Gain valuable insight into customer service performance with one simple field!

You often hear the phrase that it’s the little things that make a big difference. In this post I’m going to show you how a simple calculated field showing the number of days it has taken to resolve a Case can help you to quickly identify trends and pinpoint areas for service improvement.

First of all let’s create the field. To do this go to your solution, navigate to the Case entity and select Add Field.

I’m going to call the field No. Days to Resolve. Data type is decimal number and it’s a calculated field.

Once the field has been saved, I need to setup the calculation. In the calculation, I want to set a condition to only perform the calculation for Cases that have a status of Resolved.

Moving onto the calculation, I want to calculate the difference in days between the Created On date and Modified On date.

Once that’s done I can save and close the calculation form.

Now I can add the field to the Case form and Resolved Cases view so users can easily see how long it has taken to resolve a Case.

Something to point out here is that this calculation is the total number of calendar days it has taken to resolve a Case i.e. not number of working days. This may not be ideal for everyone but personally, given the level of insight this field can provide, I think it’s good enough.

Now the real power of this field is when I start to use for analysis. The dashboard below gives you some examples of how I’ve used this field generate insights into service level performance.

If we take the example of Average No. of Days to Resolve by Owner, straight away this chart highlights that there’s a big difference in resolution timescales for each team member which prompts the following questions:

  • Do we need to do more training with certain team members?
  • Is there inconsistency in our case resolution process i.e. is each team member dealing with cases in their own way rather than following a defined process?
  • Are some team members perhaps cherry picking easier cases to work on?
  • Are we assigning certain Case types to the wrong subject matter experts?

You see just how many questions this one example has prompted! These are questions I might not have considered without the data being in front of me. Now I can start to dig deeper into the data, find the answers to my questions and use that to drive continuous service improvement.

There’s so much more you can do but I hope that this has shown you just how useful a simple calculated field can be in helping you to pinpoint areas for service improvement.

Dynamics 365 Case Management – calculating the number of days a Case has been open

When you create a Case in Dynamics 365 the Case has a Created On date which is useful for determining how old a Case is. However, what I find more useful is using a simple out of the box tool called Calculated Fields to calculate and display the number of days a Case has been open. The reason I prefer this is it’s a nice simple, but meaningful, visual for Customer Service Representatives and Customer Service Managers. They can use this field to help them quickly hone in on those Cases that have maybe been open for a while and understand why they are still open.

To setup this calculation I need to create two new fields:

  1. A ‘Today’ field which displays today’s date
  2. A ‘No. Days Open’ field which calculates the difference in days between today’s date and the Case Created On date

To create the fields I go to my solution and edit the Case entity.

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