Microsoft has expanded its onlineMeeting Graph API to enhance CX with a new virtual waiting room, and native browser join for clients.
The virtual waiting room feature connects to Microsoft Teams, offering a space for customers to relax as they wait to engage with a business representative.
With video communication growing in popularity – especially across the healthcare, finance, and retail sectors – this innovation allows companies to keep customers engaged, sharing industry messaging with those who wait.
For companies that harness the Dynamics 365 Service platform or have partnered with a CCaaS vendor that integrates with Teams, embedding the new API into the video handling workflow is relatively straightforward.
What’s more, it helps manage customer expectations, going beyond the traditional approach to video, where customers arrive at an appointment or enter a queue without any reassurance of when the interaction will begin.
Evan Westenberger, Regulated Industry Marketing Lead for Dynamics 365, built on this point in a Microsoft blog. He said:
With the enhanced waiting room feature designed for business-to-consumer scenarios, clients joining an appointment enter a dedicated virtual waiting room with industry-specific messaging.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has also introduced a Browser Join innovation, which allows users to kickstart virtual appointments with a single click, lowering customer effort and increasing convenience.
For industries like healthcare, which deals with many vulnerable customers, such a solution is significant to increasing the take-up of telehealth.
Indeed, there is no effort on the part of customers in downloading and installing Microsoft Teams. Instead, they can simply follow a link from their browser and enter the virtual waiting room.
Meanwhile, companies can also better manage virtual appointments through the API, using Teams to add, update, and delete customer conversations.
The official public preview for the renamed “Virtual Appointment Graph API” will come in June 2022 and follows several recent additions to the Microsoft CX stack.
Many of these innovations were thrust into the public sphere at the recent Microsoft Build conference, including self-service BI to simplify customer data analysis.
