12 features included in release plans
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Data 2025 release wave 1
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Business Value
Understanding your customers is essential for effective engagement. With this new feature, sales reps, service agents, and chat bots can easily access unified customer insights, such as propensity to buy, customer lifetime value, recent activity, and more, when you chat with Copilot. Previously, accessing these insights in Dynamics 365 was difficult and limited by admin configurations.
Now, these insights are seamlessly integrated into your team’s workflow, giving them a 360-degree view of the customer. Key information, like recent transactions and interactions, is just a copilot nudge away, allowing your team to engage more meaningfully and make every customer feel valued. This not only boosts the efficiency of your marketing, sales, and service teams but also helps create loyal customers through personalized, impactful experiences.
Feature Details
With Copilot, accessing rich insights about a lead or contact from Customer Insights - Data, like predicted lifetime value, propensity to buy, recent transactions, and interactions, becomes effortless. Agents and sellers can simply ask Copilot for information about specific customers directly in the flow of their work, gaining instant access to relevant data. Even if they're unsure of what data is available or how to discover it, Copilot provides immediate, seamless access, empowering teams to engage more effectively.
Scenario
Sarah, a sales rep at a large retail company, is preparing for an important meeting with a high-value lead, Mark. Before the meeting, Sarah wants to better understand Mark's purchasing behavior and level of engagement, but she’s pressed for time and unsure of what specific data she has access to.
Sara asks Copilot, “What’s Mark’s predicted lifetime value and propensity to buy?” and Copilot returns insights from Customer Insights - Data. It provides Sarah with Mark’s predicted lifetime value, recent purchases, and interactions with the company. Copilot also highlights that Mark has a high propensity to buy but shows a medium risk of churn based on recent inactivity.
Equipped with these insights into the flow of her work, Sarah confidently tailors her meeting approach, focusing on re-engaging Mark with a personalized offer to prevent churn. She’s able to engage him more effectively, demonstrating that she understands his needs, leading to a successful meeting and a stronger customer relationship.
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- The author created this article with assistance from AI. Learn more
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Autonomous agents equip your marketing, sales, and service teams with essential insights and automate business processes. But they're only as good as their knowledge of your customers and your company.
Now, you can use Customer Insights - Data as a knowledge source in Microsoft Copilot Studio to transform your rich customer data into a powerful business asset. Both default and custom Copilots and autonomous agents can now understand, analyze, and act on these insights, enabling every team member to access tailored information and tools to achieve their goals efficiently.
Feature Details
Autonomous agents that understand your unified customer data become your most powerful assets, allowing you to build organizational efficiencies never before possible.
In Microsoft Copilot Studio, you can now add customer profiles, segments, measures, and other insights from Dataverse as knowledge sources for any custom or customizable autonomous agents.
When you launch or update the agent, any user of the agent will instantly get access to your key customer insights to get their job done.
Create agents that can perform autonomous actions or respond to changes in your unified customer insights.
Scenario
Sally is a seller who is evaluating a promising new lead named Joe. Joe recently attended a new product launch event and has an existing relationship with the company. Using data from Customer Insights, agents in Dynamics 365 Sales (such as the sales qualification agent) can now access information about Joe's total spending, his VIP status, and his recent interactions across other touchpoints.
With these insights, the agent can make a more informed decision about Joe's likelihood of purchasing than would have been possible without this data. This way, autonomous agents instantly democratize the key customer insights Sally needs to determine how important Joe is for her prospecting efforts.
Enabled for:
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| Change history | |
|---|---|
| Public preview date moved to Sep 2025 General availability date moved to To be announced |
Feb 06, 2025 |
Business Value
Your customer data grows constantly with rapidly changing signals like online activities and mobile interactions. As the data set grows, reprocessing of the data takes longer, slowing your ability to respond to changes, and providing increasingly stale insights. With native support for the Delta Lake data format in Customer Insights - Data, you can now accelerate the time to unify customer data by processing just the incremental changes to your data, allowing you to get results quicker and engage customers with the most up-to-date and timely insights.
Feature Details
One of the key values of the Delta Lake format is the ability to track changes over time to the data. With native support for the Delta Lake table format in Customer Insights, you can now take advantage of Delta Lake incremental data updates to accelerate processing in Customer Insights - Data.
It's typical for customer profile data to change only by a few percentages each day. Instead of reprocessing the entire data set every day, Customer Insights - Data can process just the changed source data for unification in the Delta format, saving time and getting you results faster. This improvement happens automatically when all the tables are in the Delta format. No configuration or change is required.
Incremental processing of segments, measures, activities, and predictions is planned to be added in the coming months.
Enabled for:
- In this release, incremental unification requires that all source tables included in the unification process use the Delta format. Tables ingested to Customer Insights - Data using the Delta Lake connector and the Dataverse connector will be in the Delta format.
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| Change history | |
|---|---|
| Public preview date moved to Jun 2024 General availability date moved to Aug 2024 | Apr 22, 2024 |
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Connecting Customer Insights - Data to storage containers behind firewalls is now enhanced with Azure Managed Identities, enabling secure, streamlined access. This upgrade builds on the full potential of Azure Managed Identities, offering seamless authentication that eliminates the need for storing credentials, ensuring tighter security and easier integration with other Azure services.
