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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,... / Can D365 Customer Insi...
Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
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Can D365 Customer Insights be customized?

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Posted on by Community Member

Hello Community,

I would like to know if the D365 Customer Insights app can be customized, and if yes, how customizable it is? Or can it only be used as is out of the box?

Thanks!

I have the same question (0)
  • Verified answer
    Bill Ryan Profile Picture
    Bill Ryan 8 on at
    RE: Can D365 Customer Insights be customized?

    There's limited functionality that you can customize (choosing icons for example for Activities) but for the most part, you can't change the underlying form.  What I've found very helpful is using the Power BI connector and creating customized Customer cards. I'm guessing that this isn't what you are looking for, but seeing your name D365 Eric, there's a Card add in that you can insert into D365 that lets you consume the data in an easy format (assuming you have exported it).  Another thing to keep in mind is that you can get to the API directly and consume data from there, use PowerApps/Canvas apps and feed data from there.  Power BI has been the main way for me though. But if you're looking for a Form Editor like you have in D365, that's not a feature now.

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at
    RE: Can D365 Customer Insights be customized?

    Hi Bill Ryan,

    Thank you for your response! If I understand correctly, if I have an existing D365 instance - for example D365 Sales - and if I wish to consume the data from D365 Sales (for example Accounts, Contacts, Cases, etc.), and feed those data into Customer Insights to get the advanced analytics, then I would go with the Card add-in approach that you described, is that correct?

    If I set up a D365 Customer Insights environment directly, I can't connect it with my D365 Sales environment in that manner, am I understanding this right?

    Thank you!

  • Suggested answer
    Bill Ryan Profile Picture
    Bill Ryan 8 on at
    RE: Can D365 Customer Insights be customized?

    You can definitely ingest your D365 data into CI directly through Power Query/PPDF using the DataVerse connector (since 365 sales data is there).  So you can connect it, but you're ingesting it, running it through Map/Match/Merge and then exporting it out.  The Customer Card would just let you show the combined history of all the contacts for instance, in a card so it shows all activities on a timeline.  But you have  to ingest the data and then export it back to CRM although I think that experience and integration will get stronger soon.  

    So you can definitely ingest the data and export it back - what I meant was that you can't just change the customer card like you can with a form/view in D365.  You know how you can edit or create Forms, and have multiple views, right now that's not a feature  in CI.  

    You mentioned advanced Analytics though - so depending on what those are the answer is it depends.  CI has AI feautures like Product Recommender, Customer LifeTime value  and a few more.  You can segment and export those or use them to feed PBI dashboards. There's also website analytics that you can see in real time if you activate Engagement Insights, which is still a new feature but very easy to setup and quite cool.

    As far as CI though, the analytics you get are mainly going to be the models and then segments/measures you build off of the activities.  

  • Verified answer
    Nils Ke Profile Picture
    Nils Ke on at
    RE: Can D365 Customer Insights be customized?

    Hi Eric,

    Customer Insights web app is focused on empowering data admins, data analysts and business analysts to organize their customer data and gain insights from it. Our "Customers" page serves as a quick way for these users to review their customers, but is not thought of as a prime consumption experience. That's why there's no customization of these Customers pages in CI.

    Our goal is to let you choose how your unified and enhanced customer data is used/shown in your (existing) line-of-business experiences (like D365 sales). We offer several ways for that:

    - Consume CI's data from Dataverse, which provides full flexibility towards Power Platform, D365 apps and an API, see: docs.microsoft.com/.../customer-insights-dataverse

    - Display data within a D365 app with our D365 customer card add-in: docs.microsoft.com/.../customer-card-add-in. Note: This does not update the source data in D365 (as Bill Ryan explained).

    - Use other connectors from CI to duplicate selected data to other services for further data handling/exposure, like Azure data lake: docs.microsoft.com/.../export-azure-data-lake-storage-gen2

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member on at
    RE: Can D365 Customer Insights be customized?

    Hi Nils Ke,

    Thank you for sharing the information, much appreciated!

    Am I correct to say that Customer Insights is meant to be used when we are dealing with multiple customer data sources? In other words, if our D365 Sales application is the only source of data, then we would simply need to use the D365 customer card add-in instead. Am I understanding this correctly?

    Thanks!

  • Suggested answer
    Bill Ryan Profile Picture
    Bill Ryan 8 on at
    RE: Can D365 Customer Insights be customized?

    CI excels when you're consolidating data from different data sources, but it's very common to just have one source.  If you had incomplete data (for instance, within Contacts you had multiple records with Bill, William, Will and the same last name, or had multiple email addresses that had small deviations, or wanted to consolidate totally different Contacts that happen to be the same person within D365, CI would be great for it.  And from there, you could create an export destination and Update 365 sales.  It really depends on your use case.  If your only using Contacts and the data is perfectly clean, then it probably wouldn't bring a lot to the table.  But if you had multiple contacts for the same person and wanted to get all their activities consolidated for instance, CI would knock it out of the park.

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