Deep Dive into D365: Customer Insights

Connectors

• Customer Insights is supported by the Microsoft Power Platform and, because of this, presents the opportunity to collect data from lots of different sources and gather it all into one place using ‘connectors’. 
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• Connectors play a crucial role in helping Customer Insights users create a single view of each customer as they determine where the data comes from. Pair this with the ‘map, match, merge’ process and you can keep control of the data that’s highlighted. 
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• With the potential for different data sources to have different naming conventions for the same information (for example, one could refer to ‘surname’ and another to ‘last name’), mapping, matching and merging lets you decide which data source you want to trust for each individual field. The one you deem most trustworthy will be pulled into your end customer profile. 
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Timelines

• Customer Insights has the capability to track customer activities, map these onto a timeline and display them in chronological order, meaning you can view and analyse actions a customer has taken. That’s not the cleverest part, though… 
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• By introducing these timelines to a machine learning model, the technology can be used to make predictions on what actions your customers might take next, and, in turn, you can use these predictions to take appropriate action of your own (for example, as a membership organisation, you could offer a renewal discount to a member that AI has predicted may churn). 
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Dynamics 365 Marketing synchronisation

• By using Customer Insights in harmony with Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can take customer profiles and use them to create segments. This combined functionality can inform your marketing activity and helps you target your customers or prospects with messages appropriate to their respective stages in their buying journey. 
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Underrated features

Intelligent mapping

• Mapping, matching and merging (see above) can be a bit of a time-consuming process, so Customer Insights’ intelligent mapping feature takes some of that workload away from you. The feature can judge which data sources it thinks are the most reliable and select these automatically, saving you time and effort. All you need to do is glance over and make sure its choices suit you; you can always make changes manually if you’re not happy with the selections made. 
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