Microsoft Co-pilot: Revolutionising Housing Associations?

There’s lots of talk about Microsoft co-pilot and in light of the Housing Ombudsman’s press release ‘Ombudsman brands Knowledge and Information Management as ‘closest thing to a silver bullet’ for social housing’ we’ll look at what it is and how it can be used in Dynamics to improve the information colleagues have access to.

What is co-pilot?

Microsoft co-pilot is a new feature thats being rolled out across most of the Microsoft ecosystem and helps you work faster and easier by using artificial intelligence (AI). It can understand what you want to do and help you with tasks like writing, creating presentations, finding information, and more. You can use natural language to ask it questions or give it commands, and it will respond with suggestions or actions. For example, you can say “create a summary of this document” or “find me the latest sales report” and co-pilot will do it for you. Co-pilot works with the Microsoft 365 apps you already use, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, etc. This is all good stuff but how has this functionality been added to Dynamics 365 Customer Service?

How does it work with Dynamics 365 Customer Service?

Copilot can help customer service teams resolve customer issues more quickly and efficiently. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand and interpret customer inquiries and suggest relevant solutions to the agent. Its designed to improve the overall customer experience by

• Reducing the time customers spend waiting for assistance
• Providing more accurate and consistent responses to enquiries.
• Helping customer service teams to be more productive by automating certain tasks and allowing them to focus on more complex issues.

For example it can automatically generating case details, suggest knowledge articles to the agent, and even predict the likelihood of a customer being satisfied with a proposed solution.

How can it help Housing Associations?

1. Help resolve complex issues by using AI and knowledge mining to find and surface relevant information from various sources, such as documents, emails, or websites. Saving time on manual searches when colleagues are in contact with customers or following up on an enquiry.
2. Enable them to innovate and adapt by using AI and low-code/no-code tools to create and modify apps, workflows, or chatbots without requiring coding or technical skills. This reduces costs by enabling housing associations to complete more technical changes in house.
3. Co-pilot could help housing associations comply with regulations and standards by using AI and security features to protect customer data, ensure data quality, and audit service activities.
4. Prevent customer issues by using AI and predictive analytics to identify and address potential problems before they escalate or affect customer satisfaction. Enabling HA’s to stay on the right side of the regulator and provide a great customer service. It also reduces the costs related to fire fighting issues (eg: staff time and compensation)
5. Help reduce costs by using AI and automation to eliminate redundant or unnecessary tasks, such as data entry, verification, or validation, and improve service quality and efficiency

What are the challenges?

Some possible key challenges for housing associations trying to implement co-pilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service are:

• Data quality and integration: Housing associations need to ensure that their data is accurate, complete, and consistent across different sources and systems, and that they can integrate their data with co-pilot and other Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps.
• Change management and adoption: Housing associations need to manage the change in their service processes and culture, and ensure that their agents and customers are aware of and comfortable with using co-pilot and its features.
• Security and compliance: Housing associations need to protect their customer data and comply with relevant regulations and standards, such as GDPR, and ensure that co-pilot and other Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps meet their security and compliance requirements.
• Customisation and scalability: Housing associations need to customise co-pilot to suit their specific needs and preferences, such as language, tone, or style, and ensure that co-pilot can scale with their service volume and complexity.
• Evaluation and improvement: Housing associations need to evaluate the performance and impact of co-pilot on their service outcomes and customer satisfaction, and identify areas for improvement or enhancement.

How can these be resolved?

All this can be a game changer for housing associations who use co-pilot in Dynamics 365 or the rest of the Microsoft stack (Word, Excel etc). We’ve looked at some of the challenges but how could they be resolved. E&F Solutions follow a simple model to help you understand your needs and then the technology that can support those needs.

1. Understand your strategic drivers – What is your HA trying to achieve?
2. What processes support those drivers? – Map them out with stackholders
3. What data supports those processes? – What needs to be logged, checked, edited etc during those processes
4. What technology supports that process? – is co-pilot (other Microsoft technologies) the right fit?
5. Take it slowly – yep I said it, despite the constant drive to do things quickly this type of technology needs some serious thought and time put in initially so when you are ready to scale you’ll be building on solid foundations. Go for small processes at first so colleagues and customers feel comfortable when you get more ambitious and tavkle those larger more complex ones.

Resources:

Use Copilot features in Customer Service | Microsoft Learn