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As global businesses increasingly acknowledge the significance of generative AI for enhancing customer experiences and driving growth, Microsoft has emerged as a pioneer in advancing AI functionalities. This progress is particularly evident in its journey orchestration and customer data platform product—Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights are now Customer Insights. Through the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 2023 release wave 2 come a host of enhancements that empower businesses to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to gain deeper customer insights, personalize customer experiences, and drive business growth.
Delve into this guide to discover the essence of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 2023 Release Wave 2.
Introducing the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Microsoft has unified the standalone Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing applications into a single, comprehensive offering under the name Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. This unified solution encompasses both Customer Insights – Journeys (formerly known as Dynamics 365 Marketing) and Customer Insights – Data applications, providing a seamless and integrated experience for businesses seeking to harness customer data and insights for personalized customer journeys.
To deliver unparalleled value to users and empower them with the most personalized experiences, Microsoft has merged the power of a unified customer profile with the ability to orchestrate customer journeys seamlessly in real-time, across every touchpoint, into a single, streamlined, and cost-effective offering. This unified solution simplifies licensing, making it easier for customers to acquire and utilize the applications as their business needs evolve.
Sneak peek into the new features in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Let’s explore the new and improved Dynamics 365 Customer Insights features as a part of this 2023 release wave 2 plan:
Dialogue with data
Understanding your customer starts with data. Dialog with data in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offers an intuitive approach to exploring your data across all sources, unlocking new avenues for business growth. Chat with your data using everyday language and receive comprehensive responses along with valuable insights within seconds. Dialog with data is available in all regions and supports 23 languages.
Real-time personalization for seamless customer experiences
As customers engage and interact with your brand, they continuously provide signals about their interests, such as adding items to their cart or subscribing to trials. Capitalizing on these signals in real-time is crucial for delivering the most relevant experiences.
In Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 2023 Release Wave 2, Microsoft has introduced real-time capabilities to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data, enabling you to personalize customer experiences on web and mobile in real-time, regardless of whether they are anonymous or identified. By leveraging their latest interactions and activities with your brand, profile data, segments, and insights like lifetime value, you can deliver the most pertinent offer, content, or experience.
Empowering sellers with unified customer insights
As customers engage across digital and human-assisted channels, it’s important for sellers to have access to comprehensive data and insights to ensure a seamless cross-channel experience. Customer Insights unifies, enriches, and transforms customer data and interactions into actionable insights using data from multiple sources, equipping sellers with unparalleled knowledge. These insights are now readily available to sellers in Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Copilot. Sellers can access customer profile summaries, which provide an at-a-glance view of essential customer engagement, predictions, and insights to guide follow-up conversations. Metrics like lifetime value, churn risk, and buying propensity, displayed directly on the sellers’ working page, help them identify high-value opportunities and facilitate hyper-personalized conversations.
Orchestrate personalized journeys with Copilot
The ability to accomplish complex tasks through simple descriptions is now becoming a reality, thanks to advancements in AI and natural language models. Journey Creator, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, streamlines the process of designing customer journeys by allowing you to describe your desired journey in plain English and letting Copilot do the rest.
You can receive suggestions for creating the journey based on segments, triggers, communication timing, and branching options, and easily make edits to the journey. Journey Creator is currently available in North America and will be rolled out to all regions in December.
Query Assist, Microsoft’s AI-powered segment builder, is now available in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Journeys, enabling both marketers and data analysts to construct complex segments simply by describing them. Intelligent segment summaries facilitate seamless collaboration among teams, making it easier to share segments, comprehend the segment’s intent, and ensure the logic aligns with the desired outcome. Additionally, marketers receive recommendations for optimizing their segments.
With this release, Microsoft has introduced a range of features designed to enhance customer engagement and streamline communication. These include:
- Quiet times: Establish quiet times to avoid sending emails to customers during their preferred off-hours.
- Duplicate email prevention: Prevent duplicate emails from being sent to the same address.
- Optimal email address selection: Choose the most effective email address for reaching customers.
- Brand SMS sender: Use your brand as the SMS sender.
These enhancements empower you to deliver personalized, timely, and relevant communications that foster stronger customer relationships.
