Customer Service skills in Copilot Cowork

What it does

The Dynamics 365 Customer Service plugin lets a representative hand multistep case work to Microsoft Copilot Cowork in plain language: brief me on this case, draft an escalation summary, find my cases with no customer reply for five days and diagnose each. Cowork breaks the request into a visible plan, pulls live case data plus Microsoft 365 context such as email, meetings and chats, and proposes actions for the representative to approve.

Key facts

Customer Service skills reach Cowork through the Service app. The app might already be installed, and installing it doesn't switch Cowork on or grant any Dynamics 365 data access.
A representative turns it on in Cowork under Customize: search for Service and flip the toggle.
The Customer Service environment is chosen through the Settings option in the Service plugin. A selection made in another Copilot experience might not apply to Cowork.
Cowork draws on three skill sources: built-in WorkIQ skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, email, calendar, meetings, enterprise search and so on), Customer Service skills such as case enrichment, customer-ready response drafting and incident resolution, and custom skills stored in the user's OneDrive.
Checkpoints let the representative review and approve proposed field updates and actions before anything is committed to Dynamics 365. Some service tool calls need approval before Cowork applies them.
Cowork works within the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 permissions the user already has.
Prerequisites: Cowork access under your organisation's licensing and spending policy, applicable Customer Service licensing, permission to the intended environment and records, the Service app assigned to the user or an effective Entra group, and the Customer Service MCP configuration in place.

When to use / skip

Use it for representatives and team leads who spend their day assembling context: case briefs, escalation hand-offs, drafting replies from a named knowledge article, chasing silent customers. It suits work that crosses Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 data, which is where app-switching hurts most.

Skip it as a substitute for in-workspace Copilot features where the rep is already inside a case form and wants a summary on screen. Also hold off for a tenant that hasn't settled who gets the Service app and who controls MCP access; the plugin will simply fail to appear or retrieve anything.

Configuration decisions

Who is in the pilot cohort, expressed as an Entra group on the Service app. See the Service app admin doc in this KB.
Which Customer Service environment representatives connect to, and who tells them when it changes.
Whether to build custom skills for your triage rules and knowledge sources, and who owns them given they live in the author's OneDrive.
Which actions you're content to let reps approve at a checkpoint, and which you'd rather keep out of reach through Dynamics 365 security roles.

Gotchas

App installed does not mean skill available. The user also needs the toggle on in Customize, Cowork access, and Dynamics 365 permissions. Four separate things, and "I can't see it" tickets will hit each in turn.
Check the signed-in work account and the selected environment before retrieving or changing records. Pointing at a sandbox by accident is easy to do and tedious to unpick.
Cowork can only show what the user's permissions already allow, so a representative with a narrow security role gets thin answers and no explanation.
Custom skills sit in OneDrive, so they're personal by default. A good skill built by one rep won't reach the team unless you plan how it's shared.
Approval prompts are a control, not a formality. If reps click through them without reading, proposed field updates reach case records unchecked.

Consultant notes

Run the rollout in the order Service app, Entra cohort, Dynamics 365 roles, environment selection, toggle. Skipping a step produces confusing partial failures.
Give reps five or six prompts from real cases (brief, escalation summary, stale-case diagnosis, reengagement draft) rather than a feature tour. Adoption follows relevance.
Agree early who owns custom skills, because nobody does by default and they drift.
Test with a low-privilege representative as well as an admin; the admin demo flatters the product.

Worth another look if the plugin gains admin-managed skill sharing, or if Microsoft publishes a licensing position specific to Cowork with Customer Service.