What are Measures within Microsoft Customer Insights and How To Use/Build Them

Ronelle Raath, 04 February 2020

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

Within CI you also have the ability to set Measures, but what are Measures?

Well, they represent Key Performance Indicators (better known as KPI’s) that you can set and keep track of either on your Customer or Business.

By setting Measures you can set goals you would like to achieve with Customer Satisfaction and Business Growth. You can then monitor the actual outcomes from your unified Customer Profile within CI and act where needed to ensure you meet your set goals.

You have three types of measures that you can use:

The Customer Attribute is a single field attribute on your specific customer. This can be something like the Total Support tickets they’ve logged or the accumulated Support Hours that they have used. Another nifty feature is that Customer Attribute Measures are visible on your Customer Card:

As only a single field attribute (such as: Total Tickets Raised by a Customer) can be used with Customer Attributes along with your CustomerId, you might want to set KPIs to your Customers where you need to add more dimensions or variables.

For these cases you’ll want to build a Customer Measure.

For example, with the ‘Total Support Tickets Raised’ Customer Attribute measure, you cannot easily identify your customer from the CustomerId provided so you could add the following:

· The Company Name

· The Year they Logged Tickets

Thus, making it easier to identify your Customers and giving you a bit more insight into your Customer’s Ticket Logging behaviours, such as Northland Inc. increasing their tickets to 10 logged in 2018 whilst only 1 ticket was logged in 2017.

Finally, from all the data now available through the data sources, you can set Business Measures to track your performance and the health of your business.

There are two different Business Measure outputs:

· A single numeric output like with a Customer Attribute that will show on the Home page.

· Or a more complex output with dimensions or variables like with the Customer Measure.

Here you can easily see the total of all Tickets logged within your business, clearly visible and up to date on your Home page.

By setting well thought out measures to your Customers and Business and having them easily displayed on your Customer Cards or Home Page you can ensure to keep an eye on areas of improvement or notice trends you were not aware of.

You can incorporate Measures to build insightful Customer Segments and with the multitude of connectors available within Customer Insights you’re even enabled to enhance your insights with rich data visualisations and exploration via Power BI.

To top it all off you can automate better customer engagement and improve your processes from these insights through the use of Power Automate, PowerApps and many more.

So, start setting Measures on your Customers and Business and take the first well informed steps in improving your business!