Deprecated: announced 14 September 2026. Support ends 30 October 2026, after which the feature is removed. The replacement is forecast scenarios in workforce engagement management. See the deprecation notice.
What it does
The built-in forecasting reports in Customer Service predict incoming case and conversation volumes, and the number of representatives needed to handle conversations, from historical data. Both are being retired on 30 October 2026.
Key facts
- Two things are going at once: volume forecasting (cases and conversations) and representative forecasting for conversations. The deprecation notice covers both.
- Announced 14 September 2026, support ends 30 October 2026, removal after that. That's roughly six weeks of notice — unusually short for a Dynamics deprecation.
- The same deprecation applies to Dynamics 365 Contact Center, where the equivalent report sits under the same admin configuration.
- The replacement is forecast scenarios in workforce engagement management, which cover forecasting plus capacity planning, scheduling and intraday management.
- Forecast scenarios are scoped by planning group, which is a different modelling shape to the old global-plus-channel-override configuration. There is no in-place migration.
- WEM requires the Workforce Management for Customer Service package to be installed from the Power Platform admin centre and enabled in Copilot Service admin centre. That's a deployment step, not a toggle.
When to use / skip
Don't build anything new on it. If a client is live on volume or agent forecasting, the work between now and the end of October is standing up WEM planning groups and forecast scenarios and getting enough history through them to be credible. If a client isn't using it, skip straight to WEM.
Configuration decisions
- Whether WEM is in scope at all. It is a bigger product than the report it replaces — planning groups, shift plans, capacity plans, adherence — and some clients using only the forecast report will not want the whole thing.
- Who owns the forecast once it moves. The old report was an admin artefact; WEM belongs to a workforce management function that plenty of clients don't have.
- How to draw planning groups, because that decides forecast granularity and supervisor visibility at the same time.
- What to do with reporting built on the old forecast output. Anything reading
msdyn_dataanalyticsreport_forecastneeds rework.
Gotchas
- Six weeks is not long enough to stand up WEM properly from cold. If a client depends on this for staffing decisions, start the conversation now rather than after the October date.
- Forecast accuracy in WEM improves with history through the WEM pipeline. Switching on 29 October and expecting a usable forecast on the 31st won't work.
- The notice says support ends on 30 October, with removal "after" — no removal date is published. Plan against the support date, not an assumed grace period.
- Contact Center and Customer Service are hit together, so a client running both doesn't get a fallback in one of them.
Consultant notes
- Raise this with anyone mid-implementation who has forecasting in their scope document. A signed-off requirement that names volume forecasting is now a change request, and it's cheaper to have that conversation in September than in November.
- Price the replacement honestly. "Forecasting is moving to WEM" sounds like a swap and isn't — it's a package installation, a planning group design exercise and a new operational owner.
- Check what the client actually did with the forecast. A fair number export it to a spreadsheet and staff off that; those clients need a much smaller replacement than a full WEM rollout, and pushing WEM at them will stall.
- Watch for the same deprecation reaching embedded deployments differently. The old representative forecasting report was standalone-only in Contact Center, so the migration story isn't identical across the two products.
Revisit after 30 October 2026 to confirm removal, and whenever Microsoft publishes a migration path from the old forecast output.