Gaining a deeper knowledge of your target audience and how your customers interact with your brand is one of the best ways to make sure you can stay ahead of the competition. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is the CDP (Customer Data Platform) from Microsoft designed to help companies understand their customers, and deliver more personalized experiences.
The comprehensive application collects and unifies data about your target audience, pulling insights from everything from operational data to IoT information. You can also enrich customer profiles with data points collected by third-party tools like customer service or helpdesk software.
With this innovative tool, companies can ensure they’re meeting their customers in the right environments, with the kind of meaningful interactions they’re looking for.
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
Ultimately, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a customer-focused tool created to offer a complete 360-degree overview of your target audience, with machine-learning-enhanced information which allows you to see, tailor, and utilise customer profiles. Intended to work alongside other tools in the Dynamics landscape, Customer Insights helps business leaders to create more personalized and relevant experiences for their audience.
Features include:
- Out-of-the-box connectors: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights comes with pre-existing connectors to help you pull of the information you have about your audience into the same unified platform.
- Data cleaning capabilities: Disparate data from different environments is intelligently transformed, standardised, and unified, to give you more accurate insights.
- AI and Machine Learning: In-built machine learning and AI tools allow you to predict customer intentions allowing for more effective engagement strategies.
- Power Apps connections: Power Apps connectivity allows users to create unique solutions for customer interactions using data from Customer Insights
- Data enrichment: Access to a comprehensive selection of Microsoft Dataverse tools and partner connections ensures you can build on your existing insights.
Like many products in the Microsoft landscape, Customer Insights is constantly updating and improving to support a wider selection of users. The service recently introduced a new integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, so users can enrich their profiles even further with sentiment analysis and feedback data.
How to Get Started with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
To start building powerful experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you’ll need a Dynamics license, and an “environment”. After you purchase your subscription, Microsoft will send you an email with an invitation to create your environment and populate it with relevant information.
You can choose a name for your environment, the kind of primary audience you’re trying to reach, and how you’re going to store information. You’ll have the option to store Customer Insights on an Azure data lake managed by the Customer Insights team, or store information via your own Azure Data Lake (which you manage yourself).
You can also connect your Customer Insights with your Microsoft “Dataverse” environment, where you can share data with business applications based on the Dataverse.
Once you’ve set up your environment, you’ll be able to explore Customer Insights.
Exploring Customer Insights
Visit the “Customer Insights” section of your Dynamics 365 environment, and explore the various features. The left pane will allow you to navigate between different customer segments and sort through various pieces of intelligence. The Customer Insights section within the Dynamics 365 environment contains numerous cards to walk you through setting up your environment.
For instance, you can:
- Add data: Click on this card to import information from various sources.
- Unify data: Harmonize the data, remove duplicates and create unified customer profiles
- Analyse data: Use your unified profiles to collect insights about your audience. You can analyse data to help you define segments, and configure predictions.
The “Segments” section of your Customer Insights platform will show you groups of customers based on behavioural, demographic, and transactional details you’ve identified. You can create as many segments as you want to help refine your knowledge of your customers.
“Business Measures” will show you KPIs you’ve defined, like how likely a customer in each segment might be to churn, or what their average order value is. You can also run Enrichments”, which involves using data from Microsoft and partner sources to enrich your existing first-party data.
Making the Most of Customer Insights Data
Unified profiles within Customer Insights are the foundational tools you’ll use to get insights into your audience and take relevant actions. To make the most of your profiles, Microsoft recommends:
- Ingesting data from various sources: Collecting data from Power Query Connectors, Microsoft Dataverse environments, and Common Data models.
- Unifying data: Run the data unification program regularly to remove duplicates, unify fields, and match conditions, therefore cleaning your insights.
- Enriching your data: Use the expanding library of enrichment providers partnering with Microsoft to enrich your existing information.
- Creating predictions: Access out-of-the-box prediction models to predict expected revenues, churn, and other important insights.
- Export data: Create “connections” to services like Dynamics 365 marketing to create outbound campaigns based on your customer insights
All of the information collected and created by the Microsoft Customer Insights ecosystem is protected by the latest security measures. You can also maintain full control over all of your insights with a self-service CDP designed to remain compliant with GDPR and similar regulations.
Who Should Use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
Customer Insights is a state-of-the-art tool for accessing a complete and holistic view of your target audience, in a world where hyper-personalisation is key to success. As the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, experience continues to evolve, with new opportunities for enriching your data with first and third-party data sources, the opportunities of this technology are limitless.
Customer Insights can help business leaders to transform their business and delight their customers with more in-depth profiles to guide marketing, sales, and service decisions. Plus, you get to keep full control over your customer data, for a higher level of compliance.
