In today’s data-driven world, businesses rely on customer data to fuel their marketing strategies. They need to access, analyze, and act on this data to power personalized experiences that drive return on marketing investments. However, this comes with the challenges of (1) configuring systems like a Customer Data Platform correctly and (2) ensuring high data quality within these systems.

A Gartner research study¹ reported that high quality data provides “better leads, better understanding of customers, and better customer relationships” and that “every year, poor quality data costs organizations an average of $12.9 million.” This is why it is crucial to understand the current configuration state of your Customer Insights – Data environment and the quality of your data; addressing these challenges is the key to unlocking the most relevant and impactful insights about your customers. 

We recently shipped generative-AI powered features in D365 Customer Insights – Data to help organizations improve data quality and configuration with Copilot so they can empower business users with the best insights to deliver highly personalized customer experiences.

This blog post will share more information on how you can improve data quality and configuration with Copilot. With these features you can:

• Review the current status of your Customer Insights – Data environment,
• Understand the overall health of your data,
• Consult which insights can be generated successfully from your data,
• Act on recommendations to unlock more insights.  

To illustrate how these features work, let’s see how they can be used to improve the speed and quality of an email marketing campaign to target high lifetime value customers with a ‘thank you’ discount on their next purchase.  

Quickly know if your jobs have run successfully, and where to go if not with Copilot  

Contoso Coffee recently implemented Customer Insights – Data, which involved integrating source data from various systems and creating unified customer profiles. To ensure that everything was running smoothly, they checked the system settings. Environment Status Summary, a Copilot feature not only highlighted a recent issue, but also used AI to identify where the issue occurred and provided a direct link to investigate. Thanks to this feature, Contoso’s IT Team was able to quickly fix a skipped customer profile job that would have otherwise blocked them from generating insights for an upcoming email marketing campaign. With the problem resolved in minutes, they could focus on re-engaging high lifetime value customers in a timely manner. 

Understand your overall data quality with Copilot

Now that Contoso’s environment is running smoothly, they want to quickly understand the general health of their data estate.

They review a summary of their data quality on the Home Page by the Data Prep Report, a Copilot feature. This summary includes a data quality grade, which insights are available, the most critical data quality issues, and a link to a detailed data prep report to learn more. Using this summary, Contoso can see that their data quality is medium with a 75% score. They are able to generate some insights, but not the customer lifetime value prediction they want for their email marketing campaign.

If not for this summary, Contoso would have attempted to configure, train, score, and run a customer lifetime value prediction that would have failed completely or had low-grade results. The summary show where their data stands. Thus they don’t have to go through the frustration of trying to generate insights based on unusable data.  

See which insights can be generated successfully from your data 

Next, Contoso wants to deep dive the report to understand the next steps to build their email campaign. They click into the full Data Prep Report, which informs them that they can generate churn predictions, segments, or measures based on their current data. However, they want to pursue a customer lifetime value prediction to support their campaign. They filter the report to review the detailed issues and recommendations specific to customer lifetime value and see the issues listed in priority order from highest to lowest severity. The report gives them the targeted, easy-to-digest information they need to know how to proceed. 

Act on recommendations to unlock more insights 

Finally, Contoso engages their IT Team to act on the detailed issues and recommendations. The IT Team follows the recommendations by taking the suggested actions such as adding more data incorporating products with a sufficient number of purchases. With minimal time, effort, and ambiguity they are able to improve their data and light up the customer lifetime value prediction they want for their marketing campaign. 

Create and use high-impact insights in marketing campaigns 

With the help of Environment Status Summary and Data Prep Report, Contoso Coffee is able to get their Customer Data Platform environment set up correctly and resolve their top data quality issues effectively.  By improving data quality and configuration with Copilot they are able to instantly get rich insights, such as customer lifetime value predictions, which are conveniently available out-of-the box in Customer Insights – Data. This lets their marketing team focus on launching an effective email campaign that provides relevant and in-the-moment offers to their highest value customers to drive business results. Consult our product documentation and start using these AI-powered features today to achieve similar results!

What are some ways to engage further with Customer Insights – Data? 

• If you’re a new user, or want to test with demo data: Start a trial of Customer Insights 
• For more information, reach out via the Customer and Partner Voice channels or in the Dynamics 365 Application Ideas page.  
• The Customer Insights forums are also another great way to ask questions and connect with other partners and users.
• Discover Dynamics 365 Customer Insights W2 2023 capabilities.

The post Deliver higher-impact experiences with better data quality and configuration with Copilot appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As marketing leaders, one could say that your potential for success is only as good as the data you possess. But is that possession enough? To develop targeted, thoughtful, and inclusive customer experiences, acknowledging that today’s data lacks representation, diversity, and reach is important. That’s true whether you consider gender, race, age, cultural experiences, accessibility, and more.

In today’s data-driven business landscape, it’s important to reflect on the fact that the traditional data sets you’ve come to rely upon only provide part of the answer. To get to the heart of your customers’ decision-making, you need to not only consider data that’s inclusive and representative of the customers you are trying to reach, but also take a fresh look at how you measure this data.

The industry is at an inflection point. Inclusive analytics are where the opportunity for marketing leaders lie—not only in terms of building a better, higher-performing business, but also in contributing to building trust and advocacy with your customers.

Marketing with Purpose

Purpose is as important now as ever for how brands engage with people.

Download the playbook

Taking a holistic, inclusive perspective

Customers are more likely to trust, buy from, and champion companies that have or embrace a strong purpose. And we’re not talking just any purpose, but an action-driven one that helps define the business.

That’s largely because the emotional connection and association a person feels toward a brand is informed by their perception of that brand’s reputation, values, responsible business practices, and inclusivity.

“Corporate reputation management hinges on not only a brand’s emotional appeal, but also how it lives, breathes, and behaves in the market. When we add diversity into the equation, we see a heightened need for understanding and integrating the unique wants, needs, and perspectives of differing and evolving audiences.”

Walter Geer, Chief Experience Design Officer, VMLY&R

The “aha” moment, of course, comes down to how inclusivity is defined and an inclusive customer decision journey. We’re talking about a journey that is personalized to the point of being able to make people feel welcomed and included, where they say, “You get me; you’re a brand for someone like me.”¹

Take, for example, one dimension of diversity—gender—and a story shared by a Microsoft engineer who was in the room as this example unfolded. Several years ago, a new program manager joined the product team. During a planning meeting with several engineers, she brought up the idea that a welcome screen that the team was designing wasn’t particularly welcoming and felt cold and impersonal. As an alternative, she proposed a white background with a colorful, creative flair.

Chewy Chong, Principal of Co-Innovation at Microsoft, said, “Why don’t we test it?” And they did, conducting a small test of the prototype on 500 users. The topline data showed 40 percent increased engagement by women, but men had a 39 percent decrease in engagement. When viewed as an aggregate, these two groups zeroed each other out. Women preferred the designed version, while men equally preferred the blue version.  

