“This product is designed to help our customers predict and accelerate their cash flow. To that end, the company is introducing a new product called Dynamic 365 Finance Insights, which you can think of as Customer Insights, except for money. The operations side is related to what happens after the sale, when the company begins to collect money and report revenue. These are not revolutionary by any means in the CRM space, but do provide new capabilities for Microsoft customers. The second gives inside sales teams tools like next best action. The first allows companies to tap into all this data to better predict the customers who sales is engaged with that are most likely to turn into sales. The company has also added new sales forecasting tools and Dynamics 365 Sales Engagement Center. “We did work at the company level to build a system that allows us and our customers to search for and then delete information about customers in each product group within Microsoft, including my organization,” he explained. Philips says that the company has been working on this for some time. “We’re adding new first and third-party data connections to Customer Insights that allow our customers to understand, for example audience memberships, brand affinities, demographic, psychographic and other characteristics of customers that are stored and then harnessed from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights,” Philips said.Īll of this might make you wonder how they can collect this level of data and maintain GDPR/CCPA kind of compliance. The company is adding some new connectors to help complete that picture of the customer. Microsoft’s CDP is called Customer Insights. It pulls together into one place all of the customer data from various systems, making it easier to understand how the customer interacts with you, with the goal of providing better experiences based on this knowledge.
“To be frank, every single thing that we’re doing at Microsoft, not just in business applications but across the entire Microsoft Cloud, is on the back of that vision that data is coming out of everything, and that those organizations that can collect that data, harmonize it and reason over it will be in a position to be proactive versus reactive,” Philips told TechCrunch.įor starters, the company is adding functionality to its customer data platform (CDP), a concept all major vendors (and a growing group of startups) have embraced.
James Philips, who was promoted to president of Microsoft Business Applications just this week, says that Microsoft has also been keenly focused on harnessing the growing amount of data and helping make use of that inside the applications he is in charge of. This is, in fact, the goal of all vendors in this space, including Salesforce and Adobe, which are also looking to help improve the customer experience.
Microsoft dynamics 365 how to#
Microsoft announced a major update to its Dynamics 365 product line today, which correlates to the growing amount of data in the enterprise and how to collect and understand that data to produce better customer experiences.