Get a 360-degree view of your clients with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Customer data is becoming more and more critical to a business’s overall strategy, especially with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, to remain competitive in an ever-changing marketplace. These days, customers are more discerning, and to understand their likes and dislikes, you need to study their interactions with your company. Since that happens across multiple channels, such as an online store, a retail outlet, by phone, via social media, and others, collecting and analyzing that essential data is no small task.
If you are already using Microsoft Dynamics 365 as your CRM platform, there is a powerful tool that you can leverage: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Let’s talk about how it works, and how you can put it to work for you.
How Does Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Work?
First, with appropriate setup and configuration, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights gets right to work, gathering customer data from all the sources you connect. Applying machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, begins to pull disparate data into a cohesive whole, analyzing it to provide your sales, marketing, and customer support teams with a wealth of information about each customer, making it possible to personalize their experiences with your company. And this doesn’t take months – out-of-the-box AI models are ready to apply to your data to help you get value quickly.
Having native integration with Microsoft’s Power Platform, you can pull data from almost any source, such as Power BI, Access, Excel, and even JSON and RESTful APIs. In addition, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights has several pre-built connectors to third-party services, such as Experian, that allows you to pull in data even if it’s not within the Microsoft ecosystem.
With built-in customer profiles that are customizable and even segmentable, your team will have a holistic view of each customer and their interactions with your company.
What Can You Do With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
The sky is the limit of what you’re able to accomplish with this technology. Here are a few key ways to make it work for you:
See customer trends and adapt. Seeing the choices that thousands of customers make can help you identify trends. Catching these trends early on can give you a competitive edge over your competition, allowing you to adapt your products, offers, or even channels for customer interaction to better engage and delight your client base.
Improve products through customer feedback. Your existing product information (on your e-commerce outlet, for example) can be enhanced with the ability to receive and record customer feedback. Customers can rate products, write reviews, and more, giving you valuable input and another metric to help identify the top-performing products and ones with potential. It can even serve to help you identify new opportunities and develop new products to take advantage of them, getting to market before all your competitors do.
Data-driven business decisions. By analyzing the client history and data stores you’ve already accumulated, it becomes easier to identify customer demand year-over-year and peer into the future with market forecasting. Armed with reliable data, you’re in a better position to make decisions that propel your business forward.
Adjust inventory according to demand. Having enough of your products to sell during times of peak demand depends greatly on having enough raw materials or supplies to produce them. Identifying those trends well ahead of time allows you to adjust inventory levels accordingly, ordering in enough time and in the right quantities to avoid tying up your working capital in supplies that sit on the shelf for months until used.
Data analysis for mere mortals. This kind of aggregation and analysis used to involve a great deal of custom development in complex programming languages, as well as sophisticated data modeling. Now, all the hard work has been done for you, allowing your stakeholders to simply use the system to find answers to questions, such as “When is the optimal time to message our customers about this month’s offer?”, “Which engagement channels do our clients prefer?”, and more.
Manage Customer Consent
These days, people are very concerned about privacy and have their preferences of what information they want to share with sellers. Especially as privacy legislation becomes more restrictive, it is essential to obtain customer consent, record their choices, and ensure they’re respected.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights has you covered. With a built-in Consent Center, default consent rules can be applied to the segmentation data flow, ensuring your marketing campaigns reach everyone who opted-in – and avoid the inboxes of everyone who didn’t.
Data analysts can crunch numbers on consent data found in the Customer Data Platform. Such data can be used to train AI and ML models, helping to improve the accuracy of metrics like customer churn and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Start Getting Customer Insights Now
What we’ve highlighted in this article is only a taste of the benefits of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in your company. It’s already helping countless businesses move ahead of their competition – and it can help you too.
If you’re interested in learning more, or if you’re thinking of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in your organization, reach out to us today, and we’ll help you form a plan for success.
By Chandra Subramanian, CogentNext Technologies