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Customer Insights

Customer Insights

Customer Insights is one of the newer additions to the Power Platform. It allows you to unify and understand your customer data, coming from various sources, to harness it for intelligent insights and actions.

Step 1 - Connect your data sources

Your first step towards a unified customer profile is, to connect all your data sources. This is done by navigating to Data -> Data Sources and selecting Add data source:


After defining a name for the data source you can choose out of many connectors in a similar experience (Power Query) like importing data to CRM or Power BI:


Once connected to your data source you can do transformations, e.g. changing data types, which will be applied whenever your data set is refreshed:


After your data source is connected, a status column indicates, if the data is ready, or being refreshed. By clicking on the 3 points next to each data source you can edit, refresh or delete it.

Step 2 - Map / Match / Merge

The next steps after connection your data sources is to map, match and merge your data sources to create a unified customer profile.

You navigate to Data -> Unify -> Map and select the entities out of your data sources (which can be client static data as well as transactional data) that make up your customer profile. 



Once done, you define the primary key for each of the entities. 



The next step is to match the data. Which means we will define a match order and match rules based on which the different entities will be matched against each other. 

You start of be defining a primary entity, that will be the base for your unified profile and can then add one or multiple entities to match with this profile. 



For each entity you can then define rules, how to match the two entities, e.g. by fullname, email.... 

By adjusting the precision between low to exact you can ellaborate your best match result. But this may also depend on your use case, since e.g. in a banking scenario you would choose high precision, while in a marketing use case low would just be fine. 


If you click on "Preview" you can have a look at your results based on the selected precision:


The last step is the merge step, where you can merge identical columns, e.g. if their name is not identical and they have not been merged automatically.

Step 3 - Define search criteria

The last step towards your unified customer profile is, to define search attributes:


Then you click on run and the search index is being created. Once finished, you can have a look at your customer profiles:


Measures

Measures allow to calculate certain KPIs either on business level or on customer level, e.g. Lifetime Spend, Average Store Purchase, Total Loyalty Points, ...

The business measures are displayed on the "Home" tab:


Customer measures are displayed on the customer profile:

Segments

Segments can be created based on measures, or you can define your own rules, like below:


Segments can be exported and then further be used in Dynamics 365 Sales or Dynamics 365 Marketings to target selected customers in a marketing campaign. They can also be exported as csv, if you open the segment in Customer Insights.

Dynamics 365 Sales / Service

You can install the Customer Insights add on via App Source in your CRM organization. This allows to add certain customer insights controls to your customer forms. E.g. controls that display a timeline of all your customer interactions, a control that displays certain KPIs or a control that displays fields of your unified customer profile.

This could look like that:


Power BI

Also Power BI comes with a Customer Insights connector. Which means you can create your own dashboards based on data from Customer Insights:



Of course there is much much more that you can do with Customer Insights. This post was just scratching on the surface.  You can utilize it in Power Apps, you can use it with Power Automate.

Feel free to register for a free trial at https://dynamics.microsoft.com/de-de/ai/customer-insights/
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