What’s new in the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 2024 release wave 2

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights brings exciting enhancements and new features to help businesses deepen their understanding of customers and create more personalized, impactful interactions. D365 Customer Insights consists of two solutions: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (previously known as Dynamics 365 Marketing) and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data (previously known as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights). Together, these tools empower organizations to unify customer data, generate actionable insights, and deliver tailored experiences across all touchpoints. In this blog, we’ll explore the latest features and improvements introduced in this release, highlighting how they can drive better engagement and business outcomes.

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys now enables anyone to create customer journeys effortlessly with the help of Copilot in Dynamics 365. This feature allows you to simply describe your desired journey in everyday language, and Copilot, powered by generative AI, will automatically build it for you. This empowers you to focus on delivering personalized experiences while streamlining the journey creation process, making it easy for teams to collaborate and quickly align on customer engagement strategies.

Key features of using Copilot to create journeys include:

• Natural language input: Describe the journey you want to create in plain language, and Copilot will handle the rest.
• Suggested journeys: Get inspiration and a head start with a list of suggested journeys tailored to your needs.
• Instant previews: See a preview of the journey Copilot creates before making any adjustments.
• Detailed summaries: Receive a comprehensive summary of the journey created by Copilot, allowing you to review and refine your strategy before adding content.

The latest release of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys enhances event management features to ensure your marketing events reach their full potential. With new tools for managing waitlists, streamlining communications, and simplifying form completion, you can enhance event attendance and improve the overall experience for your attendees.

Key event management features include:

• Waitlist registrations: Maximize event capacity by enabling waitlist registrations, ensuring that spots are filled when cancellations occur. The system automatically registers the next person on the waitlist and sends them confirmation and event details.
• Pre- and post-event communications: Utilize out-of-the-box journeys to optimize messaging and promotions before, during, and after the event. Target the right audience, use event-specific templates, and leverage multichannel journeys to boost engagement and ticket sales.
• Form pre-fill: Simplify the registration process with form prefill, which reduces redundancy by automatically filling out customer details. This speeds up the registration process and enhances the user experience, allowing customers to quickly confirm or update their information.

These enhancements streamline event management, making it easier to drive higher attendance, improve communication, and provide a seamless registration experience.

In the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys 2024 release wave 2, delivering tailored experiences to different customer segments is now more straightforward with the introduction of the journey split tile. This new feature allows you to divide your audience into multiple branches, enabling you to offer distinct experiences based on either random sampling or specific participant numbers.

Key features of the journey split tile include:

• Split by percentage: Randomly divides the audience based on defined percentages, ideal for scenarios requiring randomness, such as surveying a random subset of your customer base. This method is most effective with larger populations, ensuring each participant is assigned to a branch individually.
• Split by number: Allocates participants into branches according to predefined numbers, useful for scenarios needing specific quantities, such as offering promotions to the first 1,000 sign-ups. Participants are assigned to branches sequentially from left to right.
• Up to 25 branches: Both splitting methods support up to 25 distinct branches, allowing for detailed customization and targeting within your journeys.

This feature simplifies the process of creating varied customer experiences, whether for feedback collection, promotional offers, or testing new experiences, by providing precise control over audience distribution and engagement.

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys introduces several key features designed to optimize your journey management and enhance customer interactions. With improved analytics, rate limiting, and personalization capabilities, you can now manage and tailor customer experiences with greater precision and efficiency.

Key features include:

• Understand customer inflows and exits: Gain detailed insights into customer behavior at every step of your journey. Track why customers enter or exit each step, export lists of up to 50,000 records, and analyze discrepancies between starting segments and actual journey participants.
• Control customer entry rate: Use journey rate limiting to space out message delivery, preventing overwhelming downstream systems and improving customer experience. Set limits per day or hour and control which days of the week customers can enter the journey.
• Orchestrate with marketing interactions: Branch and adapt journeys based on customer interactions with your marketing messages, such as email link clicks or blocks. Utilize out-of-the-box triggers to enhance engagement and personalization.
• Personalize based on web interactions: Track and leverage online behavior to create tailored experiences. Personalize messages, score leads, and track engagement based on web activity while ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
• Wait for segment membership: Delay the next step in a journey until a customer becomes a member of a specific segment. This allows for more targeted actions based on customer behavior, such as waiting for credit card activation before sending a welcome email.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys 2024 release wave 2, the new capabilities for real-time journey forms enhance how you manage and integrate leads and contacts. You can now streamline the process of updating and linking lead information to existing contacts, ensuring your data remains accurate and organized according to your company’s established processes.

