Breaking down the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 2024 release wave 1

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a powerful customer data platform designed to enhance customer experiences within your organization. This intelligent offering 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.) As with all Dynamics 365 products, Microsoft releases two waves of new features and updates per year. In this post, we will highlight the top new features for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data in the 2024 release wave 1.

Taking campaigns from concept to launch can often be a complex and time-consuming process. In the 2024 release wave 1, Copilot for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is designed to revolutionize and expedite the campaign creation process. By simply describing your campaign goals or providing a creative brief, Copilot harnesses the capabilities of data and AI to generate tailored audiences, content, images, journeys, and more, enabling you to curate, edit, and launch your project swiftly.

With Copilot, you can:

• Easily manage all campaign assets in one place, streamlining the editing and coordination process
• Automatically create a brand profile from your company’s website, ensuring all content remains on-brand, including Copilot-suggested content
• Receive suggested audiences tailored to your campaign objectives and past campaign performance, optimizing targeting efficiency
• Utilize Copilot’s email creation features, including content suggestions, tone adjustment, and layout customization, to craft engaging emails
• Access image suggestions, generate new images, or refine existing ones to match your message and brand identity
• Generate suggested journeys designed to achieve your campaign goals, providing a foundation for further refinement and optimization
• Export all campaign details into a single document for easy sharing with stakeholders, facilitating seamless review and approval processes

By using Copilot to create campaigns, you significantly conserve time and effortlessly drive towards your defined goals, allowing you more opportunity to refine and approve your campaign before it reaches your customers. It enhances productivity with AI-driven precision.

Email marketing stands as a critical tool for customer engagement and conversions, yet determining the most effective email strategy can be challenging. In the 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, marketers can leverage A/B testing within real-time journeys to compare different email variations among subsets of your audience. Utilizing the email editor in Customer Insights – Journeys, you can effortlessly create alternate email versions by adjusting elements such as the subject, body, or sender address, tailoring content to resonate with your audience effectively. This tool effectively measures interaction and performance, allowing for data-driven decisions to refine and enhance email content for better engagement and conversion outcomes.

With this new feature, you can:

• Define different types of A/B tests changing the subject, from email address or email body
• Preview and test-send version A and version B of your email
• Easily identify a winner and analyze the results of the A/B test in journey and email insights

Efficient lead generation is essential for business growth, and capturing responses from external, custom-built forms can significantly enhance your efforts. In the 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, you can maximize the potential of your existing forms without the need for recreation. Seamlessly capture submissions from any third-party form on your website and automatically create new leads or contacts within Customer Insights – Journeys. This integration empowers you to gain deeper insights into your audience, refine targeting strategies, and execute more effective follow-up actions.

• External form submission capture: Automatically capture submissions from any external form on your website and funnel these into Customer Insights – Journeys as new leads or contacts.
• Custom JavaScript creation: Easily create JavaScript code with mapped form fields to existing entity attributes within Customer Insights – Journeys, simplifying the integration process.
• Flexible embedding: Embed the generated capture script into any webpage that houses the form, allowing for consistent data collection across multiple points.

Tailoring customer experiences requires the ability to segment your audience effectively, delivering unique interactions based on individual preferences and behaviors. While attribute branches and segments are useful, sometimes the distribution of customers among branches is more critical than commonalities. For instance, sending surveys to a random subset of customers can be a difficult task to configure manually. The 2024 release wave 1 introduces the journey split tile to address this challenge by allowing you to divide your audience into branches within a journey, offering distinct experiences to different subsets of participants. Whether you’re conducting surveys, testing new experiences, or offering promotional deals, the journey split tile empowers you to customize interactions efficiently.

• Split by percentage: Randomly divides the audience into percentages associated with each branch, making it ideal for scenarios requiring randomness, such as survey distribution to a subset of customers.
• Split by number: Allocates participants to branches based on specified numbers, suitable for scenarios needing a specific number of participants, like offering promotions to the first set number of customers who sign up for a newsletter.
• Versatile branch creation: Each split option supports up to 25 branches, providing flexibility to accommodate various audience segmentation needs within your customer journeys.

