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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer Insights - Journeys forum / Segment count is not a...
Customer Insights - Journeys forum

Segment count is not accurate

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Posted on by MattFJohnson 195

I've often been very disappointed with the performance of segments but I'd read they have been "Greatly improved" in the recent update so I thought I'd check it out. 

I created a simple segment "Give me all Contacts where their parent Company is based in City = Sheffield". So I published the segment and waited. Then I waited a bit longer. Still no members, So I went out to lunch. When I came back there were some members in the grid on the members tab, however the members field on the General tab was still empty.

When I looked closer at the members grid, I noticed it said "1-5 of 6" at the bottom. OK, so I scrolled to the next page and surprisingly it said "6-7 of 7". So is the member count 6 or 7. I also noticed it didn't have a value in the Last updated time field. It must be over 2 hours since I published this segment.

Is this really to be the expected performance of a professional marketing application? No marketer will find it acceptable to create a segment, publish it then wait a seemingly unknown amount of time to get the results, then the results are inconsistent at best. 

Membercount.png

Member1_2D00_6.png

Member6_2D00_7.png

We absolutely must have a way to manually trigger a segment refresh so we can actually see how changes we made to the segment affect the member count. I totally understand that this needs to go off to Azure and gather data but it is not acceptable to expect someone to wait 6hours for a auto refresh cycle. Life and business simply doesn't work this way. 

Categories:
Segmentation
  • Leah_Shaull Profile Picture
    Leah_Shaull 5 on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    I reply to this thread over 6 months later and simply had to mention that I am in this exact situation right now. I have spent the past year on and off familiarizing myself with D365 for marketing, sales, and customer support. Every single task I attempt (marketing emails, knowledge articles, lead qualification and segemntation to name a few) endsup in a confusing loop with Microsoft support and tasks that should take a mere hour take weeks on end. With the amount of Microsoft bugs I have found when I take issues to customer support, I feel like I should start billing them for my time lol

  • Community Member Profile Picture
    Community Member Microsoft Employee on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    +1 for a similar experience with segments. Any others with similar experiences?

  • Stefanos T Profile Picture
    Stefanos T on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    Hello,

    We agree and this is the designed behaviour, segments are evaluated again right after you modify them and go live again,

    with the exception being interaction-based segments, which need more time to digest historical interactions.

    In case you see a different behaviour we need you to file an incident so that we have your details and authorisation to look into it.

    All these issues have been addressed and will be available with next solution, feedback is taken seriously and discussed daily.

    Regards,

    Stefanos

  • MattFJohnson Profile Picture
    MattFJohnson 195 on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    Which bug are you referring to?

    1) The Members count field being blank?

    2) The count on the members grid being wrong? saying "1-5 of 6"  on the first page then "6-7 of 7" on the next page?

    3) The Last updated time not being populated?

    When you say there is no ICM? What does this mean to us as consumers? Are you saying that Microsoft don't believe there is a performance problem with segments only getting updated at certain intervals? Can you confirm what you seem to be implying that if a user makes a modification to a segment, they should see that change reflected in the members list within minutes? I am certainly not seeing performance like that.

    I believe making a change to a segment's criteria should trigger an immediate re-evaluation of the members. I can maybe understand a segment that is live and not changing only being on a 1hr refresh cycle but this cannot be the case if changes are made to the definition.

  • Stefanos T Profile Picture
    Stefanos T on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    Hello,

    The bug reported at your first post is already fixed and will be fixed with new solution in August.

    I do not see any ICM on our area regarding segment evaluation, as I said this is expected to be a matter of minutes.

    Regards,

    Stefanos

  • MattFJohnson Profile Picture
    MattFJohnson 195 on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    After raising a bug with Microsoft over 2 weeks ago I just got a call back today.

    First of all, they'd asked me to do a full copy into a support org which I knew would not work due to the nature of D365 Marketing using it's own Azure services which are unique to the org.

    I then showed them the above bug in a screen share and they said they would look into it.

    Is this the normal kind of response time a customer should expect from a product they are paying £££hundreds a month for?

  • Stefanos T Profile Picture
    Stefanos T on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    Hello,

    We are sorry to hear about your experience, I would like to note though that customer feedback is always taken into consideration, the new insights engine is not fancy words, it should be addressing the issues you mention by making the evaluation faster and more performant in an unprecedented way. Can you please raise an ICM with details about your problem so we can take a look, this is not the designed experience in any way, you should be seeing the changes in your modified segment immediately.

    Regards,

    Stefanos

  • MattFJohnson Profile Picture
    MattFJohnson 195 on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    Hi Christian,

    When I go to the solution centre it says my Marketing application is up to date. Unless you know of a different way to get even more up to date releases?

    I've said this before and I'll say it again. It is fundamental to a product that the basics work. There is absolutely zero value in having some fancy new Insights engine if you can't even reliably create the most basic of marketing entities such as a segment easily and quickly. D365 Marketing has been out for nearly 18 months now and you seem to be ignoring the end users experience of actually trying to use the product, instead focusing on a tick list of engineering accomplishments. First and foremost the product must work.

    Just imagine this very likely customer scenario: Company A hires an intern for the summer and sets them the task of evaluating D365 Marketing to reach out to their customers base with a few campaigns. They try and create a reasonably basic Segment of customers but struggle to work out how the relationships work because they don't understand the inner workings of lookups or N:1 relationships in CRM. Then they finally figure it out and publish, only to have to wait hours to see what members are even included. They realise it slightly wrong, so they make a quick change to one of the filters in the query only to find there is no change to the members, so they try it again and again, then they realise that it's just the filter hasn't been re-executed for another 6 hours since last time. When they finally do refresh they're very confused because the count is wrong on the members grid. The next day after waiting over night they try and create a simple customer journey (which as Justin mentions above) does not let them select the Segment they created the previous day!

    Does this sound like a very good user experience? I might sound a bit harsh but this is the reality. Do you think Company A will continue to use the product? Will they recommend it to their colleagues or friends? You could try telling them they'll have Marketing AI in Q4 2019 (maybe?) but do you think that will do any good here?

  • Suggested answer
    Christian Abeln Profile Picture
    Christian Abeln on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    Hello MattFJohnson,

    we are said to hear that the your experience with segmentation was not satisfactory. Please note that we have been working hard to bring the new marketing insights engine and we are rolling this out globally. But we also strongly recommend upgrading to the latest solution release (June release right now). We are also continuously providing updates and fixes in those updates.

    Are you running on the June update already?

  • Suggested answer
    Justin Wilkinson Profile Picture
    Justin Wilkinson 1,336 on at
    RE: Segment count is not accurate

    I have found a lot of bugs riddled in it myself various things so for instance under Customer journeys the look up for segments did not work and it was set to something random:

    The latest breakdown of changes: cloudblogs.microsoft.com/.../the-dynamics-365-for-marketing-april-2019-update-is-rolling-out-now

    blogs.technet.microsoft.com/.../segments-in-dynamics-365-for-marketing

    also a load of known errors : docs.microsoft.com/.../readme

    I hope this might be helpful to you

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