When a customer service representative is working on a voice or digital conversation in Dynamics 365 Contact Center, they often need information from several different places. The customer may be asking about a company policy stored in SharePoint, details about a product stored in Dataverse, or something specific to the conversation currently taking place.
The Copilot help pane gives representatives a way to ask these questions without leaving the conversation.
Today we will look at how the Copilot help pane works in Dynamics 365 Contact Center, how we can ground it using SharePoint and Dataverse, how we can extend it using Microsoft Copilot Studio, and an important question: does Copilot also understand the context of the customer conversation we are currently handling?
Let’s explore this together.
What Is the Copilot Help Pane?
In Copilot Service workspace, Copilot appears in a pane alongside the representative’s normal workspace.
One of its main capabilities is Ask a question. Instead of manually opening a knowledge search, navigating to SharePoint, or searching through Dataverse records, a representative can ask questions such as:
What is our return policy for damaged products?
Or:
Does this customer have an active premium support agreement?
Copilot can search the knowledge sources configured by the organization and generate an answer directly inside the help pane. Generated answers can also contain citations so the representative can review the source before using the response with the customer.
A Simple Way to Think About the Architecture
There are several pieces involved.
The representative is working with a customer inside Dynamics 365 Contact Center. The Copilot help pane receives the representative’s question and has context about the current work session. Copilot can then retrieve information from configured knowledge sources before generating its response.
Knowledge can include sources such as:
- Dynamics 365 knowledge articles
- SharePoint
- Dataverse
- Uploaded files
- Public websites
- Other sources configured through Copilot Studio
Microsoft’s newer extensibility model increasingly uses Copilot Studio to configure these knowledge sources and extensions.
This distinction between context and knowledge becomes important later in the article.
The Agent
The agent we’re changing is called Customer Service Copilot Bot in Copilot Studio. It is a managed Copilot Studio agent connected to the Ask a question experience in the Copilot help pane.
Go to Copilot Service admin center → Productivity → Copilot settings → Manage:
Then Agent within Copilot → Customer Support → Settings:
Go to Extend agent → Copilot Studio. Note the option to send parameters to the agent for context:
That link opens the Customer Service Copilot Bot, where you can add or change knowledge, tools, agents, and topics:
Using SharePoint as a Knowledge Source
SharePoint is a particularly useful source for customer service organizations because much of the information representatives need already lives there.
For example, a company might keep the following in SharePoint:
- Product documentation
- Internal troubleshooting guides
- Warranty policies
- Shipping procedures
- Escalation instructions
- Employee procedures
- Service policies
- Frequently asked questions
Rather than copying all of this content into Dynamics 365 knowledge articles, we can expose appropriate SharePoint content to Copilot. When SharePoint is configured as a Copilot Studio knowledge source, the agent can search the configured SharePoint location and use retrieved information to generate an answer.
Access to the underlying SharePoint content still matters. Adding a SharePoint site as knowledge does not mean Copilot suddenly has access to every SharePoint site in the tenant. The configured source and the user’s permissions still need to be considered.
An Example
Imagine we have a SharePoint site containing a document called:
Contoso Laptop Accidental Damage Policy
The customer tells us:
I dropped my laptop and cracked the screen. Is that covered?
The representative could ask Copilot:
What is our policy for accidental laptop screen damage?
Copilot can retrieve the relevant policy from SharePoint and generate an answer for the representative. The representative can then review the source before giving the information to the customer. That is much faster than placing the customer on hold while searching through an internal SharePoint site manually.
Adding SharePoint Knowledge
Knowledge-source configuration can be configured in Copilot Studio.
Go to Knowledge, select Add knowledge, select SharePoint, enter the SharePoint location, configure the source, then save and publish the agent.
Select SharePoint:
Enter the URL and add:
We can also mark the knowledge source as Official and give it a useful description so the agent understands when it should be used.:
This knowledge contains internal Contoso employee and customer-support documents, including product policies, warranty information, accidental damage coverage, procedures, and troubleshooting guidance. Use this source when answering questions about Contoso support policies and procedures.
Like this:
Note it may take a few minutes for indexing to complete and you get a correct response in Copilot Studio. Let’s ask our agent in the Copilot Studio test pane “A customer dropped their Contoso laptop and cracked the screen. Is the damage covered under the standard warranty?”:
When we run this we see response is coming from our SharePoint knowledge source:
Using Dataverse as a Knowledge Source
SharePoint works very well for documents. Dataverse becomes interesting when the answer lives in structured business data instead. For example, suppose our organization has custom Dataverse tables containing:
- Product specifications
- Warranty plans
- Store locations
- Service packages
- Troubleshooting codes
- Partner information
- Installation requirements
Instead of creating hundreds of documents containing this information, we may want Copilot to answer questions using the data directly from those tables.
Let’s say we have a custom Dataverse table named:
Laptop
with columns such as:
- Product Name
- Model Number
- Warranty Period
- Maximum Memory
- Replacement Eligibility
- Support Tier
Let’s add this knowledge to our agent:
The representative could ask:
What is the warranty period for the Thinkpad?
Copilot can use the Dataverse knowledge source to find the relevant information and produce an answer.
Does Copilot Understand the Current Customer Conversation?
Yes, the Copilot experience can use context from the active customer interaction.
When a representative is working on a case or conversation, the Copilot experience can operate within that active context. The CSR might ask:
Based on the current conversation, what warranty information should I provide to the customer?
Copilot then returns the response, grounded in the knowledge sources we had grounded it with:
Copilot can understand that the current conversation is related to a laptop, accidental damage, and potentially warranty or replacement coverage. The CSR can optionally send the response directly to the customer chat, as well as copy it, edit it before sending, etc:
The representative might then ask:
What is our accidental damage policy?
Copilot can retrieve an answer from the configured knowledge sources. This creates a useful combination:
Conversation context tells Copilot what the customer is talking about.
Knowledge grounding gives Copilot authoritative information for answering the question.
Final Thoughts
The Copilot help pane in Dynamics 365 Contact Center gives representatives a convenient way to ask questions while they are already working with a customer. By connecting SharePoint, we can make internal policies, procedures, product documentation, and troubleshooting information available without forcing representatives to search through separate sites. By connecting Dataverse, we can expose structured business information such as products, warranties, service plans, and other records. And importantly, Copilot can also operate within the context of the current customer interaction.