The 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data introduces seamless integration with Optimizely, enabling marketers and citizen developers to personalize customer touchpoints across channels effortlessly. This integration facilitates easy configuration for data exchange between the platforms, allowing for the utilization of Customer Insights – Data segments within Optimizely. Users can create experiences that are tailored to their customer’s browsing activity, loyalty, past engagement history, and other real-time signals.

Key features of this integration include:

• Configuration of connection between Customer Insights – Data and Optimizely
• The use of Customer Insights – Data segments within Optimizely for targeted personalization
• Running experiments or campaigns in Optimizely based on Customer Insights – Data segments
• Incorporating experimentation and interaction data from Optimizely back into Customer Insights – Data for enhanced insights

Customers continuously provide signals about their interests and preferences as they engage with businesses. Recognizing and acting on these signals promptly is essential in delivering the most targeted and personalized experiences. In the 2024 release wave 1, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data now offers the capability to update customer profiles and associated insights in real-time, thus enabling businesses to enhance user experience on their sites or mobile apps, fostering loyalty and driving higher conversion rates through timely and tailored engagements.

This real-time capability is achieved through several features:

• Real-time web tracking: Implement a tracking script on your site to capture high-intent customer actions like viewing the pricing page, adding items to the cart, or downloading e-books instantly.
• Real-time unknown profiles: Accumulate web data from all visitors, authenticated or not, and let the system automatically create unknown profiles in real-time.
• Real-time unknown-to-known: Merge unrecognized profiles into known profiles promptly, maintaining a comprehensive and current view of your customers.
• Real-time web personalization: Use APIs to access your customer data, including segment memberships, web events, or demographic data, and personalize the experience for your site visitors based on real-time signals.

Gaining insight into how customers engage with your marketing campaigns is pivotal for refining and enhancing your marketing strategies. The 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights bridges the gap between your marketing execution system and the Customer Data Platform, negating the need for manual data pipeline setups. This integration enables users to draw upon both customer data and marketing interaction data when creating segments. Such capability facilitates marketers and sales representatives in constructing more personalized engagement strategies, predicting purchase intents, and executing re-targeting scenarios efficiently, ultimately aiming to increase conversion rates through informed decision-making.

Key capabilities include:

• Integrated marketing data: Automate the integration of marketing interaction data from Customer Insights – Journeys to Customer Insights – Data, allowing for the seamless creation of enriched customer segments and insights.
• Segmentation using engagement data: Leverage marketing engagement data directly in segment creation, enabling targeted strategies for enhancing customer interaction with marketing campaigns.
• Churn prediction: Utilize patterns in email engagement to predict customer churn, empowering proactive retention efforts.
• Ad re-targeting strategies: Identify unengaged customers through their email interactions and develop ad re-targeting strategies to boost their conversion rates.

In the era of heightened data privacy concerns, companies with multiple lines of business (LOB) face the challenge of leveraging opportunities to cross-sell while adhering to stringent data protection standards. The 2024 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data addresses this challenge by enabling optimized customer experiences and business performance within a framework that fully respects privacy requirements. This system allows LOBs to collaborate using shared customer profiles while ensuring strict control over data access based on the profile’s engagement with individual LOBs. Furthermore, it provides comprehensive yet segregated insights that enable cross-company groups such as IT, analytics, and data science to analyze customer engagement across all LOBs and brands, thereby minimizing compliance risks and enhancing cross-sell opportunities without compromising on data privacy.

Key capabilities include:

• Unify customer profiles across your LOBs while ensuring adherence to organizational data access policies
• Protect sensitive customer information by allowing LOB access only to data relevant to their business engagement, ensuring no sensitive data leaks across LOB boundaries
• Enable cross-departmental insights on customer engagement while maintaining strict privacy controls, allowing for informed decision-making without compromising customer data

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 1? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.