Feature Details
There are three key scenarios where Customer Insights - Data may need to connect with Azure storage containers located behind a firewall:
- Data output: Customer Insights - Data can be set up to write data directly to your private Azure storage container.
- Data input: Data connections can be established to import data from your Azure storage containers.
- Exports: Specific tables can be configured for export to Azure storage containers.
Managing data connections with Azure Managed Identities ensures access is controlled and limited by your enterprise policy, eliminating stored secrets, and ensuring that access controls are deleted when their associated resources are deleted, improving overall security lifecycle management.
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Improve the quality of your unified customer profiles and insights by filtering out unwanted rows from your source data directly in Customer Insights - Data. Removing old or incomplete rows that don’t provide value allows Customer Insights - Data to create higher quality insights in less time and saves having to filter out unwanted data in downstream processes.
Feature Details
A common challenge when working with customer source data is dealing with old and obsolete source data that is ingested with the data you do want. But preprocessing your source data takes additional time and effort.
Now, Customer Insights - Data allows you to apply row filters directly to any source table you ingest, reducing the data scope to just what you need. Filters are applied once on the Tables page where source tables are now displayed on their own tab separated from the output tables created by Customer Insights. Select the row filter link next to any table to simply set the desired filters.
To optimize processing speed, data is filtered in Spark when it's processed by the unification, segments, measures, activities, and models. The full, unfiltered data set is available when downloading it from from the Tables page.
Key values of this feature include:
- Improved processing time: By removing unwanted rows, the system no longer processes data that isn’t needed, which can reduce processing time.
- Improved output data: Removing unnecessary data from the output makes your data easier to use by consumers who will no longer need to exclude unwanted data.
Preview limitation The condition 'Is any of' {list of values} is supported for string data only.
Enabled for:
- The author created this article with assistance from AI. Learn more
Business Value
| Change history | |
|---|---|
| Public preview date moved to Mar 2025 General availability date moved to Mar 2025 |
Dec 03, 2024 |
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The Microsoft Dataverse connector now provides the best option for importing data from Dataverse into Customer Insights - Data, allowing you to import the largest Dataverse tables with the highest levels of performance and reliability possible. Table selection has been improved, allowing you to select just the tables you want to import to precisely control what data is ingested into Customer Insights - Data.
Feature Details
Updates to the Dataverse connector make it the best choice for importing tables from Dataverse to Customer Insights - Data.
- Performance improvements allow you to import even the largest Dataverse tables with improved speed.
- The previous limit of ingesting data that is less than two years old from Dataverse is eliminated. Now all your Dataverse data is ingested and available for use.
- Improved reliability because data is now imported in the Delta format, eliminating issues common to the .csv format.
- Select only the Dataverse tables you want to use in Customer Insights. No more read-only mandatory table selections.
Existing Dataverse connections will be updated automatically with no downtime.
Enabled for:
- The author created this article with assistance from AI. Learn more
Business Value
| Change history | |
|---|---|
| Public preview date moved to Jun 2024 General availability date moved to Aug 2024 |
Feb 22, 2024 |
Business Value
Customer Insights - Data now provides more control over how you copy the unified profiles and insights generated by Customer Insights - Data into the private data lake you use to drive analytics and other business processes.
You can now easily select the specific Customer Insights - Data output entities you want to be copied to your data lake. This allows you to get just the data you want in the shortest possible time, saving you time and eliminating storage costs for tables you don’t use.
In addition, you can now choose what data format the data is written in. Landing the data in your preferred format eliminates delays and costs associated with transforming the data.
Feature Details
Making your unified customer insights available to your organization from your own Azure Data Lake is now easier and more manageable. Customer Insights - Data allows you to simply check the tables you want to sync to your Azure Data Lake and to select the data format to write the data in. Choose from CSV, Parquet, or Delta Parquet formats. Each time Customer Insights - Data processes your data and updates your customer profiles and insights, the data is quickly and automatically synced to your Data Lake, getting your insights to your business consumers and downstream business processes faster and more efficiently. Settings can be updated, allowing you to change what tables you want synced.
Eliminating synchronization of the tables you don’t use means you get the data you’re focused on faster. It also means you can save storage costs by eliminating storage of tables you’re not interested in. Faster sync times, lower storage costs, and less data format ETL means your organization and analytics teams are more efficient and you realize more value from your investment in Customer Insights - Data.
Scenario
Northwind runs a daily analytics report using customer loyalty data generated by Customer Insights. They’ve recently switched to using a spark engine to compute these insights and need the loyalty segments and a loyalty score from Customer Insights in the Parquet format. Northwind data wranglers can easily enable this change with just a quick change in Customer Insights, eliminating the costly creation and maintenance of an entire data conversion pipeline process, saving time and compute costs and getting results faster.
