Study Notes for Exam MB-230: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service (Part 1)

Continuous Growth

2019 is on its way to say goodbyes to the world and professionals round the globe are hurrying to achieve their set goal as much as they can before the year ends. Speaking of professionals working with Microsoft technologies and business apps, I have seen more people sharing their passed certification links on LinkedIn in the second half of 2019 than the first half.

I recently passed the Microsoft Certification Exam MB-230: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and I was approached by some people to guide them on how to prepare for the exam. Instead of a 1-on-1 sharing, I thought a better approach will be to write a post about it and share it with them. So without further ado, here are my notes and tips on how to prepare for the said exam.

Strategy & Tips:

Assuming that you have some level of experience working with MS Dynamics Customer Service module and assuming you are working full-time, 40 hours a week, I will suggest you to schedule your exam at least 3 weeks ahead your prep start time. You may be able to do it earlier but this is only my suggestion.

The first things you must do to start your prep is to visit the MB-230 Exam page and download the Skills requirements for the exam. You may also download it from here. Make sure you study each and every topic in the skills requirements document when you start studying.

Also, check the Two ways to prepare on the MB-230 Exam page and check the Learning Path on the Online-Free tab (I assume you are like me and like the free resources).

You must book at least 2 hours daily on week days and 4 hours at least on weekends (18 hours per week at least). That will be a total of 54 hours for you to prepare for the exam (approximate estimations).

Make sure you write (Not Type) your notes when you study. You may download the notes I have shared but I will recommend you to print them and write your own notes on top/sides/bottom of my notes for your ease.

Create a Trial instance for Dynamics 365 Customer Service module and make sure you practice each and every area of the CS module.

Study Resources

Customer Service Overview (Dynamics 365 Customer Service)

Apply goal management to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement - Learn

Work with cases in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service - Learn

Voice of the Customer for Dynamics 365 - Learn

Work with entitlements and service level agreements in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service…

Work with Knowledge Management Solutions in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service - Learn

What's new in Dynamics 365 Customer Service

https://oxa.microsoft.com/courses/course-v1:Microsoft+MB-230.1+2019_T1/course/

Good 8 hour (at least) Customer Service Course on OpenEdx

Course | MB-230.1 | Microsoft Learning

Study Notes:

The notes below are not very extensive but should be able to give you a good grip on the exam topics.

The HOW-TOs:

One type of questions that I faced during the exams were the How-To questions. This involves, the steps, navigation and command/button options. Make sure you familiarize yourself with these (hate to say that but yes you might have to memorize them).

Following is my list of the How-To areas that you must know the steps by heart.

1. How to create an SLA? (Steps)
2. How to create SLA Item?
3. How to configure the Case-Routing Rule? (Steps)
4. How to configure the Auto-Case Creation Rule? (Steps)
5. How to configure Queues?
6. How to/Steps for Releasing a Queue item?
7. What happens when one release a Queue item? Where does the Item go? (Deleted, removed, etc.)
8. How to/Steps for Picking up a Queue item?
9. How to enable the Knowledge Base Articles Search on the Entities?
10. How to configure the Relevance Search?
11. How to configure goals?
12. How to merge cases?
13. How to configure the T1/T2 Interactive Dashboards?
14. How to configure Single Stream vs Multi-Steam dashboard?
15. How to run reports from Case Entity View?
16. How to view Entity specific Dashboards?
17. How to configure Charts?
18. How to configure Entitlements?
19. How to configure Voice of Customer forms for feedback?
20. How to configure Voice of Customer responses?
21. How to publish a Knowledge-Base article (end-to-end publishing cycle)?
22. How to configure Business Process Flows?

Dashboards:

• You can only add 6 components on a regular Dashboard in the out-of-the-box configuration unless you:

1. Use Interactive Dashboards
2. Customize with PowerShell to increase the default limit.

• Each container is called a component
• Custom Dashboard

1. Organization Owned
2. User owned (can be shared with other users) Note: if a user account is disabled, the user has user-owned dashboards that have been shared with other users, those dashboards will no longer be available to the users they were shared with.

• Customize System Dashboard

1. Insert Charts
2. Insert Lists
3. Insert Relationship assistance
4. Insert IFrame
5. Insert web resource

• Customize Personal Dashboard — All of the above 5 + “Add a Power BI Tile” option. Allow PowerBI Visualization Embedding has to be set to Yes in the System Settings. This is not by default.
• Interactive Dashboards:

Interactive Dashboards are different from other dashboards → give a visual representation of data associated with 1 entity.

