Use Customer Insights - Data with Azure Synapse
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data provides many different features and tools, such as out-of-the-box AI predictions that simplify business analysts' process of building solutions. Prebuilt connectors help you efficiently use Customer Insights functionality, such as profiles, segments, measures, enrichment, and AI. However, occasions might occur where the out-of-the-box features don't provide the necessary depth or don't support the exact use case that you want to use. For example, Customer Insights - Data includes a customer churn model out of the box, which you can use to make predictions that are related to a customer not renewing a subscription. The data that is attached to the model needs to include specific fields and formatting. This model might now fit your overall data structure. In these instances, you might want the ability to create your own prediction models to fit your needs. Therefore, you need to use other applications that allow you to build more sophisticated solutions that can fill in the gaps from Customer Insights - Data and provide complementary services.
Azure Synapse and Customer Insights - Data
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms by using serverless or dedicated options at scale. Azure Synapse brings these worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, explore, prepare, transform, manage, and serve data for immediate business intelligence and machine-learning needs.
With the combined power of Azure Synapse Analytics and Customer Insights - Data, organizations can unify their customer data. Additionally, they can bring in other sources of data, such as operations data, financial data, structured/unstructured data, and IoT and big data. Moreover, organizations can accomplish this goal in the same Azure Data Lake Storage in a common data model schema. Now, organizations can use out-of-the-box insights (that are available from Customer Insights - Data) and develop custom AI and machine learning models for more specific and tailored predictive insights that are actionable across the entire organization.
Customer Insights - Data and Azure Synapse Analytics meet at Azure Data Lake Storage to complete the Common Data Model schema. Essentially, the Common Data Model schema unites the following types of data to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer:
- Unified customer data, such as data from line-of-business applications (Salesforce, Adobe, and Dynamics 365) that come from Customer Insights - Data
- Operational and big data, such as historical data and unstructured data
- Streaming/real-time data (such as Twitter) and social data from Azure Synapse Analytics
Additionally, Common Data Model provides unmatched time to insights that are actionable across the entire organization.
Set up exports to Azure Synapse Analytics
Before you can export data from Customer Insights - Data to Azure Synapse Analytics, make sure that you meet all necessary prerequisites. For more information, see Prerequisites in Customer Insights - Data.
Similar to other exporting capabilities, if you want to use Customer Insights data in Azure Synapse Analytics, complete the following actions:
Set up the connection to Azure Synapse Analytics - Under Admin > Connections, add a connection and then select Azure Synapse Analytics. After you specify the server address and authenticate, the connection is available in the future for exports. Learn how to set up a connection to Azure Synapse Analytics.
Set up the export - Under Data > Exports, add a new export destination that points to the Azure Synapse Analytics connection that you created earlier. In the export, select the segments to be included in the export. Learn how to set up an export to Azure Synapse Analytics.
You learned how to use customer profile and segment data from Customer Insights - Data with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys and Dynamics 365 Sales. Now, you can learn how to display Customer Insights data in Dynamics 365 records.