Moving past bias

The insight prompted curiosity and self-reflection by the team but ultimately, they chose not to make a change given the preference of the primary audience. This introduced bias into the sampling or testing by valuing one cohort over others. Businesses often optimize design for the primary audience, which leaves out the opportunity for inclusion of the needs of other customers.

What’s even more interesting is that in the welcome screen test, the team found that the user research panel was overweight in one main demographic. This speaks to the need to really understand the makeup of data sources and research panels, and how a business may be affected by bias potential, preventing that business from leaning into a more inclusive customer decision journey—and preventing the business from growing.

The impact of this reaches beyond just excluding an audience. Overrepresentation of one group and underrepresentation of another can also impact how a company chooses to design and evolve its product(s) and marketing strategy. This is especially true in the technology vertical, where the need and stakes are higher in creating a more equitable future. Some, like Nadia Masri, Founder and CEO of Persky, a next-generation consumer insights platform, view it as not just a need, but an obligation.

“I think every startup and every technology company has an obligation to figure out ways to make a more just and equitable future that is driven by technology. If we’re leading innovation, we have to make sure that that innovation results in fairness and equality for all people—all genders, all colors, all abilities, etc., so that everyone can be included in the future that we are building.”

Nadia Masri, Founder and CEO, Persky

Looking at exclusion to find inclusion

When you think about inclusion, companies must do more than “talk the talk” without actually learning anything. This comes from trying to optimize for the average customer but resonating with no one. The real opportunity here is to start looking at the customer not accounted for. That means diving into how that customer base is excluded, then solving that issue to grow it and create a more emotional connection.

When you have proximity with the vast diversity of human experience, proximity leads to empathy and empathy leads to insight, which allows you to close the gap between customers who are included and the people who are excluded. When you capture the heart and intention of an audience and build an authentic relationship on shared values and an understanding of their lived experience, it’s much easier to deliver on the conversion-related conversations, such as price and financing.

Take, for example, the decision journey for a new car. At Microsoft Advertising, we used our automotive analytics insights team to help understand how people decide what brand to select, type of car, price, and so on. Historically, it’s well understood that people start their buying process 26 weeks before they make a purchase decision. So, we started looking at the data at that point and then parsed the query path, analyzing more than 500,000 people’s searches over that time.

We initially looked again at gender as a dimension of diversity, discovering what women value versus men. As expected, we saw differences in what women valued during the customer decision journey compared to men at each stage in the process.

But we also did something unexpected. The team realized we had 52 weeks of data we could explore, well beyond the established 26 weeks. What we found were keywords about accessibility. People with disabilities were looking for brands that had great technology and were investing in the best type of robotics and other key attributes related to adaptive cars. Ultimately, we discovered that this audience made a brand decision 52 weeks out before disappearing from the direct query path, likely heading down a query path on financials and returning at 26 weeks.

We found these insights by being open-minded and striving to root out bias toward a long-established “fact” that the automotive customer journey starts at 26 weeks before purchase. A more inclusive customer journey is one that considers all audiences and seeks to understand their journeys from their points of view. By looking at the data 52 weeks out, we discovered that we needed to reexamine our assumptions about how we treat prepurchase data to identify new human intent signals.

Nothing about us, without us

Creating more diversity in customer experience and evaluation of the data that informs it starts from within. The meaning of “nothing about us, without us” is simple yet powerful. If you’re designing for people with disabilities, why not try designing with people with disabilities? It becomes a two-dimensional consideration.

First, ensuring more inclusive customer decision journeys requires including the diverse customer base you are trying to reach. It’s about understanding their purchase journey through their experience. That means conducting more qualitative than quantitative research to:

• Learn everything from the terminology the customer uses to the way to show and describe your product and how to integrate that into your advertising.
• Participate in ongoing conversations with your diverse customer base and explore every facet of their purchase journey, like how they find out about your product and packaging experiences, which is critical to ensure you serve all the needs of your diverse audience and not leave any aspect out.

Second, a diverse workforce is also essential in helping create more diversity of thought that reflects your customers’ wants and needs. A plurality of perspectives that includes diversity in gender, age, race, work experience, abilities, cultural background, and more is critical.

A diverse internal team is more likely to have the information needed to provide an empathetic, authentic, and inclusive customer experience. In other words, diverse talent can translate into improved understanding, new markets, and expanded customer bases.

The desire for teams with diversity should extend across the company at large through a supported inclusive environment.

Your company’s potential for innovation, growth, and development ties directly to your employees’ knowledge base. And clearly, a more informed, authentic, and inclusive knowledge base—based on inclusive analytics and lived experience by the breadth of the humanity—is what is needed for the best collective future.

Next steps

Learn more about leveraging data across your organization to create more personalized and relevant customer experiences.

• Elevate your customer experience (CX) at every touchpoint with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
• Read the Microsoft Advertising blog about the Marketing with Purpose Playbook.
• Get started with a Dynamics 365 free trial.

End Notes

¹Marketing with Purpose Playbook, Microsoft Advertising, September 2020.

The post The data bias challenge: Creating inclusive customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

At National Retail Federation (NRF) 2023: Retail’s Big Show, thousands of people joined together in New York City to collectively envision what’s next for the future of retail. The lessons and best practices shared have important implications for other industries as well. Retailers, operating in a highly competitive environment, are often the first to blaze the trail of innovation in customer experience.

Elevating the consumer shopping experience requires companies to deliver more relevant, streamlined experiences throughout the retail value chain. That delivery starts with unifying disparate data from sources across the end-to-end shopper journey. Driving customer acquisition, retention, and business growth requires a connection between your customers, your people, and your data.

Marketers today are rethinking their data strategies, looking for ways to take ownership of their customer data and to use that resource to create valued customer relationships in a time of tightening privacy legislation. Microsoft continues to make significant investments in helping organizations across industries fulfill customer demands for privacy and personalization while optimizing marketing return on investment (ROI). To that end, we are excited to showcase the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform—an opportunity for organizations to jump-start their customer experience transformations—at NRF 2023.

Microsoft Customer Experience Platform

A platform that puts you in control of your customer data

Learn more

Deliver more relevant customer engagements with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform

The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform is an end-to-end customer experience platform that brings together industry-leading applications spanning Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft PromoteIQ, Microsoft Clarity, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, and Microsoft Purview.

With full ownership of their data, organizations can engage buyers the way they expect. With a deep understanding of customers and rich, out-of-the-box insights, organizations can now maximize the value of their customer data. By determining and predicting intent, they can deliver the right content on the right channel and in the right moment. And, with AI-orchestrated journeys, organizations can engage customers in powerful new ways, delivering connected experiences across every customer touchpoint—all the way from awareness, to purchase, to service.

For Chief Data Officers (CDO) and their data wranglers, the solution delivers on their need to balance technology investments and business productivity demands with the scalability to support ever-changing business complexities. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform integrates seamlessly with your existing Azure Data Lake to remove the complexities of duplicating the ingestion and storage of data, while making it faster to combine data with other sources and deliver unmatched time to insight.

