Top 5 reasons to choose Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights over COTS Customer Data Platforms

While a unified profile is a simple solution to consolidate an individual’s brand interactions offline and online through owned, paid or earned channels to build customer insights, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) builds unified customer profiles, as its core feature. The two use cases every CDP tries to address are deep analytics and deep engagement. Though some of the CDPs are more focused in analytics to understand the customer through all possible analytical lenses and find tools to build affinities, score propensities, evaluate sentiments etc., the other sets are more fixated on real time hyper-personalized experience building to entice and eventually convert the customers in their consumer journey.

Another interesting fact is that engagement CDPs are not positioned alone, and often placed alongside CRM or a Customer Journey Builder solution with compact out-of-the-box integration. For example, Adobe RT-CDP is gaining in popularity not because of CDP capabilities, but because of powerful journey solutions like Adobe Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics. Salesforce Data Cloud works seamlessly with Salesforce CRM and a journey solution like Marketing Cloud. Redpoint Global brings CDP, but also effective Redpoint Orchestration for real-time experience across customer journey.

Image 1: Common positioning of packaged CDP

Recently, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights has received a lot of traction. Primarily introduced alongside MS Dynamics CRM,  its “Journey” module helps with email marketing, real time journeys, event planning and more. This solution starts with an ecosystem already around it.

Before we dive into MS Dynamics Customer Insights, let’s examine the core feature of a CDP. At its foundation, it needs to extract and ingest data from various customer profile or interaction data sources, then unify based on an applied match, merge and reconciliation rule to build a unified customer profile. Then it will build segment and insights to activate to downstream journey orchestration and business intelligence solutions.

Image 2: Engagement CDP Core Architecture

Below are the top five reasons Microsoft Dynamics is a better choice for CDP:

1. Azure Integration

MS Dynamics 365 Customer insights, a Microsoft solution has the best possible integration with various Azure solutions.

• Azure Data Lake
  • Both common data model tables and delta tables can be pulled into customer insight solution as data sources.
  • For CDM, a defined schema plays a key role in data ingestion providing structural and semantic consistency across applications.
  • Delta Lake supports schema flexibilities, allowing appending data to existing tables with evolving schemas.
• Azure Dataverse
  • Cloud-based data management solution that allows for securely storing and managing data used by biz apps.
  • Analytical tables within Dataverse can be connected to CDP and those tables are of delta format.
• Azure Synapse
  • Primarily acts like a destination.
  • It is recommended to use Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse instead of Customer Insights data-out exports for further data processing of the tables generated by Customer Insights.

2. Data Enrichment

As of July 2024, it is a preview feature, ready for use by customers and provides feedback, it’s not a GA feature ahead.

• Enrichments, such as brand and interest enrichments, are based on Microsoft data and machine learning models and available free with Customer Insights – CDP subscription.
• Enrichments leveraging external data providers like Experian and HERE, needs additional subscription from those providers.
• Enrichment can be applied to both – data before unification or after, on the unified profile.
• Enrichment data are managed separately from unified customer profile data.
• It is possible to restrict enrichments to a specific segment rather than overall profile.
• In the US, LiveRamp is available for enrichment and provides deterministic offline identity resolution and consolidation of customer data.

Image 3: MS Dynamics Customer Insights unique features

3. Power Platform

This is the most important differentiator for Customer Insights CDP solution.

• Power Query
  • Offers varied connectors for data ingestion into Customer Insights.
  • Possible to apply various kinds of transformations like filter, aggregates etc., while pulling data.
  • Can clean data by removing duplicates, handling missing values, and correcting inconsistencies.
• Power Automate
  • It triggers specific events to occur automatically when CDP data changes and manage more complex flows directly.
  • Automation can be setup using Power Automate connector.
  • Monitoring can be achieved through triggers. If a data source job fails, or a segment threshold cross, it’s possible to capture that and send an email to a support group or post in a MS Team using Power Automate Actions.
  • Power Automate also helps in crossing data export limitations for sources like Azure Dataverse.
  • For the Customer Insights-Journey solution, power automates fulfill the need of automation based on segment status. Here is a great example of how a bulk update or deletion of Contacts is possible for recipients with one or more hard bounced marketing emails.
  • This works like Salesforce Flows or partially like marketing cloud automations.
• Connected Power Apps
  • Unified customer profile can be brought into custom apps leveraging Power Apps.
  • Only the Customer, UnifiedActivity, and Segments tables can be retrieved through the Power Apps connector. Delegation is available for Customer and Unified Activity tables.
  • It is possible to activate segments and build personalized experience leveraging PowerApps.
• Power BI
  • OOTB PowerBI connector, helps exporting segments, measures to Microsoft most famous BI tool – Power BI.
  • The connector is designed to work for large data sets (up to 1M rows).
  • Importing larger data sets may work, however it could time-out because of Power BI limitations.

4. MS Copilot

What if you had the ability to build a segment or a business measure by simply describing them to a virtual assistant, who will do it for marketers? The best possible features a CDP can have:

• MS Dynamics Customer Insights – Data, due to Microsoft copilot integration.
• Allowing a data scientist to explore, analyze, and understand customer data by simply asking questions to copilot using natural language.
• Copilot is also handy to build customized and personalized contents for real-time activation.
• Copilot can help build journeys based on descriptions provided by marketers, with speed and scale.

