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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,... / Does Customer Insights...
Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
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Does Customer Insights work with Dynamics 365 as the only Data Source?

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Posted on by AlexMcL 8

Hi

I have a couple of questions:

#1 I've been going through the learning path Create a unified customer profile in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. For most of our client systems, Dynamics 365 is the key source of customer data, with all the transactions, activities and contextual information.

Is Customer Insights still useful in this context, or does the value only really only come from unifying from more than one data source?

#2 Are LinkedIn and Outlook useful data sources? They're mentioned in the material for Sales Insights, but not as far as I've seen so far for Customer Insights?

Many thanks,

Alex

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  • Verified answer
    Mimi Yoshida Profile Picture
    Mimi Yoshida Microsoft Employee on at

    Hi Alex,

    Dynamics 365 Customer Insights are not only a tool to customer data but also to give you insights and also enrich data with AI.

    For example, even in cases where you only have Dynamics 365, you are likely to have data such as activities and custom entities which you use to collect additional information about the customer. By using Customer Insights, you can then gather these additional information and activities. And for example, create measures, this will help customers immediately gain information that is relevant to their KPIs without having to consolidate and aggregate data themselves. The AI capabilities using Azure Machine Learning, also allows you to predict things such as customer churns but using templates that come with customer insights so that organizations without data scientists can still make machine learning models.

    I suggest you have a look at this video from Microsoft Business Application Summit last year.

    Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights: Technical deep dive - THR3013

     

    Regarding LinkedIn and Outlook, unfortunately they are not supported as data sources for Customer Insights.

  • AlexMcL Profile Picture
    AlexMcL 8 on at

    Thanks for your response and the link to the YouTube! It looks from the vision slide (around 03:00 of the recording) that LinkedIn and Outlook are on the roadmap, albeit not for 2020 Wave 1 by the look of things.

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