Introduction
The customer's experience represents the core of every organization’s digital transformation ambitions. To compete in today’s market, you need to build meaningful relationships with your customers on a personal level. The better you understand who your customers are, the easier it's to provide a more personalized customer experience. Accomplishing this requires a complete, deep, and unified view of who that customer is across all the different areas they interact with your organization. This becomes challenging when you consider that most organizations rely on multiple software applications to run their business. Customer data might exist in your ecommerce software that powers your website’s store, point-of-sale software that is used in retail stores, marketing software, and more.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data is an intuitive and flexible customer data platform (CDP) that helps your organization:
Unlock insights,
Build a deeper understanding of your customers,
And power those personalized customer experiences by unifying all your customer data across your organizations various transactional, behavioral, and observational data sources into a single 360-degree view of the customer.
Customer Insights - Data makes it easy for your organization to unify and understand your customer data and to harness it for intelligent insights and actions
How Customer Insights - Data works
Customer Insights - Data ingests data from all your different data sources and unifies them into a single customer profile. From within the customer profile, you can track data across different demographics and identify trends based on key data that you want to track.
When an organization is first getting started with Customer Insights - Data, they need to define where their data is coming from and what they want to track.
The following list shows what this process would look like at a high level:
Ingest data - Defines the data sources that your data is coming from. Data can be ingested from a wide range of data sources through built-in connectors that connect to many different data providers.
Create customer profiles - Customer profiles are created through unifying the data that is ingested from your different data sources into a single profile.
The unification process consists of four steps:
Source fields - Defines which tables and fields are combined to create a unified customer profile.
Duplicate records - Defines how to handle any duplicate records in your datasets.
Matching conditions - Defines the rules that are used to help combine your datasets into a unified customer profile.
Unify customer fields - Defines final information such as which items to exclude, attribute ranking, and other details that could affect the merge.
Define activities - Activities help to consolidate your customer activities across data sources and put them into a timeline view. These activities might represent interactions or purchases.
Define relationships - Relationships connect your tables together and generate a graph of your data.
Enrichment - Enrichments help you better track brand affiliation and loyalty across hundreds of different brands and several interest categories.
Define measures - The KPIs that best reflect the performance and health of your business. These measures might represent satisfaction levels, revenue targets, or performance levels.
Create segments - With segments, you can easily group your customers based on demographic, transactional, or behavioral customer attributes.
Important
Before you can work with the features that are defined in this module, you'll first need to have a unified customer profile. Creating a unified customer profile is done through ingestion of data from multiple data sources and combining it into a unified customer profile. When you first set up Customer Insights - Data, a sample dataset is created to allow you to familiarize yourself with the application, but you'll want to go through the unification process to analyze the data that is related to your business.
Get started
After Customer Insights - Data is configured, any user who has a Customer Insights license can access the application. When you first launch the application, it opens the Customer Insights - Data home page, which provides a holistic view of your customer base showing metrics that help you track the overall health of your business.
The types of insights that you can expect to view on the home page are shown in the following image.
From the main menu in Customer Insights - Data, you have access to all the different application features, based on your needs.
The main menu provides you with access to the following capabilities:
Home - Provides a central overview of available insights and segmentation data that is defined for your organization.
Customers - Provides access to individual customer cards based on unified customer profiles.
Data - Used to ingest data from different data sources to create a unified customer profile. The data section also lets you define the following parameters:
Data sources - Displays a list of the different data sources that are ingested into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data.
Unify - Used to unify your data from different sources into a single customer profile.
Enrichment - Unlocks data on affinities for hundreds of brands and dozens of interest categories. These affinities are extracted for profiles that might be like your customers.
Activities - Lets you take activities from different sources and make them available together in chronological order.
Tables - Displays the different tables that are in your Customer Insights – Data deployment, based on the different elements you configure.
Exports - Provides you access to the different exports you're using.
Insights - Provides access to tools used to provide insights about your organization.
Segments - Lets you define how to group and categorize customers based on similar demographic, transactional, or behavioral attributes.
Measures - Defines key business and customer KPIs such as customer lifetime value, average purchase value and frequency, and CSAT, and identifies high-value customers.
Predictions - Provides access to the different AI elements that are available to use as part of your deployment.
Settings - Provides access to different application settings that you can use for administrative purposes.
System - Provides access to different environmental settings that can be modified based on your specific needs.
Permissions - Provides access to configure application permissions.
Connections - Used to set up and configure different export destinations for customer segments.
Work with customers
After you define all the activities, measures, and segments that are used for tracking and working with data, users with access to the application can use this data to gain deeper insight into your customers through the Customers page. The Customers page presents a consolidated view of each customer based on profile data that you gathered from all your data sources. Customers can be individuals or organizations. From within the Customers page, you can search for and locate customers.
Note
While you can access customers in the Customer Insights – Data application, most users use Customer Insights data outside the application.
Each customer profile is represented by a customer card tile. Depending on whether the customer is an individual or organization, the customer card displays slightly different information. You can use the buttons on the lower-right side of the Customers page to move through all the available customer profile pages.
Important
You can't access the Customers page until your organization's administrator has defined at least one searchable attribute on the Search & filter index screen. If this step has not been done, the application takes you to the Search & filter index screen. When at least one attribute is defined as searchable, you can see the Customers page.