Dynamics 365 CE Tip of the Month: Using the new Visual Hierarchy

Understanding the full picture of your customers’ relationships, across accounts, contacts, opportunities, quotes, and more, is essential for informed decision-making in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE). However, many organizations struggle with navigating this information because it requires digging into multiple forms, opening nested subgrids, or switching between pages. These challenges often slow down sales teams and make it harder to grasp complex account structures.

The new Visual Hierarchy feature, introduced in the 2025 Release Wave 2 update, solves this problem by providing an intuitive tree-style visualization that spans multiple tables and relationships. This tip of the month blog shows you how to configure this feature to create a clean, interactive view of your customer relationships.

The Visual Hierarchy feature lets you design one or more hierarchical structures starting from a chosen table (such as Account or Contact) and extending across related tables. This gives salespeople, managers, and service teams a clear, navigable view of child accounts, associated contacts, quotes, opportunities, and more, all in one place.

With Visual Hierarchy, users can quickly explore relationships, identify key stakeholders, find associated records, and even edit information directly within the visualization.

1. Within Dynamics 365 CE Sales, navigate to the Sales Hub app.
2. Switch the area to the App Settings area.

3. Select the Visual Hierarchy tab and create a new Hierarchy.

4. Set a name for your hierarchy, and then select which table you want to start from. In many cases this will be either an Account or Contact. In our example, we will start with an Account, and use the Parent Customer to see child account/contacts and follow them to individual quotes.

5. Each time you add a table, you will have to select which view is going to be used to filter the results, and which forms you want to show on the tile (1) and card (2).

6. Continue to add relationships to your hierarchy.

7. Once you’re done, you can preview the hierarchy right from this screen. If you’re happy with the results, click Save and Publish to let users begin using this visualization.

8. Depending on which table you started with (Account in our case) users can now access this visualization right from the main view or main form of that table.

9. The new visualization gives users an in depth look at your customers, with a format that is easy to read and gives immediate access to related records if they need to make updates.

10. If you have more than one visualization created for a table, use the selector in the top to change between them.

A Visual Hierarchy brings a modern, highly usable approach to relationship management in Dynamics 365 CE.

Key advantages include:

• A clear, unified view of client relationships across multiple tables.
• Easier navigation for sales, service, and management teams.
• Ability to edit records directly from the visualization.
• More flexibility than the legacy single-table hierarchy view.

By adopting Visual Hierarchy, your organization can cut through complexity, improve visibility, and give users the context they need without navigating multiple screens. If you need help optimizing your Dynamics 365 CE system or want assistance designing effective Visual Hierarchies, contact one of our Microsoft experts. And be sure to return next month for the next blog in our Dynamics 365 CE tip of the month series.