What happens when the same customer appears in three different systems—and every system tells a different story?Sales sees an open opportunity. Customer service sees recent complaints. Marketing sees email clicks and website activity. An order system knows the customer has already purchased twice. Each department has useful information, but nobody has the complete picture.In this episode of Microsoft Knowledge Nuggets on M365 FM, Mirko Peters explains Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data in plain English and explores how organizations can bring fragmented customer information together, unify records, create 360-degree customer profiles, calculate measures, build segments, use AI-powered predictions, and activate customer insights across Microsoft business applications.Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data is Microsoft's Customer Data Platform (CDP). Its purpose is not to replace CRM, sales, service, or marketing applications. Instead, it connects information from those systems to create a more complete and usable understanding of each customer.
WHY SCATTERED CUSTOMER DATA CREATES BAD DECISIONS
Most organizations already have significant amounts of customer data. The problem is that the information is often distributed across multiple systems.Dynamics 365 Sales may contain contacts, accounts, opportunities, calls, meetings, quotes, and notes. Customer service systems contain cases, complaints, product issues, and support conversations. Marketing systems track email opens, clicks, forms, event registrations, and website engagement. Order platforms contain purchases and returns.Every system provides a useful perspective, but none necessarily provides the complete customer story.This can create situations where sales approaches a customer who currently has a serious support problem, marketing sends an upgrade promotion to someone who just purchased the product, or customer service fails to recognize that the caller is one of the company's most important customers.The problem is not necessarily missing information. The information exists—it simply is not connected.
WHAT IS DYNAMICS 365 CUSTOMER INSIGHTS DATA?
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data is a Customer Data Platform, commonly abbreviated as CDP.A CDP brings customer information from different approved sources together, identifies records that appear to represent the same customer, and creates unified customer profiles that other business processes can use.Think of it as a central customer records room.Sales contributes customer and opportunity information. Service contributes cases and interactions. E-commerce or order systems contribute purchases and returns. Websites contribute digital interactions. Other business applications contribute additional customer information.Customer Insights - Data organizes these records and attempts to connect the information belonging to the same customer.
WHAT IS A 360-DEGREE CUSTOMER VIEW?
The term 360-degree customer view sounds complicated, but the underlying concept is straightforward.Instead of understanding a customer from only one perspective, organizations can combine multiple types of information into a broader profile.That profile might show who the customer is, what they purchased, which service cases they opened, which events they attended, and how they recently interacted with the organization online.It is not a magical perfect view of everything about a customer.It is a more complete business view created from the customer information an organization has legitimately connected.
CUSTOMER DATA TYPES
Customer information can come in many forms.Demographic or profile information can include names, addresses, job titles, organizations, and contact information.Transactional data can contain purchases, payments, returns, subscriptions, or reservations.Behavioral information can describe actions such as visiting a webpage, opening an email, registering for an event, submitting a form, or using an application.Operational information can provide additional context from service processes, inventory systems, or connected devices.Combining these different types of data allows organizations to understand more than what appears in a single CRM record.
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS DATA VS CUSTOMER INSIGHTS JOURNEYS
Microsoft uses the Customer Insights name for two closely related areas, but their responsibilities are different.Customer Insights - Data brings customer information together, creates unified profiles, calculates insights, and builds customer segments.Customer Insights - Journeys focuses on customer communications and journeys across channels such as email and text messaging.An easy way to remember the distinction is:Data understands the customer. Journeys communicates with the customer.Customer Insights - Data can prepare the audience and customer context. Customer Insights - Journeys can then use that information when the organization decides how and when to communicate.
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS DATA VS DYNAMICS 365 SALES
Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights - Data also perform different jobs.Dynamics 365 Sales gives sales professionals the tools required to manage leads, opportunities, accounts, activities, and customer relationships.Customer Insights - Data takes a broader perspective.It can incorporate information from Dynamics 365 Sales while also connecting approved information from service platforms, websites, order systems, cloud data platforms, and other sources.It therefore extends the customer context available around CRM processes rather than simply replacing Dynamics 365 Sales.
BUILDING THE UNIFIED CUSTOMER PROFILE
Creating a unified customer profile begins by bringing appropriate data sources into a Customer Insights environment.An environment acts as a controlled workspace where customer information can be imported, prepared, unified, and managed.Organizations then connect the sources containing relevant customer information.These sources may contain customer tables, order tables, service records, website interactions, or other structured business information.The challenge is that different systems rarely describe customers in exactly the same way.
DATAVERSE, FABRIC, AZURE AND OTHER DATA SOURCES
Organizations using Dynamics 365 and Power Platform may already have significant amounts of customer information stored in Microsoft Dataverse.Customer Insights - Data can also work with data from platforms discussed in the episode including Azure Data Lake, Microsoft Fabric OneLake, and Azure Synapse Analytics.Power Query connectors provide another method for bringing information from databases, business applications, and other connected sources into the customer data environment.The purpose is to connect relevant customer information regardless of whether every source uses the same structure.
DATA MAPPING
Different systems often use different names and formats for the same information.One database might use a field called "Email Address." Another might simply use "Email." Phone numbers might appear with or without country codes. Names can contain different formatting, titles, or spelling.Mapping tells Customer Insights what those incoming fields actually represent.Organizations identify fields representing information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, customer IDs, addresses, and other attributes useful for identifying customers.Relationships between business records also need to be understood.An order means little in a unified profile unless the system can determine which customer placed it.
CUSTOMER MATCHING
Matching is one of the most important parts of customer data unification.Suppose Alex Morgan appears in Dynamics 365 Sales using a work email address, in a support platform using a personal email address, and in a webinar registration using a name and telephone number.Those records may represent the same person.However, matching customer information is not as simple as automatically joining identical names.Two different people can have the same name. Family members may share email addresses. Customers change jobs and email addresses. Phone number formats vary.Customer Insights - Data therefore allows organizations to define matching conditions based on appropriate combinations of identifying information.The objective is to connect records when there is sufficient evidence that they represent the same customer.
DUPLICATE REMOVAL
Before creating the wider customer profile, organizations also need to deal with duplicate records.A customer might appear twice because someone submitted a web form more than once, an import created another contact, or another business process accidentally created duplicate information.Duplicate removal helps prevent a single customer from being represented multiple times before broader unification takes place.Clean source data therefore remains important even when sophisticated customer data technology is available.
THE GOLDEN CUSTOMER RECORD
After matching and deduplication, Customer Insights - Data can create a unified customer profile.This is sometimes described as a golden record.The term does not mean that the platform creates a magically perfect version of the customer.Instead, it represents the best combined customer profile that can be created from the approved information and matching rules provided by the organization.A unified profile might combine contact information from one source, account relationships from another, purchase history from a commerce system, and service history from another application.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/m365-fm-modern-work-security-and-productivity-with-microsoft-365--6704921/support.
