A customer buys from your company, signs up for emails, downloads a guide, visits your website, and later contacts support. How much of that history can the employee speaking with them actually see? In many organizations, Sales sees one piece of the relationship, Customer Service sees another, Marketing owns engagement information, and website behavior sits somewhere else entirely. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is designed to bring those pieces closer together so organizations can understand the customer more completely and communicate based on that context. In this episode of Microsoft Knowledge Nuggets on M365 FM, we explain the two major parts of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—Customer Insights - Data and Customer Insights - Journeys—and follow customer information from disconnected records through unified profiles, segments, journeys, triggers, personalization, consent, analytics, and human follow-up.
WHY CUSTOMER DATA BECOMES FRAGMENTED
Customers do not think about your organization as separate applications and departments. They simply interact with your business. They purchase something, request information, visit your website, open an email, speak with Sales, or contact Support. Internally, however, every interaction can land somewhere different. Dynamics 365 Sales may contain the opportunity. Customer Service may contain the support case. An ecommerce platform records purchases. A website records form submissions and browsing behavior, while marketing systems track emails and other interactions. The result is one customer with multiple disconnected versions of their story. Customer Insights is intended to make that customer story easier to understand and use.
WHAT DYNAMICS 365 CUSTOMER INSIGHTS ACTUALLY IS
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps organizations understand customers and use that understanding to provide more relevant communication. That broad definition makes more sense when Customer Insights is separated into its two major building blocks: Customer Insights - Data and Customer Insights - Journeys. Customer Insights - Data brings information together and helps organizations understand the customer. Customer Insights - Journeys uses customer information to plan and deliver communications based on who somebody is and what they do. A simple way to remember the distinction is: Data helps you see the customer. Journeys helps you respond to the customer.
WHY THE CUSTOMER INSIGHTS NAME CAN BE CONFUSING
Microsoft's naming changes are one reason Customer Insights can initially seem more complicated than it is. Before September 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing existed as its own product. Microsoft renamed that product Customer Insights - Journeys, while the existing Customer Insights product became Customer Insights - Data. Both capabilities now sit underneath the broader Dynamics 365 Customer Insights name. This means somebody saying, “We use Customer Insights,” could mean Data, Journeys, or both. A useful question in any Customer Insights conversation is therefore simply: Do you mean Data or Journeys?
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS DOES NOT REPLACE SALES OR CUSTOMER SERVICE
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights should not be confused with Dynamics 365 Sales or Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Dynamics 365 Sales remains where sellers manage leads, accounts, opportunities, calls, follow-ups, and the sales process. Dynamics 365 Customer Service remains where service teams manage customer cases, knowledge, and support activities. Customer Insights adds customer understanding and communication around those existing processes. A salesperson can gain additional context about customer behavior. A service employee can better understand previous interactions. Marketing can communicate using information the organization already possesses. The goal is connection rather than replacing the systems where employees perform their actual work.
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS - DATA
Customer Insights - Data can be understood as a shared customer filing system. A customer might appear as a contact in Dynamics 365 Sales, have transactions in another purchasing platform, submit forms through a website, and have previous support interactions recorded elsewhere. Every source knows something useful about that person, but no individual source necessarily contains the complete relationship. Customer Insights - Data brings relevant information from those different sources together to create a more complete customer picture.
BRINGING CUSTOMER DATA TOGETHER
Customer information can originate from Dynamics 365 applications, websites, loyalty platforms, purchasing systems, customer service environments, and other business systems. The objective is not to collect every available field simply because it exists. Organizations should bring together the information that helps them understand customers and make better decisions. Imagine a home equipment company. Sales knows Alex requested a quotation last month. The ecommerce system knows Alex purchased equipment...
