Microsoft unveils new workflow and analysis tools for Customer Insights

Microsoft today unveiled new AI-powered features for its Dynamics 365 Customer Insights platform designed to aid marketers in managing and maintaining projects and campaigns.

The company looks to be building a platform to compete directly with other CRM giants like Salesforce and HubSpot. 

Like those two companies, Microsoft doesn’t intend for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to do all marketing functions. They’re hoping it can be a platform that others will create tools for, said Lori Lamkin, Microsoft’s co-vice president of Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Applications. 

“We’re very focused on marketing operations or customer experience. You know the backbone of what is CRM essentially,” she said. “We don’t have marketing tools for every task that a marketer does. We’d love to establish a very rich third-party ecosystem with tons of assets.”

Unified workspace

With the new features, marketers can write their campaign goals in natural language or upload a ready-made creative brief. Then, a project board is created based on the goal or brief, the organization’s data and past campaigns in Customer Insights. The project board simplifies and links all the steps for creating and managing marketing assets.

Dig deeper: 4 AI categories impacting marketing: Workflow automation and RPA

On the project board, marketers can see the target audience and segments for the campaign, as well as Copilot’s suggestions for more segments that might have been overlooked. By choosing a recommended segment, marketers can get a matching customer journey that is automatically generated. 

Lamkin sees this as the next logical step in how Microsoft provides customers with AI.

“A lot of what we’ve been doing in AI has been assisting you perform the jobs you do in the way that you’ve always done them with content or summaries or recommendations,” she said. “We’re taking this a step further and we’re really looking at the overall end-to-end workflow of how campaigns are generated and how customer outcomes are achieved with marketing and customer experience teams.”

Brand image generation

Customers can also use Typeface, a high-quality generative AI application that produces and selects images that match the brand identity. These images are created and edited within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Typeface helps align content to the organization’s brand guidelines, including themes, fonts, and product images—extracted from a central asset library.

The new features will become generally available in the third quarter of this year. Lamkin said they would be offered at no additional cost.

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