Microsoft Dynamics 365: Using insightful data to manage your business

Data is abundant and coming from everywhere, especially in the context of business. Due to the fact that companies interact in so many ways (email, A/V conferencing, social media, IM, etc.) data can end up dispersed throughout an organization.   In most cases, companies keep their data siloed (finance, operations, sales, marketing, etc.) into separate departments, platforms, and areas of the company.  Studies have recently shown that anywhere between 80-90% of customers prefer a company that customizes content and understands them to some extent. This can be related to their buying habits, patterns, or when is the best time to present adds and relevant content to them.  

Customer data is fragmented, causing disconnections in the business, resulting in a lack of insight into what drives growth and initiatives. This can also have the adverse effect of driving customers away from the business as well as the company lacks understanding of its base and may fail to effectively retain and expand. 

Dynamics 365 is designed to concisely bring all of the data together and give a complete view of your organization. Dynamics 365 provides organizations the ability to drive change by concentrating on four key areas. This would be the data that a company generates and stores, the unification of this data, applying insights and analytics, and finally actions. This strategy takes what is most important to a company and their customer base to predict behavior and provide intelligent insights into how to take proactive measures to ensure continuity and streamlined workflows. 

1.     Data – This expands to the data collected and stored throughout the business. Data of different types that is both customer and non-customer data. For example, non-customer data may be something like the weather, which may influence customer behavior. 

2.     Unification –Dynamics 365 unifies all of these data streams into one place, allowing all of your data to be connected. It then allows you to cleanse, schematize and enrich these data. (map, match, and merge).

3.     Insights – With this data, Dynamics 365 can intelligent begin to provide guidance and insights based on how you work as a business and how your customers interact with you as well.

4.     Actions – Dynamics 365 can take your data and insights to create work flows, take action on insights, and set up automation. The outcome enables the business to predict customer intent, spot trends, maintain control of customer data, automate customer centric experience, and drive personalized engagement. 

All of this functionality is built on top of the Azure platform, giving the ability to leverage Azure’s APIs for large amounts of integration and data management flexibility. Dynamics 365 is still growing with continued intelligence and machine learning. Microsoft has designed it to run business processes to enrich operations, enable better decision making, and better equip an organization to respond to demands.