Teams responsible for enterprise-wide data and information strategies, including privacy, governance, and data quality, can feel secure knowing that the solution fulfils their needs while, at the same time, it is helping them create business value. As consumers increasingly adopt digital technology, the data they generate creates both an opportunity for enterprises to improve their consumer engagement and a responsibility to keep consumer data safe. At the same time, consumers are increasingly exercising their rights to privacy, given the growing awareness of data misuse and breaches. The solution safeguards customer privacy and honors customer consent with built-in and configurable tools that automatically store and manage consent.

Turn insights into understanding to deliver tailored customer experiences

For Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) and their marketing teams, the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform serves as a secure, single source of truth. For marketing leaders who want to elevate customer experiences, the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform is the solution that enables your organization to build deep customer connections while maintaining full control of your data. The consolidated, real-time data powers operational excellence while AI and machine learning capabilities pave a path to competitive advantage. Having the ability to predict customers’ needs and wants means marketers can turn insights into true understanding of their prospects and customers. By leaning on their data with the magic of AI, they can now easily test and measure to ensure their investments are resulting in the most efficient and optimal outcomes. As a result, personalization becomes their crucial strategy. Businesses can now deliver tailored recommendations, content, offers, and experiences, across all channels and devices, along the entire customer journey.

Chief Executive Officers (CEO) also benefit from the solution, knowing that it is helping their teams align on growth and opportunities. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform can aide in progress by helping to instill a digital mindset for internal processes and, as a result, create a positive, productive culture. Teams looking for new revenue streams can accelerate progress when they have a left-to-right view across the business.

Organizations like Campari Group and Leatherman rely on this end-to-end platform to successfully deliver great brand experiences and build quality customer relationships in an era of heightened customer expectations. Customers attending NRF will have the opportunity to see, first-hand, the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 in fueling next-generation customer experience.

Extend capabilities to meet retailers’ unique needs

With the power of Microsoft Business Applications, organizations can transform customer experience, driving topline sales and improving operational efficiencies that lead to sustained profitability and meaningful growth. With the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, retailers can optimize marketing ROI by unlocking customer data with AI-driven insights to deliver connected, personalized experiences at scale.

Customer experience is the most effective avenue for sustainable competitive advantage and often the most important barometer of success. The most successful retailers are taking control of their customer data in this time of uncertainty and changing shopper expectations, engaging in new ways across every touchpoint, creating raving fans.

Microsoft’s growing ecosystem of partners helps customers extend the robust capabilities of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform. Our partners are dedicated to serving retailers’ unique needs by helping provide integrated retail industry-specific solutions that extend the core capabilities of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform. They are trusted allies, helping customers to identify new opportunities for benefiting from innovations, and to accelerate the time-to-value for investments. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform with additional solutions to address the most urgent challenges the retail industry is facing today.

Join Microsoft at NRF 2023

Missed us at the show? Find out how you can unlock the value of your customer data to fuel your customer experience transformation with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform. To see our Microsoft announcements at NRF, be sure to read How Microsoft Teams empowers your retail workers to do more with less and the Microsoft Cloud for Retail blog. See our Microsoft Learn collection of resources and contact your account manager today to find out how you can harness insights to inform and deliver more relevant, connected customer experiences.

The post Transform retail customer experiences with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As technology advances, so do customer expectations. Whether a consumer or a buyer, it no longer matters as the respective lines between customer expectations have blurred, and, at the end of the day, the business-to-business (B2B) buyer is a consumer too. Hyper-personalized, self-driven, seamless interaction across any channel at any time is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have as customers want to engage on their own terms and expect businesses to deliver even better experiences. At the same time, exacerbated by a turbulent economy, businesses need to reduce cost and complexity to innovate quickly and stay resilient so they can meet current customers’ expectations and find new ways to engage them. Businesses that take the opportunity to optimize their processes to do more with less will stand out against the competition and be better positioned to drive loyalty, retain customers, and emerge stronger from these uncertain times.

We’re excited to share the new capabilities coming in the 2022 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and, more importantly, how these new capabilities will help you deliver greater efficiency, empower marketers to be more productive, and provide value to customers in moments that matter. Ready? Let’s get started!

1. Maximize the value of your data to understand your customers

The first step in driving impactful experiences is to grasp the needs and intent of each customer.

If you are a new Customer Insights user, you will be delighted by the first-run experience feature that helps you accelerate understanding your customers. To fuel your journeys, valuable insights are generated in a matter of minutes simply from a customer list, saving you time and avoiding advanced configurations.   

2. Engage your customers in moments that matter with real-time marketing

To deliver unforgettable experiences, marketers need to send the right message on the right channel at the right time. To allow you to do just this, we have further developed our real-time engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing.  

Whether it’s to catch your customer’s attention to collect relevant details, or capture leads to nurture and strengthen the sales funnel, we’ve enhanced our capabilities so that marketers can effortlessly design customized forms with a few clicks. Through the modern drag-and-drop editor, marketers are guided step-by-step from creation to preview, test, and publish. Within seconds they can deliver compelling branded forms, on websites or landing pages, while directly tracking conversions.

To engage customers through their preferred channel, marketers can now easily build custom channels in real-time marketing. We’ve improved upon the model in outbound marketing by providing the ability to create a channel with all the power and flexibility that the box channels have. It enables marketers to extend their reach across bespoke text message providers, Viber, or direct mail, and activate these new channels in customer journeys using out-of-the-box modern templates, text message editor, and consent collection. In addition, marketers can natively track deliverability analytics to monitor the success of the custom channel activation.

Customers often qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously. The frequency cap feature prevents message fatigue by setting limits on the number of messages that can be sent per channel per day, week, or month. At the same time, marketers can bypass the limit for the most important journeys, ensuring customers never miss an important message.

3. Personalize content to grow your audience engagement

Each customer is unique and driven by different incentives. To get noticed, businesses need to easily create personalized content that stands out and resonates to keep their brand top of mind.

Finding inspiration to create enthralling emails has never been so easy. Thanks to AI, marketers receive engaging content ideas, based on the key messaging points they want to convey. Marketers can also use feature-rich text links and QR codes for events and coupons within email campaigns to get more customers to engage, click, and convert.

Managing multi-brand content is often demanding as marketers spend time customizing each email to comply with specific brand guidelines. The new brand profile functionality helps them to gain time and consistency, and reduce content-related errors by defining default senders for emails and social links, as well as custom values such as URLs or compliance messages, and easily switch these settings for the brand they are working on.

To ensure compliance and privacy of customer interactions across multiple brands or business units, marketers now have the ability to fully customize out-of-the-box preference centers to match their business needs, from tracking or isolating consent data to adhering to brand guidelines for logos, styles, and colors. Furthermore, marketers can create and manage topics that align with your brands and business for customers to opt-in to marketing subscriptions, for example: “Get cooking tips and tricks”. Last but not least, consent is becoming entity agnostic and will work with customer profiles, contacts, leads, and custom entities.

