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How Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Will Help You Retain Clients

Posted by Alanna Friedberg on Mar 10, 2020 11:00:00 AM

DYNAMICS 365 CUSTOMER INSIGHTSThe reality of business today is that it costs more to attract new customers than it does to retain the old ones. Fortunately, there are tools like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to help you achieve both of these goals. Here’s how Dynamics 365 Customer Insights could help your organization better understand the perception of your products and services in the marketplace.

What is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a module in the subscription service that provides companies with a database. But that database is a Dynamics 365 customer service tool that can collate, integrate, and analyze data from a variety of sources and marketing channels. Ultimately, the goal of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is to give your organization a 360-degree view of your entire customer and end-user experience.

Most companies have their data siloed and dispersed among a variety of systems. This could include:

  • A CRM platform.
  • A web analytics tool.
  • An email marketing automation software.
  • Social media management hubs.
  • A customer rewards program.
  • And more.

Each of these tools may be managed by a different software vendor and may not integrate well, creating a lot of redundant tasks and extrapolated insights between disparate systems. It’s a scattershot approach this lacks consistency, oversight, and efficiency.

But what if you could consolidate all of these unwieldy platforms under a single source of marketing truth? That’s exactly why Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was created.

How Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Works

Let’s be clear; Dynamics 365 Customer Insights wasn’t meant to take the place of your CRM. Instead, this tool integrates with your existing marketing channels, parsing data from all your transactional systems, and then links the data to a specific individual customer profile. Literally, any data source can link with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. To accomplish this, Microsoft had to:

  • Create a standardized data model that partnered well with existing (and sometimes competing) players in the market.
  • Create tools that allow you to manually dictate the relationships between all the data sources flowing through Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
  • Create a next-generation data analytics structure incorporating machine learning algorithms to conduct predictive learning on all the data you’re trying to slice and dice.

The end result of this phenomenal effort is a customer database that has reviewed all behaviors, all data, and created a 360-degree view of your customers.

Can you start to imagine how this understanding of your existing customers could be used to retain them? The functionality of the Customer Insights tool could be the fuel for your Dynamics 365 customer service efforts. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights makes use of customer analytics, key performance metrics, and purchasing statistics to help you understand exactly what your clients want and need.

What Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Will Help with Customer Retention?

Some of the customer retention insights offered by this software include:

  • Contact insights can help your organization understand which marketing touchpoints led the customer to make a purchase. This information can help your company reproduce behaviors that motivate that individual customer to buy your products. For example:
    • Web activity can create insight into the marketing pages visited by your customers before they made a purchase.
    • Subscription list monitoring can show you the unique customer interests by which lists were opted into or out of.
    • Event participation can guide your organization into creating engaging activities to build your brand — and attract and retain customers.
    • Email click-through rates can correlate to messaging so you can understand which emails interested each individual customer and which didn’t.
  • Customer segmentation insights can help categorize groups of customers by their needs, wants, and priorities. This includes customer buying behaviors, demographics, multi-channel usage, and by value. This segmentation will allow you to target groups of customers with the best marketing messages that will resonate and keep them coming back for more.
  • Customer journey insights track the before, during, and after when buying a product or service. Today, your customers have multiple touchpoints before they make a purchase. They may research your products online before going in-store to buy. Or, they may see an online review and make a purchase from the web. But how can you tailor your efforts to retain these customers if you don’t understand their behavior?
  • Market insights can track how customers search for your company before making a purchase. It can monitor social media engagement to determine what your customers are talking about. Understanding what’s important to your customer and what the marketplace buzz is happening around your products will help you both tailor your marketing efforts for customer retention, but also respond quickly if there is a problem with your product or service.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is the mediator between all of the data your customers are leaving out there every time they interact with your company brand. Microsoft designed this tool to map and analyze all of the data from every channel you’re impacting and then meld into real-time insight for each customer that buys your products.

One of the biggest benefits for your marketing team is that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights eliminates many of the manual processes that you used to use to combine data from the multitude of source channels out there. Instead, you can create defined data mapping sets for each source, and then automate reporting so that your team spends more time getting to the data that will help you retain each client long-term.

IES — Your Dynamics 365 Customer Service Team

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a very sophisticated platform designed for data engineers. The tool can unify all of your data under one consolidate umbrella, analyze the data, and map it to the individual customer. To get started with this platform, we recommend a consultation with a Microsoft Certified consulting team like IES. Our experienced team of developers can help you set up, configure, and maintain Dynamics 365 Customer Insights so the tool lives up to its promise of customer retention. Talk to our team today to find out how we can help.

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Topics: Dynamics 365