Use Customer Insights - Data with Microsoft Power Platform

  • 12 minutes

When you have a Customer Data Platform, you need to ensure that the data and insights can be used by the people who need it. For example, when a prediction model indicates that a customer is likely to churn (no longer wants to do business with your company), you need to be able to quickly implement a strategy to reduce the likelihood of that happening. The implementation of that strategy doesn't occur in Customer Insights - Data but is instead implemented by applications and processes that your organization has for dealing with these scenarios.

Microsoft Power Platform is a low code/no code professional development platform that helps organizations quickly build business solutions. It consists of tools that help organizations build analytic solutions, create applications, automate processes, create chatbots, and more. With over 500 different connectors to Microsoft and external vendor applications, organizations can build solutions to support their needs.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data is one of many connectors that are available for Microsoft Power Platform, which means that you can build application analytical reports, applications, and processes that are supported by Customer Insights data.

Additionally, you can use Customer Insights data in the following entities:

  • Microsoft Power Apps - Allows organizations to quickly build custom business apps that connect to data that is stored in various online and on-premises data sources, such as Dataverse, SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on.

  • Microsoft Power Automate - Allows organizations to build automation to improve process efficiency, integrate applications, automate manual processes, and more.

  • Microsoft Power BI - Allows organizations to build analytical solutions that help drive better business outcomes.

Power Apps

Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors, and a data platform that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. Power Apps democratizes the business app-building experience by enabling users to create feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code. This feature helps organizations quickly build business applications based on their business needs.

Previously, you learned how to insert Customer Insights data into model-driven applications, such as Dynamics 365 apps, by using the Customer Card Add-in. Power Apps also helps simplify the process of building customer canvas applications that use Customer Insights data. When you build canvas applications, they're connected to one or more data sources.

The following scenario is an example of using Power Apps with Customer Insights - Data.

Contoso Coffee wants to deliver personalized service and recommendations to customers who visit their retail stores and cafés. Additionally, the company plans to capture details of customers who visit their stores. To accomplish this goal, they decide to empower their Contoso Coffee retail staff with a greeter app that was built with Power Apps and supported with Customer Insights data.

When customers enter stores, retail staff can:

  • Look up unified customer profiles to identify customers when they come in.

  • Capture customer check-ins.

  • Access important details about customers, such as lifetime value and loyalty details.

  • Provide customers with personalized recommendations based on insights from Customer Insights - Data.

Customer Insights - Data in a Power Apps application

Applications from Power Apps use connectors to connect to the data that you want to show in the application. Customer Insights - Data is one of many available data sources that has a Power Apps connector. By using the Customer Insights connector, you can include Customer Insights data in objects like galleries, forms, images, and more.

Note

While this module mentions a few concepts around building apps from Power Apps, it is not the primary focus. For more information, see the Power Apps documentation.

In your Power Apps designer, you can attach data sources by selecting View > Data sources. When you select New connection, the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Connector is an option that you can select.

After adding Customer Insights - Data as a data connection, you can select the following entities in Power Apps:

  • Customer - Allows you to use data from the unified customer profile in your application.

  • UnifiedActivity - Use to display the activity timeline in the app.

  • ContactProfile - Use to display the contacts of a customer. This entity is only available in Customer Insights - Data environments for business accounts.

Screenshot of the connectors that are available in New connection.

Important

You can only retrieve the Customer, UnifiedActivity, Segments, and ContactProfile entities through the Power Apps connector. The ContactProfile entity is only available in the Customer Insights - Data instance for business accounts. Other entities are shown because the underlying connector supports them through triggers in Power Automate.

After you connect to Customer Insights - Data as a data source, you can use the data in your application. For example, you might add a gallery control (which is used to display multiple records at once) that allows you to search for and view different unified customer profiles. After you add a gallery control to the app that you're building, you could set the gallery to use Customer as the data source for items.

Screenshot of the data sources.