Maximizing the impact of personalized content requires effectively targeting the right audiences. As part of our effort to improve marketers’ efficiency, we have redesigned our segment builder. The workflow and UX have been enhanced, and we’ve set the foundation for supporting contacts, leads, and any entity, including custom, in the future. Segments can be created instantly using an intuitive and powerful logic builder that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of complex data structures. Marketers are empowered by AI-assisted natural language capabilities, the ability to create a static snapshot of segment membership, as well as previewing segment members and size. This not only scales reach but improves marketing productivity.

4. Connect your sales and marketing to provide seamless experiences

By placing customer needs at the center of the organization, deep collaboration within and across departments unlocks significant business growth opportunities.

For instance, as marketers nurture leads with real-time journeys, signals from the lead might indicate an urgency to engage with the sales team. Marketers can directly trigger a sales sequence or assign a follow-up call from the journey to the sales team to ensure the lead gets individualized attention at the right time when they are most likely to engage. Marketers identify potential leads, and sales teams receive smart assistance to optimize their time and prioritize opportunities in the lead nurturing process.

Businesses can capitalize on B2B contact unification in Customer Insights to create a complete view of accounts and contacts within the same environment. Typically, businesses engage with contacts, however, the context for engagement is based on the attributes of the organization in which the contact resides. Unified contacts provide the ability for marketers to now generate segments of contacts based on account attributes.

5. Use data and AI to optimize your campaigns and scale up your business

Harnessing the power of data and AI is key to marketing at scale and achieving higher levels of marketing maturity.

As businesses create a vast number of assets, they need to organize them according to their organizational structure to remain compliant and productive. They can now effortlessly organize their digital assets, content and journeys according to their business structure. Whether it’s business data or customer data, it can be isolated by departments, regions, brands, business units, and product lines, reducing your compliance risk.

In the upcoming months, you will be able to increase your throughput to send up to 300 million messages per month. This added capacity empowers your team to deliver personalized experiences at scale and will help you grow your business, whether you are increasing your customer base in new markets, expanding geographies, promoting new products, or building your prospective customer pipeline to reach higher sales targets.

Use new features for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights with the 2022 release wave 2

Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights

Stay up-to-date on the latest functionalities.

Read the release notes for details

From leveraging AI to capitalize on your data, optimizing real-time interactions and personalization capabilities, to customizing tools to meet your unique business needs, or facilitating deeper collaboration between departments, we are thrilled to deliver solutions that are designed to make your job easier, more productive, and ultimately enable you to transform customer experiences.

The Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights functionalities highlighted above are planned to be released from October 2022 through March 2023 either as previews or generally available.

Note: The product visuals are only for illustrative purposes and might not reflect the general availability feature.

The post 5 steps for transforming customer experience with Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights updates appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Expectations for executives leading their companies’ customer experience (CX) efforts seem to grow every day. From driving sustainable growth, to aligning your teams and integrating your technology, to empowering employees to do their best work, there’s more on your plate than ever. Meanwhile, customer expectations can feel like a moving target that only goes up. Buyers today are digital first, becoming more informed, more comfortable switching between channels, more likely to ignore anything that doesn’t feel authentic, and they expect businesses to follow their lead.

To stay relevant to customers, many leaders are rethinking their approach to CX at every touchpoint. Relying on customer relationship management (CRM) to drive sales simply won’t cut it anymore. You need to connect customer insights and data across your organization—sales, marketing, and service—to meet customers where they are and capitalize on every opportunity.

That’s why I’m excited to invite you to Customer Experience Reimagined, a digital event on October 26. Learn about the latest trends shaping CX today—and tomorrow—with Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft. He’ll share his perspective about what CX leaders are facing, how they energize employees by simplifying fragmented and complicated systems, and what it means to be a digitally connected enterprise with unified, enriched data.

Hear insights straight from the experts

Customer Experience Reimagined will give you a window into what other CX leaders are thinking, with strategies to help your business adapt to a changing landscape. Learn about the evolution of CRM, along with critical technologies and skills from leaders who are shaping their customer experience strategy:

• Constellation Research Founder and CEO Ray Wang—author of Everybody Wants To Rule The World: Surviving and Thriving in a World of Digital Giants—will join Constellation Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Liz Miller to discuss the importance of AI, analytics, and automation for shifting from real time to “right time” personalized experiences.
• Accenture Senior Managing Director John Bolze will share insights from a new report by Accenture, The Human Paradox, including how 95 percent of C-suite executives say customers are changing faster than businesses are able to adapt. John will talk about why overcoming this crisis of relevancy requires shifting from a customer-centric strategy to a life-centric strategy.
• Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF) Director of Innovation in charge of Digital, Business Intelligence/Analytics, and Fan Experience Franco Segarra will discuss how to create more meaningful fan experiences, increase attendance, and improve game day experiences with a data-centric approach.
• Eika Director of Business Applications Atle Riksfjord, Northrop & Johnson Director of Technology and Intelligence Keith Perfect, and Accenture Song Global Lead Social & Emerging Channels and author of Human-Driven Experience: The Battle for Trust in the Digital Age Robert Harles will lead a roundtable discussion on how to kick-start your CX transformation and guide your company to deliver more personalized, intentional, and relevant experiences.

Learn key lessons from Microsoft’s modern marketing transformation

Get the inside story of our own CX transformation from Stephanie Ferguson, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Global Demand Center, as she shares the vision for our Commercial Customer Platform to meet the changing expectations of customers in the business-to-business (B2B) space. Stephanie will show how we help our marketers and sellers around the globe engage our customers with greater relevancy, clarity, and purpose.

You’ll also hear our technology vision from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platform, along with Lori Lamkin, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing. They’ll talk about how we’re helping companies connect data from hundreds of business applications and deliver AI-enabled insights to sellers and service agents with automated tools that give them more time to spend with customers. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform combined with the new seller experience application Microsoft Viva Sales helps companies unify and automate, so they can scale their customer experience investments to get customers to “yes” faster.

See what’s shaping CX today—and tomorrow

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear strategies for elevating your customer experience and uncover new ways to sustain business growth, no matter what the future brings. Register for Customer Experience Reimagined today to join us on Wednesday, October 26, 2022, 9:00-10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7).   

Customer Experience Reimagined

Evolve your CRM to personalize and connect customer journeys

Register here

The post Evolve your CRM at Customer Experience Reimagined appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In the customer experience (CX) game, the last best experience sets the bar for the next. Businesses that are successful at meeting and exceeding their customers’ expectations are hearing glowing testimonials like:

“This brand makes valuable information directly available.” “The salesperson recommended the perfect solution.” “How did the brand know exactly what I was looking for!” “This brand perfectly understands our business goals.” “I received a discount exactly when I needed it.” “Rep x is my trusted advisor.” “This was an amazing service from A to Z.” “This is my favorite brand.”

