Customer data sits scattered across your organization. Sales has one view of customers. Marketing sees something different. Support teams work with yet another version of the truth.
Sound familiar?
You’re not alone. Most businesses struggle with fragmented customer information that makes it nearly impossible to deliver the personalized experiences customers expect today.
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Insights aims to solve this problem. This customer data platform (CDP) brings all your customer information together in one place.
But does it actually work? And more importantly, is it worth the investment?
Let’s figure it out together.
What Is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is Microsoft’s enterprise-grade customer data platform that unifies scattered customer information into complete profiles and powers personalized customer journeys across your entire organization.
A bit of backstory: In September 2023, Microsoft merged two separate tools into one integrated solution called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The former D365 Marketing was rebranded as Customer Insights – Journeys (focusing on marketing automation), while the original standalone Customer Insights product became Customer Insights – Data (the CDP component). This merger eliminated the frustrating silos that used to exist between marketing automation and customer data management.
The platform now combines two powerful components:
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- Customer Insights – Data: It acts as your customer data platform (CDP). This is where all your customer information – from purchase history and website behavior to demographic details—gets unified into comprehensive 360-degree customer profiles.
- Customer Insights – Journeys: It takes those rich customer profiles and puts them to work through personalized, trigger-based customer journeys. Whether someone just signed up for your newsletter or left your product page, this component helps you reach them with the right message at exactly the right moment.
Who benefits? Pretty much everyone on your team.
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- Marketers can describe campaign goals in plain English and let AI create targeted segments automatically.
- Service agents can prioritize support based on predicted customer lifetime value.
- Data analysts get unified customer views without playing spreadsheet detective.
- Sales teams receive qualified leads with complete customer context.
The best thing is that everything happens in real-time. When someone downloads your whitepaper or browses pricing, the system instantly triggers personalized responses across email, text, or push notifications.
Built on Microsoft Azure, you get enterprise-grade security and compliance tools without the headaches. The platform helps you meet regulations like GDPR while maintaining full control over your data. Also, avoid potential fines from consent management mistakes.
Quick tip: The biggest mistake organizations make is trying to implement Customer Insights without proper strategic planning. Technology only delivers results when it aligns with your business goals and existing workflows.
That’s where Microsoft-certified experts like Coffee + Dunn come in, helping you plan, build, and runconnected customer experiences that actually drive growth.
Get started with Coffee + Dunn to see how our proven methodology can help you turn scattered data into meaningful customer connections.
Why Businesses Choose D365 Customer Insights
When organizations evaluate customer data platforms, they need proof of real business impact.
A comprehensive Forrester Total Economic Impact study examined five companies that implemented Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and found some impressive results: 324% ROI and $7.86 million in net present value.
But what drives these numbers? Let’s dig into the specific reasons why businesses are choosing this platform:
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- Unified Customer View: Break down data silos that keep your teams guessing. Organizations used to juggle three or four different systems just to get basic customer information. Customer Insights consolidates everything into one place, giving sales and marketing teams complete visibility into customer behaviors, purchase history, and engagement patterns.
- Real-Time Journey Orchestration: React to customer actions in the most important moments. The platform triggers personalized responses instantly when someone downloads content, abandons a cart, or shows buying signals. This real-time capability helped companies see a 15% increase in conversion rates per customer journey.
- Massive Time Savings: Free your marketing team from manual busywork. Companies reported saving 75% of time on customer journey development and 25% on maintenance tasks. Features like automatic reporting, consent management tracking, and email templates eliminate the tedious work that used to eat up entire days.
- AI-Powered Personalization: Let artificial intelligence handle the complex targeting work. Your team focuses on strategy while the system builds customer segments and creates content that converts.
- Reduced Marketing Spend: Cut external agency costs and physical marketing expenses. Organizations eliminated up to $75,000 annually in agency fees by bringing capabilities in-house. They also reduced physical marketing spend by 50% through improved digital targeting and engagement.
- Proven ROI: See measurable business impact from day one. The Forrester study found that companies experienced benefits of over $10 million versus costs of $2.4 million over three years, with payback happening in less than six months.
Customer Insights is particularly compelling for enterprises already heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Since all Dynamics 365 applications share the same Dataverse, organizations using Sales, Service, or other Microsoft business apps get seamless integration without complex data migrations.
How the Customer Data Platform Powers Real-Time Insights
Real-time data processing sets D365 Customer Insights apart from traditional customer databases.
Here’s how it works.
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- Instant Data Updates: APIs and connectors link to your business systems and flow information into the platform within seconds. When someone makes a purchase, visits your website, or contacts support, customer profiles update automatically without manual intervention.
- Real-Time Activation: Insights translate into immediate action across multiple channels. When the platform identifies a high-value customer at risk of churning, it automatically triggers personalized retention campaigns through email, SMS, or other communication methods.
