Why you should integrate Power BI and Customer Insights

Have you ever thought about how to better leverage your customers’ analysis? Since 2016, Microsoft has been offering its customers Dynamics 365, a cloud-based software platform with innumerable capabilities to fulfil their needs. Dynamics 365 has a range of apps covering areas from finance to sales, marketing, supply chain management, project management, human resources and much more, and these can be combined to make help every company become more powerful and gain a competitive edge. There are many topics to discuss regarding Dynamics 365 and all its functionalities, but today we’re going to turn our attention to Customer Insights and the ability to build reports based on its data using Power BI. So, without further ado, let’s start by explaining what Customer Insights is:

The more you know about your customers, the more competitive you can be because you are able to give them solutions better fitted to their wants and needs, so yes, just like the title says, Customer Insights (CI) helps you potentiate your customer analysis.

With it, you can first gather all your customer information and then aggregate it using Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. The idea of this app is to give you the ability to unify all the customer data collected by different company departments, creating a unique profile to prevent information duplication and data silos. This empowers all your employees interacting with your customers in different departments to personalise their journey at the same time as achieving better engagement with them and increase the potential to cross-sell or up-sell products, maximising their lifetime value.

Customer Insights is very flexible and capable of importing data from almost any source, which lets you gather all your customer data in the same place, unify it and eliminate data silos. Besides this, with Customer Insights, you can define customer profiles using which you can follow every customer journey.

There are many reasons why you must try using Customer Insights.

1. First of all, it’s really intuitive and easy to use, giving you the ability to quickly start asking questions about the data you gather.

2. Secondly, you can segment your customers with demographic, transactional or behavioural conditions. With these segments, you can personalise targets for promotions, sales events or any other type of action that utilise segmentation. Beyond that, you can export those segments as data sets to use them in other applications.

3. Thirdly, the capability to see and identify customer trends or forecast changes in the market helps you get ahead of your rivals and make smarter decisions around offering the best solution to your customers.

4. Fourthly, with Customer Insights, you can obtain market insights to help you define or improve your products and services. This helps you anticipate market demands and combine resources to satisfy your customers’ changing needs. Such adaptability can take your company to an elevated level of organisation and efficiency.

5. Last, and maybe most importantly, Customer Insights lets you gather feedback from your customer profiles about any of your products, comparing it with product data on Power BI, as we’re going to see next. This is vitally important because you can quickly evaluate how your customer base rates your products and how they would like you to improve them. Maybe you can´t satisfy everyone, but you can get close to it. The best way of finding out what your customers want is by listening – and when a customer feels listened to, he sticks around.

Power BI, as we know, is a tool where a vast number of data sources can find each other to fill extensive dashboards with knowledge from multiple departments, specially prepared with the correct information for decision-making. Customer Insights is one of those sources. Using CI alone, you can focus minutely on your customers, but combined with Power BI, you can take essential information from CI and cross it with other insights. You can have a dashboard in which you analyse customer demand for a specific product (using data from Customer Insights) and, still in this same dashboard, see what the marketing budget is or familiarise yourself with the strategy for that product (using data from the Marketing or Finance department).

The level of enrichment is great, and if you’re wondering, “Why use Power BI to analyse my customer data when I have CI?” think of this basic example. Imagine bringing information together from anywhere you want and personalising your analyses just as you need. That’s the power of Power BI.

You import your customer data from CI to Power BI using a built-in Microsoft connector. After this, you simply create reports and dashboards as you normally would do with Power BI.

It’s important that you know that Customer Insights and Power BI are two separate tools. While the insights you get from CI may potentiate the work of your salesman, marketing department and everything else related to your customers, Power BI empowers the work of your leaders, helping them make decisions and implement strategies. When combined, these two tools become very powerful, and the value you can get from them is proportional because the more you scale your analyses, the more you’ll see the benefits.

So, what are you waiting for? Gain the competitive edge by implementing CI for your company and building some cool reports by channelling the data it generates through Power BI? We want you to leverage your customer insights to be even better prepared for new and ever-changing market trends.