system evaluates Premium Support cases next.
- Within General Support, the system evaluate cases for severity and prioritizes high severity cases (such as service outages or urgent account issues) above routine queries.
- In the Billing Inquiries queue, the system applies layered rules:
- Cases involving overdue bills are flagged for immediate attention, as they often indicate payment barriers such as disputes, failed transactions, or missing billing information.
- These cases take priority over in-SLA cases, which may involve scheduled payments, invoice copies, or non-urgent queries.
With advanced prioritization capabilities in Customer Service and Contact Center, businesses can align routing decisions with customer and business priorities. Whether it’s assigning channel-level priorities or addressing specific business needs, these capabilities provide scalability and flexibility for modern customer service operations.
Learn more
Watch a quick video introduction.
For more details on prioritization options in unified routing and how to use them, read the documentation: Assignment methods for queues | Microsoft Learn