Excellent CX encourages your customers to purchase your products, be repeat customers, and recommend your brand. It keeps your brand prominent, helps maintain ongoing relationships, and fuels emotional connections, which is especially important in between purchases. So how do we live up to these customers’ expectations? Let’s start by understanding the customer and learning how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales can help.

Understanding today’s self-service, digital-first customer

Triggered by the boom of connectivity and the accelerated shift to digital during COVID-19, customers’ expectations have changed—and they are rightfully asking for more. This also applies to business-to-business (B2B) customers, who have adopted the same purchasing behaviors as they have in their personal lives. They want modern, consumer-like experiences that allow them to engage on their own terms.

Customers are seeking more autonomy as they engage with brands. They call for digital first, immediate, self-service solutions. According to Trust Radius, virtually 100 percent of buyers want self-service options for at least part of the buying process, up 13 percent from 2021.¹ Once customers make the decision to engage with a salesperson, they expect the person to know their intentions.

To add to this, buying journeys are no longer linear. Customers no longer follow a sequential top-down path across marketing and sales. They go back and forth between content and online and offline channels. However, expectations remain the same for seamless, friction-free interactions that are personalized regardless of the touchpoint.

They tune out one-size-fits-all interactions that make them feel like they’re just another number, especially when businesses could make use of the data collected from their past interactions to anticipate their needs and ultimately deliver better-personalized experiences.

Customer experience and the sales landscape

The sales process has become even more complex. As buyers are faced with economic pressures, customer experience is even more important than ever. This is causing brands to interpret more signals, due to the variety of stakeholders and their indecisiveness in the purchasing process.

And buyers are allowing themselves to be inconsistent as they reconcile decision-making with practical realities. As they engage with a myriad of business stakeholders, their decisions can seem contradictory. This is causing businesses to miss opportunities to simplify the process and deliver relevant experiences across shifting influences.

Customers feel the disconnect and ask questions, such as: “Why do I still see ads for a product I already bought?”, “How could the seller not know about my past order?”, “Why are the promotional messages I’ve seen differ from the vendors’ pitch?”.

Though a small number of businesses can deliver congruous experiences, the truth is that most are failing to connect the dots. Technology, people, and data siloed within different departments are preventing businesses from working as one. Creating a holistic continuum of engagement from customer insights to identifying intent and actioning that information with the right buyer at the right time is a challenge.

Finally, departments such as sales and marketing are misaligned. The businesses’ organizational structures are preventing effective collaboration, and they share different goals, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs), too often not oriented toward achieving revenue optimization. In the long run, those inconsistencies in the experiences affect the overall perception of the brand and, most importantly, customers’ satisfaction.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Help meet the expectations of your customers with Dynamics 365 Sales.

Learn more

What the research is telling us about sales and marketing

Yet CX is where businesses are and will increasingly compete. Most professionals who engage in or lead CX for their businesses or department expect to compete on the basis of CX.

LinkedIn found that for 85 percent of sales and marketing leaders, alignment is the largest opportunity for improving business performance today.² Marketing needs to orchestrate engagement whenever it’s appropriate—including prompting sales with intent signals and digital buyer behaviors that indicate that sales engagement would be valuable or welcomed. Sales must consistently use marketing-provided content and technology to improve effectiveness and efficiency. This allows sellers to engage with buyers further down the funnel, increasing the effectiveness of sellers through higher qualified leads.

This is driving the transformation of CX where businesses streamline and automate processes to enhance customers’ interactions with their brand. The goal is to continuously refine CX at every touchpoint to grow and foster an ongoing relationship. “This brand perfectly understands our expectations.”

As an example, Northrup & Johnson, a luxury yacht broker and charter service provider, has seen a shift in the expectations of its buyers, who are increasingly self-exploring digitally throughout their buying process—comparing different models, taking virtual tours, and comparing with competitors. They expect a highly personalized experience both digitally and with the sales team. They want to lead their sales process and not have it dictated to them. Northrup & Johnson engages its customers on all channels with content specific to the yacht models they’ve expressed interest in or the tours they’ve taken. As its customer’s propensity to buy increases, it routes them to a seller at the right moments, such as reaching out after they had a great boat charter experience. Leveraging a unified customer understanding creates self-service experiences that then empower sellers with knowledge of affinities, intent, and lifetime value. 

Our approach to transforming customer experience

So how do you prepare your organization to transform CX and deliver frictionless, outstanding experiences to maintain a competitive edge? One thing is clear: doing things the “old way” is no longer an option.

Companies that require a customer to fill out a web form or start with a phone call will rapidly become irrelevant. Instead, they need to provide consumer-like experiences and be comfortable with unknown visitors to their digital properties. With control ceded to the buyer, they are no longer being forced through a one size fits all funnel and may enter in the middle of the funnel with a preference, then pop up the funnel to assess their options. They could start by buying and then seek knowledge about their purchase, or anything in between. The customer journey needs to flow seamlessly between sales and marketing as a result. 

Enabling these experiences starts with data. Instead of customer understanding being limited to that which a seller is willing to manually enter into their customer relationship management (CRM) system, all the interactions, purchases, and multitudes of different data sources can come together to shine a light on the buyer journey. By unifying data, organizations can gain a full understanding of their customers.

Combined with AI capabilities, they can curate a timeline of individual customer interactions, identify relevant behavioral signals in the buying process, and through automated predictive analytics, understand key factors influencing actions and KPIs, such as churn, customer lifetime value (CLTV), net promoter score (NPS), and customer sentiment. Based on those insights, marketing and sales teams can craft real-time single or multi-step personalized journeys that automate the best experiences for each buyer. They can be orchestrated to quickly advance the buyer to the next step of the journey and accelerate the pipeline through marketing-led lead identification that seamlessly notifies sales to contact the buyer at exactly the right time, in the right channel, and with the right offer. “I received a discount exactly when I needed it.”

Through automated lead scoring and AI-powered next-best-action recommendations, these once tedious tasks no longer prohibit sellers from focusing on building relationships and delivering value in every interaction. Based on similar account interactions, sellers can also recommend relevant products to customers (“the salesperson recommended the perfect solution”) and in the long run through repeated on-point exchanges transform relationships (“rep x is my trusted advisor”).

Sellers and marketers can create self-service consumer-like experiences and provide content that contributes to lead generation to meet buyers where they are. “This brand makes valuable information directly available.” They can empower customers to engage on their terms, the conversations are no longer seller-led but guided by the customers’ choice and timing. Customers experiencing self-driven paths are likely to buy more than initially planned.

A key to this is analyzing the effectiveness and pipeline through a common lens and using data to optimize journeys, and personalized content to accelerate the pipeline, improve close rates and increase customer retention.

