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May 8, 2025

Improving agent efficiency: A guide to Unified Routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service

In the busy world of customer service, efficiency is a priority. Dynamics 365 Customer Service, an add-on to Dynamics 365, stands out as a robust solution for businesses aiming to effectively manage their customer interactions.

Following our recent article on Dynamics 365 Customer Service (and the related product, Dynamics 365 Contact Center), I’ll now expand on its key feature that’s revolutionizing how inquiries reach your agents: Unified Routing.

The evolution of query routing

Before Unified Routing, managing the flow of customer queries within Dynamics 365 could feel, well, less than unified. Dynamics 365 Sales lacked routing capabilities altogether. Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduced some basic routing, which was very limited.

The first simple routing system sent customer inquiries to dedicated queues. It categorized them by case records and required consultants to manually select each case. It was a time-consuming process that was not focused on optimal customer outcomes.

Fortunately, those times are over, and both applications – Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service (as well as D365 Contact Center) – now have advanced work distribution engines. Today, we’ll focus on the capabilities within Customer Service.

How does Unified Routing work?

Unified Routing revolutionizes the way work is managed and distributed to customer service agents. It uses AI to go beyond simple keyword matching. The feature analyzes the nuances of each inquiry, understanding the topic and identifying real-time sentiment of the conversation. Then, it intelligently assigns the case to the agent best equipped to handle it, taking into account factors like:

Skills: matching the inquiry's needs with the agent's expertise.
Availability: ensuring agents aren't overloaded and are ready to assist.
Capacity: balancing workloads effectively across the team.
Communication channel: optimizing responses based on how the customer reached out.

This intelligent distribution not only balances the volume of inquiries between agents and makes it easier to understand the overall demand but also allows for more efficient and personalized customer interactions.

Workstreams

Just like in the past, we can define and filter the inquiries that are to be assigned to agents. As a new feature, the workstream became the configuration center for managing different types of inquiries. Here, we can define all the necessary rules and conditions for how cases are distributed, e.g. according to the skills needed to solve a particular problem. We can also dynamically update the requirements as our needs evolve.

Here we also set the distribution criteria and agent capacity. This capacity is defined by the work item type – each one can have its own or even several capacity profiles.

We can dynamically set or modify how many cases of different types (or across different communication channels like email and chat) an agent can handle at a time. For example, we can state that they can simultaneously handle 3 cases, 2 emails and 1 chat thread.

The workstream also allows us to determine if an AI agent should initially engage with the customer and how new task notifications are presented to your team.

Routing criteria

There are many ways to distribute work via Unified Routing.

Queue-based routing

The standard and simplest method is directing inquiries to queues, which the system does automatically at the workstream level.

Condition-based routing

We can enrich our assignment criteria, e.g. with required skills, using exact match or close match modes. The system will then only consider agents meeting our conditions.

Sentiment-based routing

Another routing method is assignment based on sentiment. If we know how our employees handle stress, we can, for example, route a potentially challenging conversation to an agent known for their composure.

Effort-based routing

We can also route queries based on the task’s time & effort consumption. This would mean that, for example, the system will avoid assigning tasks that an agent likely won’t be able to complete within their workday.

Preferred agent routing

Cases can also be assigned by customers’ preferred agents. If our customer has a dedicated contact, the system will consider this and try to assign the inquiry to them first.

All these methods are supported by AI models that learn from your historical data, continuously refining and improving the accuracy of query distribution based on your defined parameters.

Assignment criteria

Once a case reaches the target queue, the system identifies the best-suited agent based on your defined assignment criteria. But what if more than one specialist meets your conditions? There are also several ways to distribute work here. These are:

Capacity - the task is assigned to the agent with the lowest current workload.
Advanced round robin - work is distributed sequentially, considering the availability and capacity of the identified agents.
Activity - the agent who has been waiting the longest for a new inquiry receives the next one.

These methods are also highly customizable, allowing you to implement your own rules, for example, prioritization, ensuring that VIP customer inquiries are always handled first.

Licensing

As with any Microsoft product, understanding licensing can be difficult. Here’s a simplified overview of Unified Routing availability within Dynamics 365:

Customer Service Enterprise provides routing of 50 records/user/month for entities within D365
Customer Service Premium and all Contact Center icenses provide unlimited routing of customer interactions (chat, voice, text message) and 50 records/user/month for other entities.
Unified Routing add-on packs: if you plan to exceed the above limits, you can purchase additional capacity, increasing the query pool by 10k records/month.

What are the benefits of Unified Routing in Dynamics 365?

Unified Routing is aimed at enhancing and streamlining D365 Customer Service and D365 Contact Center functionalities. The proper use of its components reduces customers’ waiting time and speeds up query resolution, increasing their satisfaction.

From the agent’s perspective, the feature makes work easier with a unified interface and improves efficiency with automated query assignment. This allows them to focus on what they do best – helping customers.

Improve your customer service capabilities

Unified Routing, combined with the upcoming Workforce Management module, is redefining the way customer service teams work. By improving both agent and customer experiences, Dynamics 365 is setting a new standard. This puts pressure on competing solutions that are not as cost-effective or feature-rich, or lack compatibility with other products like D365 Customer Service has with D365 Sales and D365 Customer Insights.

Ready to expand your customer service capabilities? Contact us today to explore which Dynamics 365 solution, powered by the intelligence of Unified Routing, is best for your business. We’re here to guide you through implementation and help you begin a new era of customer excellence.

Real results

Discover how PKO Leasing saves 550+ hours monthly with Dynamics 365 Contact Center.