Think back to the last time you were in contact with your insurance company, your telephone provider, or an online mail order company. You'd probably prefer to solve your problem quickly yourself - but instead, you encounter primitive chatbots or a maze of automated telephone menus.

And when you finally do want to speak to someone, you end up in long queues, are put on hold several times and have to explain your request again and again.

These service gaps cost companies hard cash. With self-service deflection rates of less than 45%, companies miss the opportunity to resolve issues efficiently, leading to an excessive workload for service employees. And this is where the next crisis comes in: the turnover rate of service employees is up to 45%.

The financial impact of inefficient customer service is significant: it is estimated to cost around 3.7 trillion dollars a year worldwide. Where does the service gap come from? It is largely due to the existing infrastructures in contact centers, which cause numerous points of friction and inefficiencies.

The main problems lie in:

• Outdated technologies that lead to slow response times and limited scalability
• Isolated systems that prevent the flow of information between channels
• Lack of automation and manual processing of simple requests
• Unstructured and incomplete customer data, which makes personalization and decision-making processes more difficult

All in all, these factors increase your operating costs and impair service quality and customer satisfaction. This is exactly what a Contact Center as a Service solves. It combines all the important functions that modern customer service needs to work efficiently and in a customer-oriented manner. When all these components interlock, the result is a seamless end-to-end service solution.

The Dynamics 365 Contact Center is provided via Microsoft Azure and enables omnichannel interactions via Azure Communication Services - including voice, SMS, web chat, social media, WhatsApp, and Microsoft Teams.

At the same time, the Power Platform with low-code tools and automation functions ensures that companies can implement individual adaptations and workflows themselves. Thanks to a large number of preconfigured and customizable connectors, Microsoft CCaaS can also be integrated into existing third-party CRM, ERP, or ticketing systems.

The Dynamics 365 Contact Center offers a 360-degree view of the customer by centralizing all interactions and providing them in a unified agent workspace.

The increasing integration of generative AI in the contact center not only brings efficiency gains, but also new security and data protection requirements. Companies are rightly asking themselves questions: How secure is customer and company data? Where is it processed? And how does Microsoft ensure that sensitive information does not flow into public AI models?

Microsoft addresses these concerns with a multi-level security architecture based on data isolation, transparency and global compliance

• Company data remains protected: Microsoft's generative AI in Copilot for Service runs in a closed system that does not use customer data to train public AI models.
• Data processing in secure Microsoft data centers: All data is processed in ISO 27001 and GDPR-compliant Azure regions - within the EU or in specific countries on request to comply with data protection guidelines.
• Zero Trust security model: Access to sensitive data is based on multi-level authentication, identity management and role-based authorizations - only authorized users can access certain information.
• Encryption at all levels: Customer data is encrypted end-to-end during storage and transmission and additionally secured by Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
• Real-time monitoring and compliance: AI-supported security analyses detect suspicious activities at an early stage and ensure automatic threat prevention. Companies also have full control over audit logs, data protection guidelines and governance tools.

Microsoft is a leader in cloud security and AI-powered data protection, so companies automatically benefit from a highly scalable, robust security infrastructure - without having to develop or manage complex security architectures themselves.

They are underpinned by Microsoft's own transformation in the support area. With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft was able to achieve 20% fewer misroutes, a 31% higher first-time resolution rate and up to 16% faster processing of chat requests. At the same time, support teams are able to process more requests. These figures show: AI and automation are not a topic for the future - they are already delivering measurable success today.

Curious about how your company can benefit from this? There are various ways with HSO: from proof-of-concept projects and pilot applications in individual areas to company-wide implementation - we support you in using the solution strategically. Our approach ensures that you benefit from the added value quickly, without long implementation times.

It doesn't matter whether you are already deeply rooted in the Microsoft ecosystem or use an existing contact center or CRM solution. Thanks to Azure Communication Services and the Power Platform, omnichannel functions, automation and AI-supported routing can be flexibly integrated into your existing IT landscape. This means you can also introduce Microsoft CCaaS gradually without replacing existing systems.

Let's find out together how your company can best benefit from Microsoft CCaaS. Contact us for a personal consultation or a live demo and find out how you can make your customer service more efficient, intelligent and future-proof.