This post is part of an ongoing series on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Check my blog feed for previous posts on this topic!
After you have connected and unified your data, you can begin to build your customer card and enrich the customer profile using built-in functionality. Let’s take a look at how to do this.
Enrich your Customer Card
Enriching the customer profile takes advantage of data from Microsoft’s Graph, which is basically hundreds of millions of data points that Microsoft has collected and categorized about consumer behavior by three facets: age, gender and location (based on the customer’s postal code). Currently the Graph data set that is available in Customer Insights only covers the United States.
The idea behind enriching your customer profile is to compare your existing customers with the interests and brand affinities of people who are similar to them, based on age, gender and location. For marketers, this is invaluable and very difficult and costly to do with their own data.
Imagine if you are a marketer at a consumer retail business with 10,000 customers: Wouldn’t it be great to be able to look at your customer base and have some idea of how much each customer might like a particular brand (perhaps a competitor’s brand, or one that is similar to your own)? Or if your customer is interested in outdoor sports or fine wine? How would you begin to go about that? There are data sets available online, but you would have to try to slice and dice your own data so that corresponds to the available market study data that is available, and you would of course have to purchase that data. There’s also a good chance that the data you purchase is out of date. But in Customer Insights, Microsoft handles this problem for you with Microsoft Graph.
The first step is to select two of the three facets to compare to your customer data:
In this example, we are looking at our customers based on age and location. Next, we have the option to choose the brands and categories that our customers are likely to have an interest in. We can choose from any of the thousands of brands that the Microsoft Graph data set already contains, or we can let Microsoft choose for us by selecting our industry:
After selecting these parameters, click the Run button at the top, and CI will begin to compare your customer data with the Microsoft Graph data. When it is done, you will see how many customer profiles have been enriched.
Building the Customer Card
If you are following along with previous posts, you’ll already have done the first step in building your Customer Card, which is the “Merge” step of data unification, where you would have selected the fields from your different data sources that you want on the card.
Navigate to the Customers area of CI. Before viewing your Customer Cards, you will be prompted to specify which fields will be used to index your customers so you can search and filter the views:
This process is a quick, wizard-driven step, and, once completed, you will automatically be taken to the view of your customer profiles:
The fields displayed on the Customer Cards are the ones that we specified in the “Merge” step of our data unification. The great thing here is that I may know that we have more reliable birthdate information in our ERP system, but more up-to-date phone numbers in our CRM or loyalty system. Since I defined which field would be the “winner” during the Merge step in case more than one data source has the same information, the Customer Cards show me the most reliable and complete data for each field.
Drilling into each card lets me look at the particular individual, where I can see the fields I have chosen for the merged Contact, their average purchases (or whatever other measures I have configured), and the brands and interests they might enjoy based on their age/location. If you have also connected a data source that represents activities like phone calls, website visits, or emails, the timeline will show you this as well.
Up Next
Continue to follow this blog series for more on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and other Dynamics technologies. In the coming weeks we’ll have a look at how to build measures in Customer Insights, manage your connected data, build segments, and more. Leave a comment with your questions, ideas and your own tips!
Matt Wittemann 