Bringing these capabilities to the forefront illustrates how CX is driving the need to build sales and marketing alignment. It allows companies to automate empathy and relationship building beyond the sales cycle based not just on who the buyer is, but on the moments that matter to keep the company top of mind, relevant, and the buyer happy. “This was an amazing service from A to Z.” 

Transforming customer experience with Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

To guide each B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) business in their CX transformation and accelerate their growth, we provide unrivaled connected sales and marketing capabilities through Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights applications.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights respects privacy when unifying fragmented data, sometimes from hundreds of data sources across the organization—including data from Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Marketing—to create a unified profile that can be enriched with first- and third-party data sources and used to generate AI-powered insights that identify churn risk and drops in customer sentiment and suggest the next best action to satisfy customers. 

These insights about the customer can be activated in real time within Dynamics 365 Marketing to identify segments and preferred channels, trigger flawless journeys, create self-service content, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences not just based on who the customer is, but also in real time based on what they are doing. For example, Biologische Heilmittel Heel, one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers of homeopathic remedies worldwide, is using Dynamics 365 to provide its buyers—doctors, pharmacists, and veterinarians—with self-service curated content. Due to the nature of this industry and its complexity across buyers, the message and approach have to be personalized from one customer to the next. This also makes it difficult to support customers throughout their journey with the company. Dynamics 365 has enabled seamless data sharing across the organization, enabling it to understand the customer and orchestrate real-time consumer-like experiences that span sales and marketing while putting the buyer in control.

Through Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can continue to build seamlessly on marketing efforts. Marketers orchestrate handoffs by identifying prospects showing purchase intent across their buying journey and automatically pass marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) at exactly the right time to optimize sales engagement. With AI-driving sales force automation, sales teams can jumpstart digital selling and meet buyers where they are using sales accelerator sequencing and predictive scoring. Through personalized work lists and AI-optimized next-best-action recommendations, they know exactly what customer and activity to focus on to accelerate sales and increase wins. All these capabilities, along with embedded collaboration and real-time conversation intelligence, boost seller productivity and enable them to read customer signals to know if their engagements and the buyer experience are effective.

Connected, these applications unlock unique opportunities to create individualized experiences that meet customers’ expectations whether they are one-time empathetic interactions or lifetime emotional connections.

Microsoft’s solutions empower your teams to transform CX so that your customer base refers to your organization as “my favorite brand.”

Next steps

Learn how Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Sales can meet your customers’ expectations.

Footnotes

¹Trust Radius.

²LinkedIn.

The post Transforming customer experiences with connected sales and marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The new era of digital has ushered in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as well as make-or-break challenges. Fast-moving organizations are seizing the moment to capture a sizable audience. But keeping customers is more difficult than ever. Organizations, facing mounting privacy regulations coupled with wary customers, are moving beyond third-party data to zero-party data for powering customer experiences. They are taking a hands-on approach and amassing customer data directly, according to a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal.¹ In the wake of disruptive changes, organizations are turning to trusted solutions like Microsoft Customer Experience Platform.

Savvy organizations see privacy as a challenge that can become a strategic opportunity to build trust with customers and differentiate themselves against competitors. They’re embracing transparent and ethical data practices built around zero-party data, which in combination with existing data, makes it easy to deliver highly-personalized experiences that customers actually want—and avoid privacy mishaps. Respecting customer privacy requires a holistic approach encompassing data collection, utilization, and governance. For example, organizations need to ensure that analytics and artificial intelligence initiatives utilize only permissible customer data, which may be highly-sensitive in nature.

Fuel personalization with zero-party data

The majority of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. However, this expectation is met with wariness about sharing personal information and fear that data will be misused, or that they will be inundated with a barrage of advertisements, emails, and intrusive outreach. Zero-party data is key to achieving privacy-aware personalization.

Zero-party data is a form of self-reported data a consumer willingly and actively provides a brand. Customers knowingly and intentionally share this data with an organization in order to get a more personalized experience—such as a tailored recommendation, pricing, or access to additional resources. Organizations have opportunities to collect this data across the entire customer journey—while the customer is on the website, social channels, email, inside a mobile app, or even in person—through loyalty programs and creative approaches like sweepstakes, newsletters, quizzes, polls, and QR codes. Unlike first-party data which is based on historical events and requires interpretation, zero-party data is explicit data that reflects customer motivations, desires, interests, and preferences. Just as important, zero-party data has moved from buzzword to data hero, becoming an essential part of an organization’s digital strategy and countering the eminent demise of the much relied upon third-party cookies.

Don’t count out other sources of data

Nothing beats zero-party data for quality and consent, but there’s still a role for other types of data in your marketing mix.

First-party data, for example, remains an essential source of customer insight. Like zero-party data, first-party data is data about a company’s customers collected and owned directly by the company. Types of first-party data include web and app behavior, purchase history, loyalty status, or call center interactions. And although the methods used to obtain first-party data aren’t always as straightforward or transparent as those used to obtain zero-party data, it’s nonetheless valuable data that will help accelerate the pivot from third-party data.

Third-party data, like those that come from external sources like third-party cookies that track web browsing or advertising, has a place at the table (along with second-party data, which is someone else’s first-party data). The goal is not to banish third-party data entirely; instead, it’s to decrease reliance on third-party data while simultaneously increasing the collection of zero-party and first-party data.

Approach privacy as a fundamental human right

As organizations across every industry face the imminent deprecation of third-party cookies and mounting regulations, the right partner and technology are key. With the right solutions, organizations can respect consumer privacy without compromising the personalized experiences that customers value. For organizations that approach privacy as a fundamental human right, the return on investment will encompass an entirely new relationship with customers—one that is built on trust and mutual engagement.

That’s where Microsoft Customer Experience Platform comes in. Microsoft has worked with customers around the world, and their marketing leaders consistently emphasize that to meet today’s expectations of privacy and personalization, they need to deliver consent-aware engagement along the entire customer journey, powered by insights based on zero through third-party data—something they struggle with because of the proliferation of data sources scattered across multiple systems, making it impossible to gain a complete view of the customer that’s essential for connected experiences. With privacy and consent built into the platform, organizations can be rest assured that data is responsibly collected, utilized, and governed—the foundation for meaningful engagement, raving fans, and lasting customer relationships. To learn more, read the related Microsoft Customer Experience Platform blog post and visit Microsoft Customer Experience Platform.

Sources:

1- “Big Tech Privacy Moves Spur Companies to Amass Customer Data”, Suzanne Vranica, Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2021.

The post Zero-party data is more valuable than ever for customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, nothing is certain for brands. Standing still means falling behind. Heritage brands are no different. Now more than ever, brands need to find authentic ways to engage with digitally-savvy consumers no matter where they are. How do brands steeped in tradition create modern experiences that resonate with today’s digital-native consumers?

