Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (“Customer Insights” or “CI”) is an intuitive and flexible customer data platform that can unlock insights and enable personalized customer experiences. It aims to simplify connection to customer data from multiple sources and consolidate it into comprehensive customer profiles. These profiles can then be made available to your users in a number of ways, including directly as 'customer cards' in D365 CRM, as a basis for Power BI reports and dashboards, as input for flow processes. Power Automate work, etc. It provides the ability to predict missing data values, customer churn rate, and more using other similar profiles. You can even extend the capabilities of AI by creating custom machine learning models using Azure Machine Learning.
These are promising opportunities for many types of
businesses, whether small/large, B2C / B2B, or product/service. Almost all
businesses have large islands of rapidly growing customer data that are almost
always spread across multiple systems and repositories. Customer Insights
provides the ability to easily merge your different data sources without
investing at the enterprise level or waiting weeks, months, or years for other
types of solutions. Although Customer Insights is a relatively new SKU, it
builds on many existing technologies from Microsoft,
including Power Platform connectors
and the Power Query engine. Azure
services provide additional storage and functionality when needed. It's also
worth noting that Microsoft is investing everything in terms of investing in
this product and it continues to mature quickly, with new features being added
at a rapid pace.
As with all things that sound too good to be true,
there is a little warning next to all of these hopes and dreams. The main
factor that can limit the potential realization of the CI vision has nothing to
do with the defects of the product itself. Rather, it is the age-old law of
data processing called "garbage in, garbage out". That said, if your
source data is scarce, incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, inconsistent, or
duplicated, the resulting reports and analysis will become confusing rather
than reliable information. It is important to make sure that you are collecting
all the relevant data that you need, and that you invest in continuous efforts
to achieve and maintain high data quality in order to reap the potential
benefits of analytics and AI solutions.
Here are some steps you can take to keep your CRM
data clean and ensure it stays clean:
Analyze
Existing Data - Identify quality issues and gaps in
your existing data.
Create
a Data Quality Plan - Prioritize issues, identify fixes and
solutions, and set the pace for initial and ongoing efforts.
Implementing
Account and Contact duplication - There are several
techniques for identifying and merging duplicate records.
Reparent
Orphan Records - Use smart field mapping to determine
which account a contact belongs to.
Use
data validation services - Use vendor services to verify
names, addresses, emails, websites, and more.
Enrich
Your Master Data - Identify data providers to gain
additional insight into companies (firmography) and people (demographics).
Customer Insights has some very interesting
features. When you combine it with the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, Power
Platform, and Azure Machine Learning,
the possibilities grow exponentially. Remember, everything depends on a solid,
high-quality database!
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