Microsoft Dynamics 365: Detailing Insights Features

You know how the saying goes, “location, location, location.” Location is everything when it comes to real estate. As we continue our Deep Dive journey into Dynamics 365, we concentrate on Insights, Insights, Insights. Microsoft is a front runner in employing artificial and machine learning intelligence in Sales, Marketing, and Service applications.

This kind of Insight is verging on psychic powers!

Kudos to Microsoft for their ambitious approach to applying very useful technology to customer-facing applications; nonetheless, you may have already noticed that the word Insights is a tad exhausted in its use. During the course of this blog, we will be discussing each of these Insights and its advantages to give you a better understanding of what they mean to you.

Insights – Powered by InsideView

Insights, formerly called Customer Insights but now called Insights - Powered by InsideView, gives Dynamics 365 users precise company and contact data, applicable news and social feeds, and an all-encompassing network of professional connections that can provide an edge during the marketing and selling process to maintain relevance, sell smarter, and expand faster.

Insights has been readily available for several years, and it continues to get better. In the most recent release, the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) have been reconfigured significantly. Here is the updated “card” view:

Also, the expanded Insights view:

Social Insights

Social Insights combines Microsoft Social Engagement along with Dynamics 365. Social Insights from Social Engagement assists in analyzing social media data to identify emerging trends within people’s comments, be they positive, negative, or neutral. You have the ability to drill down into data and view specific things people have said, and follow up by acting on it:

Customer Insights

Customer Insights, a cloud-based SaaS service, combines data from various sources and then generates knowledge and insights to develop a comprehensive 360° view of your customers. Customer Insights provides the resources to connect to transactional data sources and model profiles of customers along with their interactions. It allows organizations the ability to generate insights via KPIs in regard to their business. Currently, Customer Insights does require a substantial amount of setup and also requires an Azure subscription. Honestly, this particular one is still in its early stages; however, I do believe this will be highly impactful:

Relationship Insights

From a business aspect, the optimal goal is to develop personalized, productive relationships with both your customers and your prospects. To help achieve this goal, the most recent version of Dynamics 365 constantly analyzes the immense collection of customer-interaction data that is kept with your Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Exchange systems. This gives you better understanding of your business relationships, allows you to evaluate your activities in regard to previous successes, and decide upon the best next action:

Relationship Insights encompasses four components:

• Relationship Analytics – The visual part that utilizes natural language processing to assess the sentiment of an email or other communications your customers and prospects send. Predictive intelligence looks at the signals like prospect email responses or the number of lead interchanges and contrasts them with patterns gathered from prior successful sales.
• Relationship Assistant - Builds on actionable cards that are customized per each user’s exact role. A sales person, for example, would see items such as scheduled calls, travel itineraries, and due dates for proposals. Customer Support would be able to view support tickets, relevant emails, and outage notices, with items prioritized for action based upon relationship health.
• Auto Capture - Integrates with Microsoft Exchange so you can automatically track emails, tasks, and activities. Users are able to use Auto Capture to channel external data into Dynamics 365 and create or update custom records, automatically, without having to write any code. Activities, such as emails and social actions, can easily be created based on the rules that a user sets up for their contacts and communications. Custom activities can be created, as well.
• Email Engagement - Finally, Email Engagement provides the ability to track the things that happen to your emails after they are sent with the following three capabilities:
  • Compose and Send: You can send and then track recipient activity, such as opens and clicks. This feature also allows users to schedule email sends based upon business intelligence data which shows when a prospect might be most likely to open their email. Features also automatically set reminders that follow up on unopened messages within a timely manner.
  • Tracking and Analytics: This feature shows how, when, and where recipients engage with the email messages you send. Now, you will know when your recipient is reading the emails you send on the go from their mobile device, or when they looking for thing in the morning, from their desk.
  • Mobile Email Application: Allows you to track attachments, view statistics on emails, and monitor your own activity timeline from your smartphone or tablet:

Organization Insights

Organization Insights (for Dynamics 365 online only) gives your organization the power to drive end-user adoption and the ability to easily troubleshoot to ensure better performance from their Dynamics 365 instance.
 

 
It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it? To learn more and see these tools in action, join us for our upcoming webcast, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Deep Dive, Part 4: It's all about Insights, Insights, Insights, on April 20th.