For more advanced scenarios, you can use formulas to provide more targeted functionality. In the following image, the customer gallery uses a text box control to provide the filter criteria for what is displayed in the gallery.

Screenshot of the advanced formulas.

As you build more screens in the application, you can use different data from Customer Insights - Data as needed.

Screenshot of Customer Insights - Data.

Notice the following details in the preceding image:

  • The image and customer details are from the image field on the unified customer profile.

  • All address information comes from the unified customer profile.

  • The Activity timeline is populating the gallery in the middle.

  • Current Points and Lifetime Value are being populated by Customer Insights - Data measures.

  • The Product Recommendation comes from insights that were defined by using the product recommendations prediction model.

Work with Power Automate

Another Microsoft Power Platform tool that you can use with Customer Insights - Data is Power Automate. Similar to Power Apps, Power Automate lets you use the Customer Insights connector to create automations that are triggered by or are interacting with Customer Insights - Data.

Power Automate flows use triggers to determine when a flow should run. These triggers allow you to create cloud flows and automate repetitive tasks, such as notifications or more advanced actions.

When you use the Customer Insights connector, the following triggers are available:

  • Trigger when a data source refresh fails.

  • Trigger when a data source refresh succeeds.

  • Trigger when a threshold is crossed on a segment. The trigger is limited to crossing above the threshold.

  • Trigger when a threshold is crossed on a business measure. Only business measures without a dimension are supported. The trigger is limited to crossing above the threshold.

  • Trigger when a full refresh of items, such as data sources, segments, and measures, are completed.

  • Trigger when a refresh of the unification process is completed.

Building Power Automate flows isn't the primary focus of this module. For more information, see Configure your triggers in Power Automate.

Create a Power Automate flow

To create a flow in Customer Insights - Data, go to Admin > Export destinations, select the Power Automate tile, and then select Set up. When the Customer Insights Connector (preview) in Power Automate window opens, you can Sign in to Power Automate, select from one of the available triggers, and then add more steps to your new flow.

The following scenario is an example of using Power Automate with Customer Insights - Data.

Contoso Coffee wants to capture in-store interactions with their customers. Employees should be able to capture check-in activities by using the greeter app. To accomplish this task, you could complete the following tasks:

  • Create a customer check-in activity within Dynamics 365 to store details of customer store visits.

  • Set up a flow to capture a customer check-in.

  • Trigger the flow from the greeter app.

Screenshot of a Power Automate flow that is attached to a button.

Power BI

Power BI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated sources of data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. Your data might be a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a collection of cloud-based and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. With Power BI, you can connect to your data sources, visualize your data, discover what is important, and share the information with anyone that you want.

After you create your unified customer profiles, you can use Power BI Desktop to build powerful reports and analytics that are connected to your Customer Insights data. Similar to other options, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data is an available connector that you can use when building reports.

After you connect to Customer Insights - Data, a list of all environments that you have access to displays. Expand an environment and open any folder, such as entities, measures, segments, enrichments, that you can import.

Screenshot of entities that are selected to load.

Then, you can use the capabilities in Power BI to build visualizations that display your Customer Insights data.

The following scenario is an example of what this process could entail.

Contoso Coffee wants to use the Power BI connector for Customer Insights - Data to use the unified data that you created within Microsoft Power BI to further analyze and uncover insights about the customer.

They want to view the following types of information:

  • Customer details, such as roles and locations

  • Communication details, such as email addresses and phone numbers

  • Measures, such as Customer Lifetime Spend or Engagement Score on a few of the many insights that can be uncovered

By using Power BI, you can create a report that might be similar to the following image. This simple report highlights the following information:

  • The Average Online Purchase value is higher than the in-store purchase value

  • It shows a higher volume of in-store purchases versus online purchases

  • Seasonal trends might occur as sales drop around March and increase again in September

Screenshot of a Power BI report highlighting data.

For more information, see Microsoft Power BI documentation.