Customers look for personalized experiences from brands. Microsoft D365 customer insights is a powerful Customer Data Platform (CDP) that empowers businesses with valuable insights. Last year, Microsoft announced a vital change to improve this platform further.

From September 2023 onwards, the company merged Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights, making the new application ‘Dynamics 365 Customer Insights’.

This merger brings important changes for both new and existing Dynamics 365 customers. Let’s take a closer look at these changes and beyond.

Understanding Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 customer insights is an intelligent platform that combines information from different sources. It helps you map, match, layer, merge, and add more insights to customer-based data.

For instance, you can merge data from various point-of-sale(s), online or in-store, for performance and trend analysis. You can remove and add data that fits your needs. It helps you segment data using activity metrics and demographics.

You can easily see behavior captured from different systems across the entire customer cycle. It can help find out if the customer is a loyal one.  

Customer Insights removes silos and unifies information into one single source of data. It helps to keep all sales, marketing, and customer service details in a loop. Thereby helping you make better business decisions based on the data.

Some top Dynamics 365 customer insights features include:

• Real-time marketing based on triggers for well-timed messages
• Copilot to assist with everyday tasks like segmentation, email creation
• Quickly create and publish lead-generation forms
• Policy management to avoid compliance issues
• Built-in dashboards to evaluate the success of the marketing efforts
• Dynamics 365 customer insights pricing is $1,700 tenant/month

Rewarding Benefits of Using D365 Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 customer insights help run customer-centric business models. To help you understand how it works, here are the benefits of customer insights you would not want to miss out on.

Deepens Customer Understanding 

The platform has all the necessary tools to access detailed and unified customer profiles and allows you to collect data from many sources.

It covers everything from online visits and purchases to social media responses and data beyond these channels. These details help you get a 360-degree omnichannel view of each customer’s journey.

Personalize Your Marketing Campaigns 

With in-depth information about your customers, you can create personalized marketing campaigns. It is a known fact that the more you understand your customers, the better you will meet their expectations while also ensuring a successful business. This is where customer Insights work their charm.

Improved Customer Engagement     

The platform’s omnichannel support lets you see data from different sources. It also gives AI-driven insights to help you understand your customers and improve their experience.

The activity tracking helps you check all responses and interactions with your brand. You also get access to its AI-powered chatbots to draw more customer engagement.

You can identify areas where a business can provide a better experience. Using this information, you can take steps to real-time engagement and help resolve issues.

Integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Marketing 

By merging marketing functionality and customer insights into a single solution, Microsoft aims to give businesses enough tools to understand their customers better. This way, they can make interactions with customers more personal and practical. After all, marketing effort fueled with correct data brings more results.

The software had four capacity units before the Dynamics 365 customer insights and marketing merger. But, now the new model only has the following two capacity units:

• ‘People Interacted’ is like the previous Marketable Contacts in Dynamics 365 marketing
• ‘People Unified’ is the same as the previous Profile Meter in Dynamics 365 customer insights

These units help you find how many customers you can reach and how much data you can store.

Integration Capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with Marketing 

As customers engage through different touchpoints, the integration adds more value to the data. After all, each customer interaction has valuable data that shows their interests and habits.

Here are the benefits and integration capabilities of Dynamics 365 customer insights and marketing.

• Rich Customer Profiles

Detailed customer profiles and identity management fuse transactional, demographic, and behavioral data across touchpoints.

• Trend Analysis

You can use ready-made Machine Learning (ML) templates. It helps predict customer lifetime value, thereby speeding up the process of fetching user insights.

• Customer Management

Get advanced AI recommendations to find and create new audience segments. You can also manage insights from a unified environment.

• Manage Customer Journeys

Build more thorough customer journeys using visual builder. You can further use real-time custom triggers to increase customer engagement.

• In-depth Analytics

You can quickly perform A/B tests to find high-performing content and journey branches. You can also use dashboards to track KPIs and metrics to help analyze the data.

• Content Creation

Use the information to create more effective, personalized, and branded content. D365 customer insights Copilot also provides generative AI support, allowing you to create content in seconds.

Beyond Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Marketing 

Dynamics 365 customer insights will soon merge with D365 Voice. It will supplement customer profiles with sentiment and data using customer feedback. It will further have more AI functionality. It may include ‘out-of-box’ ML templates and better integration with Azure Synapse Analytics. Both these additions will help with a further in-depth analytics.

As cybersecurity is vital, Microsoft will add more advanced features to help strengthen data governance. You can also expect tools for better loss prevention with policies for data protection. Microsoft is also planning to extend the use of customer insights across business functions.

Ending Note

Microsoft rebranded Dynamics 365 Marketing as D365 Customer Insights – Journeys. It shows the platform’s capabilities to offer powerful and modern tools to businesses. With this, they can manage customer journeys and increase engagement.

The change also adds features that work well with the Dynamics 365 suite. Dynamics 365 customer insights journey is excellent for managing customer journeys and interactions. Its improved features and integration with other Microsoft tools make it worthwhile for businesses of all sizes.

People Commonly Ask

1. Is Dynamics 365 Marketing the same as customer insights?     

Dynamics 365 Marketing has now become D365 Customer Insights – Journeys. The Marketing app functionality remains the same for existing customers before August 2023. It offers outbound and real-time modules.

For new customers, the focus is on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. It will provide a modern and efficient approach to customer engagement. It will help businesses deliver personalized experiences for growth and stronger customer connections.

2. What are the benefits of Dynamics customer insights? 

The Dynamics customer insights offer many benefits to the business. You can increase customer engagement in marketing, sales, or services using unified data and intelligent insights. It allows you to reap the following benefits –

• Better conversion rates on lead nurture programs
• Targeted customer service resulting in lifetime value
• Intelligent customer lifecycle mapping
• Offers opportunities by recommending products for upselling or upgrading

3. How does Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights work?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps businesses better understand their customers. It gathers data and uses AI and ML to create detailed customer profiles. It also uses Power Platform to bring in data from different sources, such as Excel and Power BI. Teams can customize these profiles to personalize interactions and improve sales and marketing efforts.