Key features include:

• Update existing data: Automatically update both lead and contact details based on submissions from real-time journey forms, ensuring your customer records are always accurate and current.
• Prevent duplicates: Define advanced matching rules to prevent the creation of duplicate records, maintaining the quality and integrity of your contact and lead data.
• Granular updates: Choose whether to update existing records with new form submissions, allowing for more precise data management.
• Preset configurations: Set default target audience configurations for new forms to streamline the process and ensure consistency in how lead data is handled.

In addition to the new features and enhancements highlighted above, the 2024 Release Wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys includes the following updates:

• Heatmap analytics for email engagement: Gain actionable insights into which areas and links in your emails drive the most engagement. View click-through rates, total clicks, and unique clicks, and filter heat maps by email version, journey version, and date to optimize your email content and design.
• Export data for custom reporting: Export Customer Insights – Journeys data to your own storage solutions for custom reporting and analysis. This feature allows you to integrate journey data with existing reporting systems and create tailored reports without needing Microsoft Fabric.
• Prevent duplicate emails: Enable email deduplication for segment-based journeys to ensure each unique email address receives only one message. Review duplicated email addresses in journey analytics to maintain a clean and efficient communication process.
• Double opt-in for compliance and engagement: Implement double opt-in to enhance email marketing effectiveness and compliance. Require users to confirm their subscription preferences through a follow-up email, reducing spam complaints and improving engagement while ensuring legal compliance.

As businesses expand their use of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, the growing number of segments and measures can lead to longer system refresh times, delaying access to time-sensitive insights. To combat this, the 2024 release wave 2 introduces an automation feature that deactivates unused segments and measures, ensuring that active ones refresh faster. Admins can control the retention period before deactivation, allowing the system to prioritize resources efficiently.

This automation helps streamline operations, particularly when managing a large volume of segments and measures, some of which may only be needed for short-term campaigns. The feature reallocates computing power to active elements, improving refresh times and overall system performance. If needed, deactivated segments or measures can be easily reactivated, or admins can opt out of automatic management to maintain manual control.

The 2024 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights introduces support for Microsoft OneLake as a data source, enhancing the flexibility and efficiency of your customer data platform. By integrating Customer Insights with Microsoft Fabric, you can generate valuable insights without the need for costly and time-consuming data movement, integration, or transformation processes. This seamless connection allows businesses to leverage up-to-date insights across various Dynamics 365 applications and advanced analytics scenarios, directly through Fabric.

Key benefits of using Microsoft OneLake with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights include:

• Enhanced agility: Gain real-time insights for faster, more informed decision-making across Dynamics 365 applications.
• Streamlined data integration: Directly connect Customer Insights to OneLake, eliminating the need for complex ETL processes and reducing costs.
• Seamless data processing: Leverage the Delta format in OneLake to automatically handle incremental changes, speeding up insights without additional data formatting.
• Unified customer data platform: Build or enhance your customer data platform by adding Customer Insights on top of Fabric, allowing for comprehensive data analysis and insight generation.

Customer data is constantly evolving, with rapid changes from online activities and mobile interactions. Traditionally, processing this data in a standard data warehouse can lead to delays, resulting in slow or outdated insights as unprocessed signals accumulate. To address this challenge, the 2024 release wave 2 introduces native support for the Delta Lake storage format in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, significantly speeding up processing times even as data updates increase in volume.

With Delta Lake’s incremental data updates, Customer Insights – Data can now process only the changes in customer profiles, rather than reprocessing the entire dataset daily. This means faster updates to customer profiles and associated insights, enabling businesses to react quickly to customer engagements with the most current information available. This automatic improvement, applied across unification, segments, measures, activities, and predictions, ensures that your organization can consistently deliver relevant, personalized experiences without the need for additional configuration.

Rand Group is your dedicated Dynamics 365 Customer Insights support partner to highlight new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights features that your organization should utilize, train your users on the new features, and perform system checks to ensure all modules are performing as planned after each release wave. Ready to start using these new features from the Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 2? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.