The success of your B2B organisation depends on your ability to build relationships. In this article learn how to drive personalised customer experiences using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform.
As we work with organisations across different industries, many discussions around customer experience strategies begin with a flawed assumption. That assumption is that only business-to-consumer or B2C organisations should focus on becoming a more customer-centric organisation. But in reality, the high bar for personalisation, speed, and ease of doing business in the B2C industry is fast migrating to B2B space. Having a customer-centric mindset is just as critical to meet those heightened expectations that are essentially reshaping the entire business-to-business buying process.
The bottom line is, if your organisation isn’t differentiating based on experiences, you’re opening yourself up to competitors. Now on the flip side, those organisations that excel at customer experiences are attracting and retaining more high value customers, which leads to;
However, make no mistake. In fundamental ways, a B2B organisation’s customers and their buying patterns are very complex and intricate.
To address this, Microsoft has brought to market Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which is a customer data platform that unifies all data. This could be first party data, which is to analyse companies’ known consumers, or second and third party data used for enrichment to create the most complete and holistic customer profiles and segments, giving the critical insights on the different needs of different types of customers. Customer Insights also enables breakthrough experiences for customers while maintaining the strictest compliance and security standards so that all customer data is securely managed and adheres to the GDPR regulations. It is a self-service solution that is built on a hyper-scale Microsoft Azure platform and allows organisations to run powerful analytical capabilities using Microsoft AI and Azure based machine learning models. What is even more powerful is that it can be extended and customized with Microsoft Power Platform.
The first step is about data ingestion. This is the ability to bring data in from various sources. Such as behavioural data sources, transactional or observational data sources. Now, all of this data could be living in internal or external systems. But the idea is to automate the orchestration of this entire customer data with prebuilt and out of the box connectors to easily gain that 360-degree view of the customers.
The second step is around data unification and standardisation, where customer insights leverages the built-in AI to intelligently match and merge the customer records into one comprehensive customer profile. In addition, organisations can create richer profiles with things like brand affinity and interest that is all being powered by Microsoft’s proprietary audience intelligence.
The third and fourth step is really about insights and activation of those insights. With accessible, persistent, and up to date customer data, the entire organisation has a single source of truth on top of which analytics, AI, and machine learning can be applied to derive insights and KPIs that power personalised experiences and optimize business processes across all channels of engagement.
Account-based marketing: Focus on high-potential accounts and align sales and marketing teams in delivering coordinated and personalised experiences.
Sales enablement: Equip sales teams with richer customer data, curated content, and insights from across the customer journey, without salespeople having to search for it.
Next best action and automated workflows: Proactive recommendations and automated processes based on unified account profiles including product usage data.
With customer insights, organisations can gain deeper insights about customers and empower every employee, be it in sales, service, or marketing, to leverage those insights and drive personalised experiences across the entire customer journey. Click here to learn more about the product. When you’re ready to further explore, contact us today.