Two types:

1. Multi-Stream Dashboards

• Multiple streams on the dashboard.
• Real time Data Display
• 1 Stream → 1 Entity (but can have multiple streams of different entities)
• Visual Filter on a row on top and the data streams below them

2. Single-Stream Dashboards

• Real time data display
• Data is displayed from 1 Entity Only (only 1 stream)
• More components can be added to Single-Stream entity than Multi-Stream Entity
• Data Stream on the Left while Visual Filters and tiles on the right

You can modify the colors of fields when rendering your Charts (try this)

Reports:

Some OOTB Case reports are:

1. Neglected Case Report
2. Service Activity Volume Report (important to remember)

• Review pattern in Service activity volume
• Duration or the number of service activities grouped by services, resources, time periods and additional criteria

3. Activities Report

• View all activities associated with support cases such as phone calls, tasks, emails, appointments, and case resolution

Reports can be started as a New Report or from an existing report

You have to select the primary record type and secondary record type

Report Filtering criteria needs to be set first

Following are the report formats available OOTB:

Charts:

Two types:

1. System Charts

• Created by System Administrator or System Customizer
• Available to all users in the organization

1. Personal Charts

• Similar to System Charts
• Are available via classic menus & interactive Menus (was supposed to happen in the next release. Check it)
• Personal charts are associated with the user who created them
• Can be shared with other users
• Personal Charts (any chart) definition can be exported and re-imported by the System Administrator to build a System Chart.
• Tag and Doughnut charts are not available in personal charts

Chart Types:

1. Column, Stacked Column, 100% Stacked Column
2. Bar, Stacked Bar, 100% Stacked Bar
3. Area, Stacked Area, 100% Stacked Area
4. Line
5. Pie
6. Funnel
7. Tag
8. Doughnut

Horizontal (Category) Axis

• Displays either numeric or non-numeric values
• Can have up to two categories listed

Vertical (Legend Entry) Axis

• Only Numeric Value: You can

1. Avg
2. Count All
3. Sum
4. Count Non Empty
5. Max
6. Min

• If you choose non-numeric value for he Vertical Series:

1. Count All
2. Count Non-Empty

Rules:

• Rules can be created to only show the top or bottom few records in the chart

• You can select this from both the menus and while building the chart itself

Tip: Make sure you try to create different personal and system charts and get yourself familiarized with the above options.

Goals:

• Provides daily calculation to show progress towards a specific objective
• Actual vs In Progress values against a target
• Goals Results can be displayed in → Charts, Dashboards, Reports

Time Period

• Time period settings control the span of time for which the goal is calculated, (one week, one quarter or to a specific date)
• Custom time periods can be manually entered
• Fiscal periods can be set to reflect the fiscal periods configured for the organization
• If the fiscal period settings are updated for the organization, an additional icon will appear within the goal to “Align with Fiscal Period”

Goal Owner & Goal Manager

The User or Team populated in Goal Owner field is responsible for meeting the Goal

This fields is all that is needed to make the calculations specific to the user or team for the goal.

The user or team populated in the Goal Manager Field is responsible for managing the goal

Goal Metric

Every goal has a single goal metric which can be reused for multiple goals.

The Goal Metric can be set to either :

1. Count (Count the records, e.g. count the number of cases that fulfills a condition)
2. Amount (Sum the amount)

• Roll-up Fields are created for the actual and in-progress values to specify which fields should be used to determine which records should be included towards the goal progress.

Note: These roll-up fields are different (have nothing related) to the roll-up field type in Dynamics 365

Goal Criteria

• Goal Criteria Section determines which records will be considered for the goal
• The Record Set for Rollup option can filter to

1. records owned by the goal owner or
2. include all records in the system that meet the criteria regardless of owner

• Rollup Only From Child Records is used in the case of parent goals. This determines if the parent goal has values of its own or is simply the combined total of its child goals. (i.e. if this option is selected than the parent goal value will sum up the values from the child goals)
• This could be the scenario where the goal of the Customer Service Manager (CSM) is dependent on the indivifual goals associated with the Customer Service Representatives (CSR). Each CSR will have its own goal (say no. of cases resolved) and therefore can have its own Goal Target. The CSM’s Target will be different and the goal achievement will depend upon the rollup of individual goals progress of the CSR’s goals. (Only if the Rollup From Child Records is selected)

Rollup Queries

• Advanced Find Style Query
• Provides very specific filters over what records are measured in the Actual and In-Progress totals

Target Values

• Target values are manually entered and updated
• Used in “Percentage Achieved Total” → shows the progress towards the goal
• In-Progress Values → Often open records such as

1. Open Cases
2. Open Tasks

Actual Values

Usually closed records → Actual progress that counts towards desired target such as

1. Resolved Cases or
2. Completed Tasks

Parent-Child Goals

• Child goals are individual goals on their own
• Child goals contribute to the totals of their parent goals
• One Goal can be Simultaneously a Parent and a Child Goal (see Goals G2 and G3 in the picture on the left)
• If parent Goal is deleted, child Goal is not deleted
• A child goal must have the same Time Period as its Parent Goal
• An example of the parent-child goals will be individual goals for each customer service representative and a parent goal that rolls up the totals to goal for the customer service manager
• Goals are calculated (rolled up) once per day, they are not calculated in real-time
• Goals can be manually calculated by the user

Consideration: If same data is used in multiple goals, it can distort your resulting numbers so be mindful of the distribution of the goals. This is known as Double-Counting

To be continued…