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From siloed data to 360° customer view: Your guide to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data 

December 7, 2023

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In today’s data-driven landscape, making informed decisions relies on having accurate and integrated data. Despite the collection of customer data, many organizations struggle with outdated information and fragmented data silos. This results in missed opportunities for valuable insights.  

Recognizing the need for a shift from siloed data management, businesses are turning to solutions that offer holistic views of customer data. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data (part of the new and improved Dynamics 365 Customer Insights) is one of the transformative solutions that can bridge the gap, provide a comprehensive guide to unify fragmented data and achieve a 360° customer view. 

This blog dives into the overview of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and its role in enhancing your understanding of customers.  

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data explained  

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data, you can empower your organization to become customer-centric. The valuable customer information at your fingertips enables your marketing, sales, and service teams to personalize one-on-one interactions on a broader scale. Seamlessly integrated with Microsoft’s tech stack and third-party apps, Customer Insights – Data provides real-time insights, fostering informed decision-making and driving meaningful actions. 

Customer Insights – Data allows you to go beyond transactional data to connect behavioral and demographic insights, crafting a 360-degree picture of each customer. You can empower your team with the choice of leveraging prebuilt AI models or crafting, testing, and deploying custom AI and ML models through advanced analytics solutions, unlocking a realm of out-of-the-box insights. Customer Insights – Data is your flexible AI playground, empowering you to tailor the data analysis to your unique business needs. 

Customer Insights – Data gives you full control over your customer data. It empowers you to use data to maintain optimal control over customer information, guaranteeing strict adherence to data governance and compliance standards. Its self-service, enterprise-grade Customer Data platform, hosted on Microsoft Azure, is designed to align seamlessly with privacy laws, regulations, and legislative requirements. The platform prioritizes privacy, security, and governance, incorporating built-in tools to ensure alignment with industry standards. 

See how sales & marketing can understand their customers better with Customer Insights – Data  

The enhanced Customer Insights now provides two distinct experiences for your marketing and sales teams. If you’re already leveraging other modules within Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement alongside Customer Insights, you’re empowering your teams to efficiently manage customer data and seamlessly translate insights into actionable strategies. 

Here is how data analytics can leverage customer insights to extract valuable information, elevating their understanding of customers: 

360-degree customer view  

Imagine knowing your customers like you know your closest friends – their favorite brands, their hidden desires, even their next purchase before they do. That’s the power of a 360-degree customer view, and it’s the secret weapon for data analysts. As a data analyst, you will be able to discover actionable insights, infuse them into business applications, and make them readily available to your marketing team. 

You can unify and enrich customer marketing, sales, and service data to form a clear picture of your customer’s preferences—and foresee predictions in real-time with AI to build stronger relationships with customers. 

Connecting the dots with entities 

Customer Insights – Data consists of data sets added to the system which are called entities. Think of entities as the building blocks of your customer understanding. Customer Insights product processes—including data unification, relationships and segmentation, and measures and activities—are organized around the entities you choose to bring together. 

Unifying fragmented data 

Data unification lets you unify once-disparate data sources into a single master dataset that provides a unified view of your customer data. 

AI-powered identity resolution 

Not every customer leaves a clear trail. AI-powered identity resolution bridges the gap, using subtle signals and attributes to identify unknown customers and enrich their profiles with historical data. This ensures you have a complete picture, even for your less vocal customers. 

With data unification complete, you can measure KPIs on transactions, campaign responses, in-store visits, loyalty redemptions, customer service encounters, sentiment, IoT signals, total spending, and review ratings, compiled into a 360-degree view of your customers. 

Predicting the future with AI 

Customer Insights – Data isn’t just about the past; it’s about the future. To learn even more about the customers, you can create AI prediction models like customer lifetime value, churn model, and sentiment analysis. 

As you build new models, your data stays up to date with a powerful ingestion API that imports real-time customer data from Azure Data Lake, Azure Synapse Analytics, or other data sources through PowerQuery. 

Customer Discovery with Copilot  

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can discover new audience segments using Copliot’s AI recommendations or define your segments to enable your marketing and sales initiatives or offer proactive customer support.   

Consent confidence 

Building segments with confidence is crucial. Copilot’s consent harmonization feature lets you define clear rules for customer consent data, eliminating ambiguity and ensuring compliance. And with automatic data refresh, you can be sure your segments are always up-to-date. 

Speak your mind, discover insights 

No need to be a data wizard! Copilot understands natural language. Ask your questions, plain and simple, and watch as Copilot dives into your data, uncovering hidden gems and adjacent insights you might have missed. 

Using natural language prompts, you can engage in dialogue with your data to query customer data and create segments even if you don’t know SQL programming.  

Hyper-personalization made easy  

Copilot provides an answer to the query as well as adjacent data and insights. This uncovers new insights that you can use to deliver hyper-personalized journeys in the moment, helping to boost customer satisfaction and retention rates. 

Seamless integration for enhanced customer experiences 

Integrating Dataverse simplifies the alignment of segments with customer profiles, providing a streamlined process to update Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) in real-time. This capability enables the delivery of customized and dynamic customer experiences. 

Measuring journey progress  

With Customer Insights – Data, you’re not just crafting beautiful journeys, you’re meticulously measuring their impact in real-time. Gone are the days of waiting for lagging reports. Inline charts and analytics offer a clear view of progress as you navigate each customer’s path. 

But the magic doesn’t stop there. You compare your journey’s performance against others, identifying strengths and pinpointing areas for improvement. By leveraging these insights, you can optimize lead generation, ensuring every step fuels your marketing funnel. 

Through Customer Insights – Data, you seamlessly export segments and data to other tools you already use, like Dynamics 365, Marketo, Google Ads, or ServiceNow. As a result, you can orchestrate seamless experiences, tailor targeted ads, engage your sales team with actionable data, and even proactively offer support – all informed by the richness of your customer journey data. 

And for those who crave even deeper understanding, you connect your customer data with Microsoft Power BI and unleash the power of interactive visualizations and sophisticated modeling, turning raw data into a symphony of customer insights. 

Ready to leverage Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data? 

Now that you’re equipped with insights into the power of this platform, it’s time to take the next step toward transforming your customer engagement. As part of the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 2023 release wave 2, existing customers might want to explore how these updates impact their Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license. 

Ready to unlock the full potential of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data for your business? Choose Confiz as your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights implementation partner.  Contact us at confiz@marketing.com to kickstart the implementation process or request a personalized Dynamics 365 Customer Insights demo. Let’s embark on a journey to elevate your customer experiences and drive meaningful results together.