What is a Customer Data Platform?
Before we jump into the several compelling reasons why enterprise organizations need Microsoft’s Customer Data Platform and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, it’s important to gain an understanding of what a Customer Data Platform is and how it benefits organizations.
A Customer Data Platform collects customer identifiable information such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers from both first, second and third party sources to create a complete view of the customer. A CDP not only collects but analyzes this customer information with the help of artificial intelligence and generates actionable insights that optimize business processes across sales, service, and marketing operations with the goal to empower data-driven customer engagement across B2B and B2C organizations.
Customer Data Platforms help sellers identify which products or services the targeted customer is interested in and focus on building personalized customer relationships based on complete data and AI-driven insights.
What is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
Dynamics 36 Customer Insights is a part of Microsoft’s Customer Data Platform and is used to connect behavioral, demographic, and transactional data generated from customer interactions and helps organizations gain a complete, 360-degree view of who their customers are and their core interests and needs.
Core Capabilities of Dynamics 365 Insights
Audience Insights
The goal of Audience Insights is to gain a deeper, holistic understanding of your customer data and build customer-centric processes across sales, marketing and customer service.
- Build client profiles: Use prebuilt connectors to collect, map, and merge demographic, transactional, and behavioral customer data from multiple data sources
- Create and merge static and dynamic segments based on different data types
- Build predictive data models to derive AI and Machine Learning-driven recommendations for sales, marketing, and customer service
- Integrate customer profiles with external CRM/ERP systems and applications
Engagement Insights (preview mode)
The goal of Engagement Insights is to help you understand how customers interact with your products and services through connected apps, websites and products.
- Collect customer behavior data from your website
- Out-of-box reports that show you metrics like audience size, page visits, referral traffic, and more
- Create visualizations based on metrics and dimensions you select with a custom report builder
- Combine customer data from multiple sources and channels, combine behavioral with transactional and demographic data to create interactive reports and gain a 360 view of your customer
Now that we have summarized the main capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, let’s delve into 5 specific reasons why your organization needs Microsoft’s unified customer data platform.
Customer-centric organizations are the leaders of today.
Customer experience simply trumps price and product – in today’s highly competitive digital world overflowed with information, customers no longer base their buying decisions on the product features and price only. With so many products and services to choose from, the market has become highly competitive and the main factor that distinguishes these products and services from one another is the experience that the customer gets throughout the process.
Customer-centric organizations are winning the market of today and here are some stats that support this:
- 86% of the buyers are willing to pay more for better customer experience.
- Moreover, 54% of the customers think companies need to fundamentally transform how they engage.
- 64% of the customers expect tailored engagements that are based on past interactions.
- Companies that successfully engage their B2B customers realize 63% lower customer attrition. And they also achieve a 55% higher share of wallet, and 50% higher productivity.
With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft raises the bar for Customer Data Platforms and enables organizations to predict & stay up to date with emerging consumer behavior trends.
Unified view of customer engagement data
In 2021, customers have the opportunity to shop from a wide range of channels, which has made it difficult for organizations to oversee their customers’ buying behavior from scattered data that comes from disparate systems and channels. To gain a deeper understanding of how customers make purchasing decisions and how they interact with the multitude of channels available to them – organizations need a way of connecting this data and gain a unified view of customer engagement across all channels and sales and customer service platforms.
With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, organizations are enabled to integrate customer data across all platforms – whether it comes from Microsoft Business Applications and systems or third-party channels with pre-built connectors. This helps organizations create a single source of customer information that is powered by analytics and machine learning to empower organizations’’ sales, marketing, and customer service strategy.
Customer data is meaningless without AI insights
With out-of-the-box AI models, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps you speed up the process of analyzing unified customer data and enables you to do it within hours.
With the latest release wave of features and capabilities for D365 Customer Insights, Microsoft introduces predicted customer lifetime value, which helps organizations identify high-value and at-risk customers. This way, your customer service, and sales teams will know which customers will bring in the most value and hyper-personalized customer interactions by recommending products and product features that customers are actually interested in.
Omnichannel Customer Experience
Once you have gathered all customer information and harvested actionable insights, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables you to share these insights with any Microsoft or third-party platforms and applications like Dynamics 365 CRM & ERP Cloud Apps, Google Ads, Marketo, and more. This capability enables organizations to provide a consistent, omnichannel customer experience across all platforms.
99.9% secure Customer Data Platform with the Microsoft Azure Cloud
Lately, having full control of customer data and maintaining data privacy is one of the top priorities for organizations. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights runs natively on the trusted cloud platform Microsoft Azure, which enables organizations to build custom machine learning scenarios with the latest version of Azure Machine Learning web services, while also benefiting from the 99.9% availability of Microsoft’s cloud data centers globally.
Do you need a helping hand or support with implementing or integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement/CRM/Cloud Business Applications? Look no further – consult with our Dynamics 365 consultants today.
