Front pagesponsored · Microsoft
Contact Center39m · 13:31 GMT · 3 min read
Microsoft D365: The Contact Center That Learns with Your Business
What does it take to make AI useful in the contact center, not just impressive in a demo? .
In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Darya Mazandarany, Corporate VP, Dynamics 365 Contact Center at Microsoft, about the contact center that learns with your business. They discuss how service organizations can move past fragmented customer data, disconnected operations and AI that performs well in demos but struggles in production.
Starting with data, not the platform
Most contact center transformations focus on consolidating channels or reducing costs. Microsoft’s strategy starts instead with a single, governed data layer. Darya explains that Microsoft’s advantage lies in its access to business collaboration data: Teams messages and meetings, SharePoint documents, and email through Exchange and Outlook. Combining this with business systems of record creates the context that fuels AI across the contact center. That supports both human-to-AI interactions and human-to-human interactions with AI assistance.
Darya gives an example. A decision such as whether to offer a customer an extra discount rarely happens in the CRM or contact center. It happens in meetings, emails and chats. Microsoft’s platform can draw on that back-office context to inform front-office service. The contact center also builds its own context graph from every interaction, so each conversation can improve on the last.
Meeting enterprises where they are
Rob asks whether a unified data layer is a realistic ask for enterprises that have kept their systems separate for years. Many carry fragmentation and technical debt. Darya says Microsoft recognizes that most contact centers run multiple contact center systems, CRMs and systems of record. Its response is a “complete but composable” approach that works with what customers already have.
From application choice to platform decision
The industry has long framed this as CRM versus contact center. Darya says customers are now approaching it as a platform decision, often describing their search as one for an AI platform or a customer experience platform. Many are evaluating frontier AI labs and other vendors alongside Microsoft. She argues that context is what makes AI effective. She also points to Microsoft’s record in security, compliance and governance as a factor in those decisions. Rob adds that many organizations want to avoid layering bolt-on tools on top of one another, after a year of rapidly deployed AI products.
What lasts and what doesn’t
On durability, Darya expects core channels to remain. She sees voice regaining ground as AI removes hold times and enables hands-free service. The longer-term value, in her view, sits in the data layer, context and intelligence that help a business understand what a customer is trying to do in the moment. She describes a customer who abandons a product search on a website and then contacts support. Knowing that history helps the agent resolve the issue faster and can improve measures such as NPS and CSAT.
A low-friction way to start
For organizations without a mature, unified data foundation, Darya recommends starting with Microsoft’s real-time voice agent. Voice is one of the most challenging channels to run and, for most companies, the main channel of engagement. The voice agent does not require customers to adopt Microsoft’s CCaaS platform or CRM. It can attach to an existing CCaaS or on-premises system and whichever CRM is in place. Darya says organizations can see business outcomes within weeks to months, then decide how far and how quickly to go.
Rob closes on the point that modernization is no longer only about replacing one platform with another. It depends on whether organizations can build a trusted layer of context that AI agents and business systems share. The aim is insights that change how work gets done.
To learn more, visit Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