With copilot, the possibilities are endless in the marketing and customer insight space. Here is a great article with initial use cases.

Image 4: MS Dynamics Customer Insights Architecture

5. Event Management

B2B CDP use cases, which normally B2C CDPs do not focus much on, need special treatment. A prominent example is event management. Physical events and virtual webinars are important sales and marketing channels for B2B businesses. But in general, it’s complex to arrange these events, execute, and follow up with the participants before, during and after the events.

• The Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys event management feature helps with:
  • Initial planning and budgeting
  • Promotion and publication
  • Attendee registration
  • Webinar broadcasting
  • Event analytics
  • Lead generation and management
  • ROI measurement etc.
• There are two kinds of events that are possible to set up – outbound marketing and Realtime journey. Here is a great article detailing every aspect of these variations.

 These are just a few features of MS Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data & Journey making it more popular compared than its competitors. With Azure Data Lake known as the widely accepted solution in Data & Analytics space, MS Dynamics CRM recognized as a leader in CRM space and Power BI at the top of the chart for BI, Customer Insights has a powerful ecosystem, sure to be a market leader in the next 2-3 years. Power Platform and Copilot add great support as it emerges a leader in customer data platforms.

References:

• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights documentation – Dynamics 365 Customer Insights | Microsoft Learn
• https://www.ameyholden.com/articles/use-realtime-segment-membership-power-automate-dynamics-365
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/copilot-overview
• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/journeys/transition-walkthrough-events
• Personalize content – Dynamics 365 Customer Insights | Microsoft Learn

Digital assets are the bloodlines of a content-centric business. Enterprises invest a fortune to procure assets from vendors. Any asset an enterprise owns, like an office building, machinery, or computers, needs management. Digital assets are no different. A digital asset can be as small as a logo or as large as a video played on one of those large LED displays of Times Square in New York. It can be an image, audio, or PDF file. It can also be a zip file, which contains many other files. It can be an executable file that a car manufacturer releases periodically to keep the in-car entertainment systems up-to-date.

Imagine there is an image of a famous football star holding a product (manufactured by an enterprise). A lot of money is invested in creating that image, which is sold to the enterprise by the creative agency that created the image. Now, this digital asset, just like any other physical asset, needs to be managed well to maximize returns on the investments made toward procuring this digital asset. How do we maximize the return on the investment? Returns can be maximized by utilizing this image to generate interest in the product, consequently driving the sales of the advertised product. The critical factor in maximizing the return on investment is optimizing the asset’s utilization in general. The asset should be visible to increase its utilization.

In other words, it should be easy for the marketing team to find the asset. Digital files are hard to find since the content within the file, i.e., photos and videos, are not searchable. Hence, assets can be made more searchable by adding data about what is happening in the asset. In the above example of our product being endorsed by a famous football star, what if we include textual data with the image that says “Product AS1022 being endorsed by <football star name>”? The text data is more searchable. When a marketeer searches for AS1022, this asset will surely come up. Hence, this makes our asset, in turn, more searchable. Behold “The Metadata”. Any data that provides more information about another piece of data is our “Metadata.” The more metadata an asset has, the more the searchability – isn’t that right? Not quite! When it comes to metadata, more is not better. Better structured, concise metadata always wins over large unstructured metadata. Metadata is an important case for digital asset management systems. But there are others as well. DAM systems bring the following advantages to an enterprise:

• Increase ROI on assets by maximizing reuse
• Improve search performance of assets
• Enforce permission on assets
• Reduce legal consequences by automatically bringing down assets on their expiry dates
• Provide portals through which users can easily consume the assets
• Provide analytics and reporting on asset usage, which can give a clear view of ROI
• Integration with other digital systems in the landscape, like PIM, CMS, personalization systems, etc.

DAM positioned in a typical digital landscape

Typical touch points of a DAM system

Asset origination

• These systems generate the assets that need to be managed by DAM
• Some creative applications will be used to create the assets; more often than not, these systems can push assets to DAM directly.
• The creatives flow through an approval workflow and marketing resource management tools in more mature processes.
• Other systems may feed the metadata or binaries to DAM systems.
• Stock asset providers can provide generic assets.

Asset consumption

These systems consume the assets managed by DAM

• PIM systems that use asset links as attributes against product SKUs
• CMS systems that reference images and videos on DAM to build web pages
• Mobile apps also reference images and videos on DAM
• Portals that expose digital assets to a selected subset of external users.
• Advertising and Marketing campaigns (emails, banners, web pages, social media posts, etc.)

There are plenty of Enterprise DAM systems in the market, and Acquia DAM is one of them. Acquia DAM was earlier known as Widen DAM and was rechristened Aquia DAM after Acquia took over the DAM.

Recently, Infogain implemented Acquia DAM for one of its clients, one of the leading manufacturers of computers, laptops, and accessories. This was a large migration consisting of ~1.8 million assets with a size close to 50 TB. Each asset carries 60+ metadata fields of varying format. This implementation also involved multiple integrations with cloud-based and on-prem legacy systems. The client reported the following improvements with the new Acquia DAM:

• Increase in utilization of the assets
• Reduction in overall cost to manage their digital assets
• Improved search performance and an overall better user experience

In the next blog, I will explore the nuances of Acquia DAM implementation in-depth. Stay tuned!