How to get fast and predictive AI-powered 360 Customer Insights

In recent times, both businesses and consumers are having to adapt quicker than ever before. Buying products or services online has never been so relevant and prevalent. This means that every organisation, no matter the industry they are in, is currently looking at how they can optimise customer interaction without the need for ‘in-person interaction’.

The challenge most businesses face is what to do with their customer data to help drive this customer closeness. Traditional CRM solutions, such as Dynamics 365, are great for storing first-stage customer interactions, including new sales leads, opportunities and customer service interaction. However, they were not designed to capture all online and external transactions with a customer. Separate e-commerce solutions and social media platforms tell us a great deal more about a customer’s spending habits and behaviours. Therefore, the way to understand your customers better is to bring these disparate systems together – the only problem is that this has typically been complex and expensive to achieve.

Customer Data Platform – the cost-effective answer

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a more efficient and cost-effective way for you to get a holistic, 360 degree view of all your customer interactions and touchpoints, overcoming the challenge of bringing multiple stand-alone data sources together in a unified way. With a CDP, behavioural, transactional and demographic information can be easily analysed in one place, providing enriched customer profiling across marketing, sales and customer service. If you can understand your customer better, you can sell them more and provide a better and more personalised service. The beauty of a CDP is that it is also completely scalable and is capable of managing huge data volumes, something which a traditional data warehouse is generally not able to do.

Introducing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is Microsoft’s own CDP offering. Powered by Azure and provided as Software-as-a-Service, it is now easy to bring in, de-duplicate, unify and enrich customer data, using pre-built connectors, from any data source. With its intuitive user experience, large volumes of data can be transformed and used to give you a better understanding of your customers, without the need for coding or technical skills. Perhaps its most important feature is the analytics it provides and the future actions that can be derived from this information – either inside the application or using Microsoft’s business intelligence application, Power BI.

The diagram below also illustrates the Artificial Intelligence capabilities within Customer Insights, which are significantly more challenging to integrate into Customer 360.

The Key Benefits

Customer Insights can add genuine value to your business quickly. The agile implementation approach taken to deploy it offers a number of advantages:

• Start quickly
  • Implement in a matter of weeks
  • Use pre-built connectors to rapidly unify customer data
• AI-powered Insights
  • Predict customer intent using rich segmentation and AI-driven insight
  • Tailor interactions with automated customer-centric processes
• Governance and data confidence
  • Maintain control of all customer data
  • Data compliant platform, which is configurable and extendable

Use Cases

To help you better visualise how Customer Insights may benefit your business, here are some examples of the kind of ways that it can be used:

• Risk Reduction for Banking

Banks can use Customer Insights to analyse customer spending habits and transactions against their account. By easily understanding how often a customer goes into their overdraft, deposits funds or borrows money, it can help with managing their risk profile. Using AI can determine whether a customer is eligible for a specific loan, or other related offers, more accurately and quickly.

• Demand Forecasting for Manufacturing

Manufacturers can streamline their supply chains by uncovering buying patterns and popularity of certain products. With the addition of AI, they can also predict the future demand of products, allowing them to plan more effectively. The streamlining of production is vital for managing development and warehouse costs.

•  Managing Social Care for Public Sector

Public Sector organisations often have multiple legacy systems, containing citizen data for areas, such as council tax, waste recycling and social care. Ordinarily, complaints and issues remain within the system where they were raised, and it’s difficult to get a full history of activities for an individual. Customer Insights can help solve this challenge. allowing sensitive social care issues to be picked up and resolved more quickly, even if a citizen changes address or personal details.

•  Reduce Customer Churn in Retail

Customer Insights is the perfect solution for retail organisations. Being able to track customer spending habits, demographics and online interactions enables you to target them more effectively with personalised communications and promotions. Coupled with customer service data, such as complaints in CRM or via social media posts, it’s possible to focus on what a customer really wants from your brand, increasing customer loyalty.

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