Dynamics 365: Customer 360 - A blog about how Dynamics 365 can improve your customer relationships

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is, as the name suggests, designed to help you manage your relationships with customers. But what if you could go beyond simply monitoring and tracking your customer interactions? What if you could actually get inside their head and see things from their point of view? That’s where Customer 360 comes in. What is Customer 360? Customer 360 is a set of features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 that helps you understand more about your customers from a whole new range of perspectives. It’s not just about knowing who they are, where they live, and how much they spend on your products or services. It’s about understanding their motivations, identifying opportunities to target them more effectively, and recognizing where there might be scope for further personalization or cross-selling in future sales and service interactions.

What is included in Customer 360?

Customer 360 is a set of features that enable you to monitor, analyze, and understand your customers to a much deeper and more sophisticated level. It’s designed to help you track and record how your customers interact with you in various ways and on various channels, such as social media, email, and calls to your customer service team. It records details such as the content of conversations, sentiment (positive or negative), and whether any decisions have been made by the customer as a result of their contact with your business. Customer 360 also includes features that let you analyze the data recorded by the system to gain valuable insights about your customers. For example, you can identify the key topics customers have discussed with your business, the sentiment associated with those topics, and the type of language they’re using. Other key features of Customer 360 include the ability to understand your customers’ preferences and expectations and to build a Customer Asset Profile that goes far beyond what is currently recorded in your CRM.

Monitor your customer conversation

One of the key ways in which you can monitor your customer conversation is through the monitoring of sentiment. You can tap into the system to find out whether customers are positive, negative, or neutral about their experience of contacting your business, what topics they’re discussing, and what language they’re using. You can also monitor conversations outside your business. For example, you can track the level of conversation on social media channels related to your industry or products. You can also monitor your brand name and variations of your name to find out whether it’s being discussed positively or negatively. If a negative conversation appears, you can take action to try to mitigate the damage.

Analyze your customer behavior

In addition to monitoring your customer conversations, you can also tap into the system to analyze the data and insights it contains. You can identify the key topics your customers are discussing and the sentiment associated with those topics. You can also identify the types of language they’re using, which can give you invaluable insights into how your customers think and what they’re expecting from your business. You can use this information to create a map of your customer journey that shows how they interact with your business across multiple channels. This can be particularly useful if your business offers a variety of different products and services, so you can see which ones customers are engaging with and when.

Understand your customers’ preferences and expectations

Customer 360 includes features that let you analyze your customers’ behavior to understand their preferences and expectations. This can be particularly useful if you regularly deal with customers who have specific needs, such as those with disabilities. You can track the language your customers use to describe their needs and any topics they discuss that relate to those needs. You can then use this information to identify gaps in your product and service offering that are not fully meeting your customers’ needs, which can help you to prioritize new product and service development initiatives. You can also use this information to identify any areas where you may be able to further personalize your offerings, such as the way your website or marketing materials are presented. If you know that a significant proportion of your customers prefer to receive information in a particular format (for example, large print), you can make sure that this is taken into account when new materials are created.

Build a Customer Asset Profile

The Customer 360 feature that goes furthest beyond what you would typically find in a CRM is the Customer Asset Profile. This is a comprehensive profile that is built up over time that goes beyond what your customers have done (such as place an order), to what they think, feel, and believe. By monitoring your customers’ behavior, you can identify the topics they’re interested in and what drives them. You can also identify their motivations and what drives their decision making. You can use this information to identify the key traits of your customers and build a Customer Asset Profile that is unique to each person. This can be particularly useful when dealing with customers who are particularly demanding or difficult to please. By building up a comprehensive profile of the most demanding customers in your business, you can better understand what drives them. This will make it easier to anticipate their needs and find creative ways to address them.

Synchronize your CRM with other data sources

Customer 360 also includes features that let you synchronize data from other sources with your CRM. This can be particularly useful if you want to track your customers’ behavior outside of your business but don’t want to set up additional systems to record the information. You can also use this feature as a source of enrichment data that can be used to enrich your customer data to help you better understand your customers and their needs. You can also use it to track competitors. This can help you to stay up to date with the latest developments in your industry and identify opportunities for adding value for your customers that your competitors may not be providing.

Summary

Building customer relationships requires more than just selling a product or providing a service. It requires genuine engagement with your customers that goes beyond mere transactions and purchases. Customer 360 helps you do just that by enabling you to understand your customers better and engage with them in ways that are more relevant and tailored to their needs. That’s why Customer 360 is an essential part of the modern CRM strategy. It’s not just about keeping track of who your customers are and how much they spend. It’s about going beyond the data recorded in your CRM to understand customers’ behaviors, decisions, and motivations. When you have a better understanding of your customers, you can engage with them more effectively. You can provide more personalized service and content, and you can anticipate and address their needs more effectively.