Heritage brands like Campari and Leatherman are at a pivotal moment in their rich history, as consumer behavior shifts seemingly overnight. To adapt, these established brands turned to Microsoft Customer Experience Platform to forge direct relationships with consumers. Hyper-personalizing experiences while retaining their unique brand personality is made possible by combining digital technology with their brand and marketing strengths to attract and retain customers. Individualized journeys require real-time insights gleaned from customer data and infused into line-of-business applications, and seamless activation across a growing number of customer touchpoints. Privacy-aware, consent-enabled personalization powered by AI enables the brands to engage each customer at precisely the right moment with the right touch, at scale.

Unify and predict to personalize experiences

Campari Group, the 160-year-old alcohol spirits manufacturer, found it challenging to collect and analyze data to accurately predict customer needs. To derive value from the vast amount of customer data, Campari turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, a customer data platform (CDP) that’s part of Microsoft Customer Experience Platform to unify fragmented customer data and generate AI-powered insights that reveal the next best action.

Because of the sensitive nature of customer data, security and compliance were very important considerations. With the most advanced data governance and consent management capabilities, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was the obvious choice.

Moving forward, Campari is taking experiences to the next level with real-time, customer-led journey orchestration in order to hyper-personalize experiences across different touchpoints—like email, mobile, social, and in-person—according to marketing segments and consumer types.

“Customer journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing promotes contextually relevant and consistent real-time conversations with every customer across all interaction points. We can more precisely align marketing messages for each communication channel to gain the greatest impact. We see the effects in in-store sales and also in e-commerce, which is particularly important during COVID-19…We want to use this data in an end-to-end way, from marketing to sales to customer service, capturing and optimizing the entire customer journey.”—Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global IT – Marketing and Sales, Campari Group.

By unifying data and deriving insights, Campari is now better prepared for new opportunities, whether it’s launching a new product, entering a new market, or building customer loyalty.

Engage in new ways

Whether customers are engaging with your brand virtually, in-person, or both, Microsoft can help create a seamless customer journey across channels. Leatherman, a leader in high-quality multi-tools, pocket tools, and knives for 37 years, needed a solution to meet their growing direct-to-consumer business. They wanted to curate a more personalized customer journey and to create user experience continuity with their online store. They leveraged customer journey orchestration to deliver an end-to-end welcome journey for their new customers.

Leatherman was able to create multi-touchpoints that allowed them to engage their customers across commerce and marketing using real-time custom events. This journey was executed every time a customer signed up or started to check out on their website. It allowed Leatherman to seamlessly activate new customers and to create opportunities for continued engagement along the way.

“We have the flexibility to trigger our journeys in multiple ways from our website and our other Dynamics products, and products from other vendors. The journey can also react to customer activities in real-time.”—Liz Lee, IT Director, Leatherman Tool Group.

Leatherman gained a 360-degree view of their customer, was able to break down silos between existing systems, use the data to drive insights, and better tailor the customer experience.

When you have true multi-channel personalization that keeps your customer top of mind, you not only create a better experience for them, but also build brand loyalty. These individualized customer journeys keep them coming back for more and can turn customers into ambassadors for your brand.

Learn more

Take your brand into the future by creating tailored, delightful customer journeys with Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, an end-to-end solution that safely unifies and protects your customer data while inspiring trust and loyalty.

The post Shaping the future of retail with Microsoft Customer Experience Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Marketing professionals go to great lengths to understand customers. Detailed personas are written to identify the motivations, interests, and buying patterns of prospects and customers. But all too often, these personas—and their resulting customer journeys—are informed by data points important to the organization, not the customer. You cannot claim to be customer-centric, customer-first, or customer-obsessed if all the data you track is company-centric.

You may be thinking your organization is ahead of the customer journey curve here. After all, you’re already tracking customer-centric metrics such as net promoter score, customer satisfaction score, and customer effort score. But take a second look. These key performance indicators (KPIs) still ultimately measure benchmarks important to the organization, not the customer.

Go beyond KPIs with customer performance indicators

Nobody is arguing that an organization shouldn’t have a robust set of KPIs focused on measuring the fulfillment of important company objectives. But your toolbox of performance indicators doesn’t have to end there—and neither do the possibilities for the customer journey. Rather, take things to a whole new level by also measuring the fulfillment of customers’ objectives and optimizing the journey with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Customer performance indicators (CPIs) quantify and measure outcomes that are desired by customers. These outcomes could include time savings, cost savings, convenience, flexibility, a sense of security, or any number of other outcomes customers deem valuable in the context of your product or service. There’s no cookie-cutter set of CPIs; they will vary widely across industries, organizations, products, and regions.

Consider the scenario of a retailer whose shoppers especially value speed. Acknowledging their shoppers’ priorities along with the need to balance services with expectations, the retailer tracks customers’ wait-time for curbside pick-up. They discover that wait times occasionally go beyond customer expectations. In response, the retailer implements a new feature that sends a flash promotional offer to high-value customers, when they are on their way during busy periods, for a complimentary drink redeemable from the in-store bar when they switch to in-store pickup. It’s a personalized gesture that acknowledges the retailer fell short of expectations but is trying to do its best to make it up to the customer. By optimizing the metrics that reflect what is important to the customer, the retailer can positively impact a whole host of KPIs, from customer satisfaction and customer loyalty to sales revenue—and more.

Where KPIs end and customer performance indicators begin

There is a strong correlation between CPIs and KPIs. As illustrated by our retailer example, meeting the objective of a CPI is likely to boost associated KPIs. In fact, CPIs have been identified as powerful predictors of growth. Similarly, declining CPIs are likely to drag down associated KPIs.

CPIs also uncover insights about KPIs. Take customer satisfaction as an example. A high customer satisfaction score (a common KPI) indicates that an organization is doing something well. And while that’s critical information, this KPI on its own may not be able to provide visibility into what that something is. Or whether that something is even important to the customer. But a set of CPIs designed to measure desired customer outcomes such as personalized touches or chat availability can identify where the strongest correlations lie between what is important to the customer and what is important to the company.

CPIs and KPIs have a lot in common. They both measure performance, they both demonstrate progress toward an intended result, and they both impact the bottom line. For this reason, they can be difficult to distinguish from one another.

In the following table, we identify a few common KPIs. Alongside each KPI, we list one or more CPIs that could be used to enhance the understanding or performance of the associated KPI.

Find your customer performance indicators

What outcomes do your customers value? When you have the answer to that question, you can focus on delivering those outcomes. Every CPI identified, quantified, and measured brings new discoveries, new opportunities, and new levers to pull. Every CPI optimized is one more personalization you can bring to the customer journey, from brand voice and quote delivery to product bundling and customer service availability.

In short, it’s not enough to measure what’s important to your organization—not if you want to optimize the customer journey and exceed customer expectations. You must also measure what’s important to your customers.

Learn how Dynamics 365 Marketing helps your organization optimize the CPIs that lead to elevated experiences.

The post The most important customer experience metrics (that you’re not tracking yet) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Engaging with customers in today’s world is multifaceted, spanning everything from generating that initial spark of interest, to closing a sale and nurturing the relationship, to delivering exceptional ongoing service and support. Today, those experiences are often disconnected, and customer relationships are fragmented. On top of that, our expectations as customers have risen dramatically.

