Benefits of Customer Insights

Ronelle Raath, 12 December 2019

Microsoft released Customer Insights in July 2019, giving you the ability to combine all your Customer data stored and managed across the whole business into one unified Customer view.

This had me thinking what are the key benefits of Customer Insights?

So here are my findings on some key benefits:

1. Customer Insights uses Artificial Intelligence to help match customer records from different systems (Data Sources) where you do not have shared keys set. This is done during the Unify step where you map, match and merge your data. These unique data-unification features make it easier for users to combine all of their data into one complete customer profile.

2. It allows you to map the ingested tables into a Common Data Service Entity. For example, if you bring in Zendesk.com tickets you can map them to the CDS version of a Case. All you need to do is select the entities from your ingested tables and then select the attributes or columns that you would like to unify.

3. You can set Business or Customer KPIs through Measures and easily group customers into Segments, based on their demographic, transactional, or behavioural attributes. With clear Measures and Segments established, you can target better customer engagements through actions like campaigns and support activities.

4. With Custom Models using Azure ML Studio, you are able to extend your unified customer data by making well informed predictions using machine learning.

5. You have the option of Enrichment from data on your customers that you don’t own. This utilises proprietary data made available by Microsoft. Currently MS Graph is only available in North America, providing you with data for brands and categories, but more coming soon.

6. The multitude of connectors available within Customer Insights enables you to enhance your insights with rich data visualisation and exploration via Power BI. We can automate customer engagement actions through Power Automate, improve processes with Power Apps and much more.

With all of these amazing features available with Customer Insights, I would urge you to give it a try and experience the benefits for yourself!

To see Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in action quickly, you can sign up for a 30-day trial. The trial will expire after 30 days and your data in the trial environment will be deleted.