- Delta Lake Optimization: The platform processes data using Delta Lake format optimization for improved performance and supports parallel processing for large-scale operations. This architecture enables real-time personalization that responds to customer behavior as it happens.
How Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Compares to a Traditional Data Warehouse
Think of the difference between a library and a control room. Data warehouses store information for analysis. Customer data platforms use information for immediate action.
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- Speed Makes the Difference: Data warehouses typically update information in batches—maybe nightly or weekly. D365 Customer Insights processes data continuously. When a customer abandons their shopping cart, you can respond within minutes instead of waiting for the next data refresh.
- User Access Varies Significantly: Data warehouses usually require technical skills to extract information. You need to know SQL or depend on IT teams to build reports. Customer Insights provides business-friendly interfaces where marketing and sales teams can access insights directly.
- Purpose Drives Design: Data warehouses excel at historical analysis and compliance reporting. They’re perfect for understanding what happened last quarter or meeting regulatory requirements. Customer data platforms focus on what’s happening now and what you should do next.
Here’s a practical example: Your data warehouse might tell you that email open rates dropped 15% last month. Your customer data platform shows exactly which customers stopped engaging, and Customer Insights – Journeys automatically adjusts their experience to re-engage them.
Compliance features differ, too. D365 Customer Insights includes built-in consent management and privacy controls for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) compliance.
Data warehouses often need additional tools to handle modern privacy requirements.
Features of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys handles real-time marketing automation and customer engagement. This replaces the old D365 Marketing with more sophisticated capabilities.
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- Trigger-Based Journeys: Respond to customer actions immediately when someone downloads content, abandons a shopping cart, or reaches a milestone. The system automatically sends personalized messages across multiple channels without delay.
- Multi-Channel Orchestration: Coordinate email, SMS, push notifications, and voice conversations from a single platform. Design customer journeys once, and the system determines the best channel and timing for each person based on their preferences and behavior.
- AI Content Generation: Copilot creates marketing materials automatically when you describe campaign goals in natural language. Generate email templates, subject lines, and images that match your brand guidelines without manual design work.
- Advanced Segmentation: Target specific customer groups with precision using demographics, behavior, purchase history, or any combination of factors. Segments update automatically as customers’ circumstances change.
- A/B Testing Capabilities: Optimize marketing content and campaign performance by testing different subject lines, send times, content variations, or entire journey flows. The platform automatically identifies winning variations and applies them to improve results.
- Event Management: Handle complete event lifecycles from registration to follow-up, including waitlist management, automated confirmations, and post-event surveys. Form prefill reduces friction by automatically populating known customer information.
- Voice Conversation Integration: Recent updates include AI agent-powered phone interactions through Contact Center solutions, enabling voice conversations as part of customer journeys.
Features of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data
Customer Insights – Data serves as the foundational customer data platform that creates unified customer profiles and enables advanced analytics.
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- Data Unification: Connects to a wide range of data sources through pre-built connectors for popular systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, and Google Analytics. Power Query integration provides access to additional data transformation capabilities for many more sources beyond the native connectors.
- Identity Resolution: Automatically match customer records across systems using advanced algorithms that consider email addresses, phone numbers, names, and behavioral patterns. Create accurate, unified profiles even when source data has inconsistencies. It can figure out that john.smith@email.com and J.Smith from your sales system are the same person.
- Predictive Analytics: Pre-built models help you understand what customers might do next, including customer lifetime value calculations, churn prediction, and next-best-action recommendations. You can also deploy custom machine learning models through Azure integration.
- Real-Time Profile Updates: Ensure customer information stays current across all connected systems. When someone updates their email address in one system, the change propagates everywhere within seconds.
- Natural Language Analytics: Query data conversationally through Dynamics 365 Copilot. Ask complex questions like “Which customers bought premium products but haven’t upgraded their service plans?” and get answers without technical expertise. Ask “Show me customers who bought Product A but haven’t returned in 60 days” and get immediate results.
- Audience Insights: Analyze demographics and behavioral patterns for strategic planning. Understand customer preferences, purchasing patterns, and engagement trends across different segments.
- Comprehensive API Access: Integrate with any business system through RESTful APIs, including real-time APIs for instant profile updates and GraphQL support for flexible data querying.