Be more creative with your content using Copilot
Creating content that resonates with your audience demands a blend of creativity and time. Copilot simplifies this process, enabling you to generate impactful content more efficiently. Content Ideas, your solution for producing captivating emails in minutes, is now available globally in English and seven additional languages. Ongoing enhancements, such as sample key points for common email types and brand-specific tone recommendations, further streamline content generation.
While Content Ideas is ideal for kickstarting new emails, Content Rewrite now enables rapid iteration and refinement of your existing messages. Whether you’re crafting emails, text messages, push notifications, or forms, you can easily rephrase your messages, adjust the tone of voice, shorten or lengthen your copy, and elevate your campaigns.
To complement your content, Copilot automatically suggests a selection of images from your library that match your copy. This feature streamlines the process of adding images to emails, forms, and push notifications, eliminating the need for time-consuming searches.
Finalizing campaigns often requires dedicated time from designers to achieve the desired visual appeal. With Copilot, you can effortlessly style your emails, event registration pages, and forms by leveraging your website design. Maintain a consistent brand identity by saving these themes in your brand profiles and easily applying them to future campaigns. This streamlined approach reduces the time spent fine-tuning styles and allows you to focus on core activities.
Increase your win rate with higher-quality leads
Organizations prioritizing sales and marketing alignment consistently ly demonstrate a higher likelihood of achieving their growth objectives. Sellers rely on marketers to generate high-quality leads, while marketers depend on sellers to nurture and convert those leads into revenue. To maximize conversions, marketers must identify prospects with the strongest purchasing potential and route them to sellers at the optimal engagement stage. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights’ enhanced lead scoring model, equipped with granular qualification criteria and signals, empowers your team to assess a prospect’s purchase propensity accurately. Once qualified leads are identified, you can seamlessly hand them off to Dynamics 365 Sales, ensuring that sellers reach out at the opportune moment.
Data-driven insights for enhanced sales and marketing collaboration
The analytics dashboard provides a clear picture of the impact of your marketing efforts, enabling you to drive improved conversion rates and optimize activities for higher return on investment (ROI). Marketers can foster stronger alignment with sales by sharing a comprehensive view of the pipeline, encompassing prospects and won opportunities.
Customizable reporting for tailored insights
Recognizing that every business has unique data aggregation needs and requirements, we are expanding our custom reporting capabilities. Within Customer Insights – Journeys, you can leverage Microsoft Fabric, an all-in-one analytics and business intelligence reporting solution, to create personalized Power BI reports. Without the need to move or transform your data, you can unlock deeper insights using data science and machine learning techniques.
How does the change affect existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and/or Customer Insights customers?
Effective September 1, 2023, only the new Customer Insights combined offering will be available for new customers. Existing standalone Dynamics 365 Marketing and/or Customer Insights customers will have a limited window to renew their existing licenses for one final contractual cycle before transitioning to the new Customer Insights combined licensing. This renewal must be secured prior to September 1, 2024.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights pricing and licensing
Similar to the standalone Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customers Insights solutions, the new Customer Insights combined offering is based on a prepaid capacity model, with capacity pooled at the tenant level.
The previous model comprised four capacity units, while the new model has been streamlined to two:
- People Interacted: Equivalent to the previous “marketable contact” unit in Dynamics 365 Marketing, this unit governs the usage of Customer Insights – Journeys.
- People Unified: Equivalent to the previous “profile” meter in Dynamics 365 Customers Insights, this unit powers Customer Insights – Data.
All customers must begin with the base SKU, which requires a minimum quantity of 10,000 People Interacted and 100,000 People Unified. This base SKU is priced at $1,700 per tenant per month (ptpm) for new Dynamics 365 customers and at a discounted $1,000 ptpm for existing, qualifying Dynamics 365 customers. After acquiring the base SKU, customers can purchase additional capacity SKUs of either unit as needed.
Summing up
You can now empower your sales and marketing teams better with real-time capabilities and generative AI through the enhanced version of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. By seamlessly unifying sales and marketing efforts, your teams can achieve more with less, concentrating on crafting unparalleled customer experiences that foster lifelong connections.
To explore the full potential of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and make it an integral part of your business success, contact us at marketing@confiz.com.
