Navigating the past year has been a challenge as organizations have had to predict the unpredictable—how their business will adapt, how to retain and even grow customer relationships, and how to think long-term when circumstances can change daily. As we continue through 2021, the path is still uncharted, but what’s clear is the importance of knowing your customer. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, a powerful, real-time customer data platform (CDP) can help you bring together transactional, behavioral, and demographic data to create a 360-degree view of your customers.
With the 2021 release wave 1 updates for engagement insights (preview) and audience insights in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, we are elevating our Microsoft customer data platform with even more capabilities to help businesses:
- Get a holistic view of customers
- Predict customer needs
- Drive meaningful actions
- Rely on a trusted platform to optimize security
Get a holistic view of customers
To know how your customers are behaving, you need to see the data, whether that be how customers navigate your webpages, what they purchase and when, or why they are contacting customer service. But if this data is scattered across disparate IT systems, it’s hard to see a clear picture. With the addition of engagement insights, you can connect digital analytics with customer profile data to see your customers across touchpoints like web, mobile, transaction, and customer service. By pulling fragmented data together, you can rely on a single source of truth to inform your strategy.
We believe you should be empowered to integrate your data—regardless of where it sits. Whether it is in the Microsoft ecosystem or any other system, you can ingest data into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with prebuilt connectors. In this release, we are providing even more prebuilt connectors such as Experian for you to easily use.
In this 2021 release wave 1, we are also introducing the seamless experience between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and customer journey orchestration capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. With this new feature, you can build segments in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to orchestrate real-time customer journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
Predict customer needs
Data, even unified data, can mean little for your business without insights. But waiting for data insights can often take weeks or months, which can slow down the speed of your business. We offer out-of-the-box AI models, which are ready to apply as-is, and what would normally take weeks or months takes mere hours with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. We know that your time is valuable and AI-driven insights can help you get value fast.
We’ve added AI-powered suggestions to help segment your customers for more personalized messaging. In this 2021 release wave 1, we’ve also added predicted customer lifetime value as well as transaction and subscription churn to make it easier to identify high-value and at-risk customers. With the addition of the next best action and recommended product features, you can pinpoint which product to recommend a customer next and why.
Drive meaningful actions
Now that you know what your customers are doing and how you want to foster these relationships, it’s time to take action. Share your data insights with any application, whether through Microsoft or third-party platforms. Our vendor-neutral approach enables you to activate insights through apps like AutopilotHQ, Bing Ads, dotdigital, Facebook, Google Ads, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Marketo, Mailchimp, SendGrid, and more.
Rely on a trusted platform to optimize your security
Data privacy has become all the more important in recent years and we help you keep your data safe by letting you maintain full control of it. By replacing internal data storage with your own data lake, you can manage your data without relying on third-party data integration tools and APIs.
In this 2021 release wave 1, we’ve added incremental data ingestion so that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will only look for new and updated records since its last run, saving your business valuable time. And because Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is built on the trusted cloud platform Microsoft Azure, you can power your custom machine learning scenarios with the latest version of Azure Machine Learning web services.
UNICEF Netherlands turn donors into lifetime supporters
Private donors and volunteers are crucial to supporting UNICEF’s mission to help every child thrive, all over the world. With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and customer journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing, UNICEF Netherlands can better engage donors and build lifetime loyalty by delivering real-time, personalized messages through the right platforms at the right time.
“Dynamics 365 Customer Insights really helps us to segment the right audiences, to focus on them, to engage them in a very relevant way, and to retain them.”—Astrid van Vonderen, Director of Fundraising and Private Individuals
Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and customer journey orchestration in our blog post, “Drive personalized interactions with real-time customer journey orchestration.“