How to Get Started With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Getting started with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and empowering marketing teams with customer data platforms doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Microsoft has streamlined the setup process to help you quickly move from installation to actionable customer insights.Before You Begin (Prerequisites and Planning)
First things first—make sure you have the basics covered. You’ll need a Microsoft 365 tenant with the right Customer Insights licensing. This could be a full Dynamics 365 Customer Insights license (covering both Data and Journeys), a Dynamics 365 Marketing license (for Journeys only), or a standalone Customer Insights – Data license. Your setup person needs a few specific permissions: Service Support Admin rights, Azure application registration permissions, and System Administrator access on your target environment. Don’t worry—most IT teams can sort this out quickly. Many organizations stumble because they skip the planning phase. Take time now to map out what you actually need. Are you focused on email campaigns, event management, or customer segmentation? Jot down your priorities. They’ll save you from rebuilding later.Setting Up Your Environment with D365 Partner Support
Head over to the Microsoft Power Platform Admin Center. Navigate to admin.powerplatform.com and create a production, sandbox, or trial environment based on your needs. Make sure to select the correct region and enable both Dataverse and D365 Apps for your environment. While Microsoft’s setup instructions walk you through each step, many organizations benefit from working with a certified partner during this phase. Getting the environment architecture right from the start prevents costly rebuilds later. A partner can help you scale utilization appropriately and avoid common configuration mistakes that limit your platform’s effectiveness.
Customer Insights – Data: Building Your Foundation
Customer Insights – Data serves as your customer data platform, so it often makes sense to set this up first.
The getting started guide for Customer Insights – Data breaks the process into five clear steps:
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- Step 1: Import Your Data Sources: Start with your most important customer touchpoints. Connect Azure Data Lake Storage, Microsoft Dataverse, or hundreds of other sources through Power Query connectors. Don’t try to connect everything at once—start with contact info, purchase history, and basic engagement data.
- Step 2: Unify and Deduplicate: Now comes the magic—turning messy, duplicate customer records into clean, unified profiles. You’ll identify matching fields, remove duplicates, and create that single source of truth everyone talks about.
- Step 3: Create Relationships: Connect your data tables and set up enrichment features. This step transforms random data points into a complete customer story.
- Step 4: Enhance with Intelligence: Add predictions for churn likelihood or expected revenue using built-in AI models. Set up activity timelines so you can see every customer interaction in one place.
- Step 5: Activate Through Segments and Exports: Create customer segments for targeted actions and connect to various export options for marketing campaigns, promotions, and other customer engagement activities.
Customer Insights – Journeys: Orchestrating Customer Experiences
Once your data foundation is solid, Customer Insights – Journeys lets you create those personalized experiences customers want.
The setup process follows a clear timeline:
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- Pre-provisioning Phase: Document what you want to achieve. Be specific about your plans for email campaigns, automation, and events.
- Provisioning Phase: Install the app across your environments (development and production). Update your Dynamics 365 tenants first to avoid compatibility issues.
- Post-provisioning Phase: Start with super users for training, then roll out to your broader team. For complex event scenarios, check out these advanced event mastery techniques to level up your event marketing.
Connecting Data and Journeys
If you’re implementing both applications, connecting them unlocks the real power of the platform.
After installing both apps on the same environment, go to Customer Insights – Journeys, then Settings > Data Management > Customer Insights and select the Connect button.
In Customer Insights – Data, add Dataverse as a data source using your Customer Insights – Journeys environment URL.
Select the contact and lead tables, then proceed with unification settings to include these entities in your unified customer profiles.
Best Practices for Success
Keep these things in mind for efficiency and effectiveness:
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- Start Small, Scale Smart: Begin with your most critical data sources and use cases. You can always add more complexity later.
- Focus on Data Quality: The unification process is only as good as your source data. Clean and standardize information before importing when possible.
- Test Before Production: Use sandbox environments to test configurations, especially if you have complex customizations or integrations.
- Invest in Training: Microsoft offers excellent learning resources. Your team’s success depends on knowing how to use these tools effectively.
The whole setup typically takes a few weeks when done thoughtfully. But here’s the thing—the time you invest in proper planning and configuration pays massive dividends down the road.
Need a guide for your Customer Insights journey?
Coffee + Dunn’s Microsoft-certified experts use a proven Plan-Build-Run approach to help organizations like yours skip the common pitfalls and achieve results faster.
We’ll work alongside your team to build connected customer experiences that actually move the needle.
Get started with Coffee + Dunn and turn your Customer Insights implementation from overwhelming to outcome-focused.
Future of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Microsoft isn’t slowing down with D365 Customer Insights. They’re doubling down on AI features that will make your customer interactions smarter and more automatic. AI agents are coming that will handle routine customer conversations without you lifting a finger. Need someone to answer basic questions or schedule appointments? These agents will take care of it. And here’s the cool part – they’ll work together across different Microsoft tools to solve complex problems. Customer platforms are shifting from data storage to active problem-solving. You won’t just collect customer information anymore. Your system will predict what customers need and take action before they even ask. That’s where this technology is heading, and Microsoft wants to get you there first.