We expect that brands know enough about our preferences to provide high-quality interactions with us. We also prefer our experiences with a brand to be personalized and consistent across every touchpoint. However, this expectation is met with our own wariness about sharing personal information and fear that our data will be misused, or that we will be inundated with a barrage of advertisements, emails, and intrusive outreach. Yet, it is a balance, and most of us are receptive to content that is relevant to us at the right moment.

As we’ve worked with large enterprise customers around the world, their marketing leaders consistently stress that to meet today’s customer expectations and deliver privacy-aware, consent-enabled personalization, they need insights from multiple, diverse data sources—something they struggle with because data about their customers is often locked in silos.

This is why we are introducing the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, a customer engagement solution that gives you control of your customer data to deliver connected experiences. With full ownership of your data, you can connect directly to your customers—on your own terms. Rich out-of-the-box AI and insights enable you to better predict customer intent, accelerate your time to market, and deliver the right content on the right channel at the right moment. And, with AI-orchestrated journeys, you can engage your customers in powerful new ways, delivering connected experiences across every customer touchpoint.

Own your customer relationships

As the industry faces the imminent deprecation of third-party cookies and the continued fragmentation of digital identities, having a strong customer data platform is essential. Marketers need to build holistic customer profiles and protect them with robust privacy and security controls—all in real time. With Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, you can power customer data unification and understanding, enrich customer data with privacy-friendly insights from multiple sources, and ensure compliance, all while honoring your customer’s consent.

Data privacy and security, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, is top of mind for companies and customers alike. This is the reason Alpha XR and Boots Alliance, Inc. chose Microsoft to gain a unified, 360-degree view of their customers and deliver a world-class digital experience. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Alpha XR and Boots Alliance, Inc. is now able to deliver more engaging and tailored healthcare and shopping experiences, while protecting the privacy choices of patients and customers.

Create raving fans

Driving down customer acquisition costs and increasing lifetime value is a top priority for every business. And today’s marketers need granular data, scalable technology, and sophisticated analytics to achieve these goals. AI makes it easier to identify trends and insights to reveal new opportunities, but the average campaign led by data sciences can take months to execute, with a large portion of this time spent collecting data, cleaning it up, and running predictive models.

The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform helps you understand the intent, journeys, and behavior of customers on your web and mobile properties to optimize funnels and trigger personal experiences. With Microsoft, marketers have access to powerful out-of-the-box AI and pre-built models to predict key customer attributes like lifetime value, churn, lookalike, and interests, all designed to accelerate your time to market and deliver results.

Chipotle serves millions of customers a year and wanted to gain a deeper understanding of individual customer preferences and how they change over time. They needed to put multiple sources of customer data to work for them, including a loyalty program with more than 17 million members, point-of-sale data, a customer care center, and digital platforms. To accomplish this, Chipotle needed a comprehensive customer data platform to drive business insights and improve their return on marketing efforts. Today, Chipotle can gather and analyze longitudinal data in a more effective way to track key performance indicators such as repeat visitors, customer lifetime value, and customer sentiment. With greater insight into customer behaviors and marketing analytics, Chipotle can now directly target customers with messages that appeal to them—at times when they’ll be most receptive.

Engage in new ways

Customers today want real connections with brands that go beyond simple personalization. They want high-quality experiences that improve the way they live and work. To maximize reach and ROI, marketers must think beyond a linear customer journey and connect experiences across marketing, commerce, sales, and service. This requires precise use of customer data, integration into line-of-business applications, and seamless activation across a growing number of customer touchpoints.

The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform provides AI-orchestrated journeys so you can acquire and retain high-value prospects based on their interactions across advertising, email, mobile, social media, custom channels, and in-person touchpoints. With the integration between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Advertising, you can easily activate your audience segments, expand your target lists with lookalike audiences and auto-generated remarketing. You can distribute these segments into Microsoft Advertising and other ad platforms without barriers, further extending your reach by meeting customers where they are.

Leatherman, the originator and category leader in high-quality multi-tools, pocket tools, and knives, sought a solution to meet their growing D2C (Direct to Consumer) communication needs. Leatherman leveraged customer journey orchestration to curate a more personalized customer journey and to create user experience continuity with their online store. The team was able to create a multi-touchpoint journey which allowed them to engage their customers across their commerce and marketing solutions using real-time custom events. This journey was executed every time a customer signed up or started to check out on their website. This allowed Leatherman to seamlessly activate new customers and to create opportunities for continued engagement along the way.

When decision journeys bring customers to your retail website, Microsoft PromoteIQ helps you monetize that interest. This was the goal when the world’s largest home improvement retailer, Home Depot, partnered with PromoteIQ to enrich customer engagement on its e-commerce site in the U.S. Managing and scaling these vendor-funded digital marketing efforts generated incremental revenue for Home Depot while also giving Home Depot’s vendor partners enhanced marketing controls to drive better conversion, increase visibility and learn from real-time performance insights.

Tap into a rich ecosystem of partners and digital agencies

Microsoft is excited to be working with a growing list of digital agencies to help organizations more efficiently unlock their data, predict customer intent, and deliver impactful end-to-end journeys.

“We are excited about the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform and how Microsoft continues to invest in this space. It has never been more important to have the right capabilities to unlock data to more effectively engage customers, to predict customer intent in the moment, and to deliver connected end-to-end experiences across the entire customer lifecycle.”—David Mitchell, CTO, VMLY&R.

“The advantages of digital transformation go well beyond a simple cost-benefit analysis. The announcement today of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform gives businesses an end-to-end platform that encompasses transformation across infrastructure, data, and artificial intelligence to create real-time predictive customer experiences that create deeper understanding to deliver the right experience and brand behaviors and preferences clients want.”—Adam Good, Executive Director, Marketing Technology WPP Australia and New Zealand.

“Over the next few years, we’ll see the impact of the changes we’ve been through. We’re invested in experience because as we move to cloud, we’ll have data to make those experiences equitable, personalized, sustainable, & simple. Microsoft’s CX Platform helps pull it all together to make what’s next.”—José Reyes, PwC Partner, Chief Creative Officer and Experience Center Leader.

Learn more

Learn how to create tailored, delightful customer journeys with Microsoft Customer Experience Platform that safely leverage and protect your customer data while inspiring trust and loyalty. We help you get the most out of your data by connecting with customers on your own terms, applying rich AI capabilities to glean the best insights, and engaging in powerful ways across the customer journey.

All of this is made possible with the combined power of products like Microsoft Advertising, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Promote IQ, Microsoft Clarity, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, and Microsoft Azure Purview. Find out more at Microsoft Customer Experience Platform and Microsoft Ignite breakout webinar.

1- PWC, Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right

The post Introducing Microsoft Customer Experience Platform: A solution for connected customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.