Enabled for:
- The author created this article with assistance from AI. Learn more
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Customer Insights - Data now makes it easy to sync the unified profiles, segments, and measures it generates directly to your Fabric OneLake, powering downstream workloads including analytics, while saving time and reducing costs.
Feature Details
Unified profiles and insights are only as powerful as your ability to act on and use that data. If you’re using Microsoft Fabric, Customer Insights - Data makes it easier for you to bring valuable unified profiles and insights directly in your OneLake where you can incorporate those insights into your core analytics and downstream processes.
Customer Insights - Data in Fabric OneLake allows you to avoid the data silos created by having data in many storage accounts and brings your unified profiles and insights into the single place for all your analytics data. Improve collaboration and break down business barriers with Microsoft Fabric OneLake and Customer Insights - Data.
Scenario
Northwind has multiple departments with distinct systems and data requirements. Bringing all their data into OneLake has improved their flexibility and ability to collaborate.
Northwind’s marketing department implemented Customer Insights - Data and was easily able to write all the unified customer profiles, segments, measures, and other insights generated by Customer Insights - Data directly to the company’s OneLake, allowing different divisions across the company to immediately leverage a consistent 360-degree view of the customer created using data from across Northwind.
The enhanced visibility and collaboration from sharing unified customer profiles and insights in OneLake contributed to a virtuous cycle where several other departments took steps to integrate their unique customer data into the unified profile, improving the fidelity and value of the unified profiles.
Enabled for:
- The author created this article with assistance from AI. Learn more
Business Value
| Change history | |
|---|---|
| Public preview date moved to Sep 2025 General availability date moved to To be announced |
Feb 06, 2025 |
Business Value
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps generate insights from all of your customer data no matter where it is stored. Directly read your customer data stored in Microsoft Fabric OneLake or in external systems made available through Fabric's mirroring or shortcut capabilities into Customer Insights - Data. Focus on generating the insights you need while reducing the effort, cost, and time needed to move, integrate, and transform your customer data.
Feature Details
Easily explore and select customer data stored in your OneLake for processing in Customer Insights - Data. The OneLake data connector attaches directly to your OneLake data, eliminating the need to copy data.
- Accelerate data unification and time to insights with incremental processing of OneLake data. Only the recently changed data is processed, dramatically reducing processing times.
- Use Fabric shortcuts and mirroring to quickly integrate data from different external sources and unify in Customer Insights - Data.
Scenario
Contoso has configured Customer Insights - Data to read in all their customer data from Microsoft Fabric. Because Contoso has shortcuts and mirroring, all their external data as well as their Azure hosted data is available to Customer Insights in their OneLake. Customer Insights - Data reads data directly from OneLake without creating separate copies. Because OneLake uses the Delta format, the unification of their OneLake data only needs to process the changed data, allowing them to get insights faster than ever. Using OneLake as their data source enables Contoso to eliminate their previous slow and expensive ETL operations to move and transform data.
Enabled for:
- The author created this article with assistance from AI. Learn more
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| Change history | |
|---|---|
| Public preview date moved to Feb 2025 | Aug 19, 2024 |
Business Value
As your Customer Insights - Data usage grows, so does the number of segments and measures. Large numbers of segments and measures can result in longer system refresh times, which delay time-sensitive insights.
Customer Insights now automatically deactivates segments and measures based on their usage to ensure your active segments and measures refresh faster. As an admin, you can exclude specific segments from auto-deactivation but the system will automatically manage the rest to allow your organization to scale confidently.
Feature Details
When you have large numbers of segments and measures, as an admin, you can't always reliably determine which are needed and which are not. Campaigns often run only once and the segments or measures are not needed afterward.
When a segment or measure isn't used anywhere else for a certain period of time—in an export, another segment, a journey, or another measure—it's automatically deactivated by the system. This moves compute resources to the segments and measures that are active, which results in a faster system refresh and thus faster time to insights.
You can always reactivate deactivated segments or measures if needed. As an admin, you can also exclude specific segments from the automated process.
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Unlock the full potential of your customer data by exporting unified insights from your Customer Insights - Data environment to your Azure Data Lake Storage account. This enables seamless integration of unified insights from Customer Insights - Data with your custom applications and workflows, while empowering you to create tailored reports and dashboards for deeper insights.
Feature Details
Customer Insights - Data can export your unified insights to your Azure Data Lake Storage. With this release, this preview capability will be generally available. Export your unified insights to build your own custom reports and dashboards or to leverage the data in your own application.
Scenario
Mark is an admin managing the Customer Insights - Data environment. His team wants to create Power BI reports based on changes in segment membership for key segments. To do this, they can now export segment data to their Azure Data Lake Storage account. Once the data is in Azure Data Lake, they can easily create Power BI reports and perform other business-critical operations. Exporting to their own Azure Data Lake also provides the flexibility to reshape the data to meet specific business needs and integrate it into other workflows powered by their Azure data estate.
Enabled for:
- The author created this article with assistance from AI. Learn more
Business Value
| Change history | |
|---|---|
| General availability date moved to Mar 2025 | Dec 04, 2024 |
Business Value
Understanding how customers interact and engage with your marketing efforts is crucial to refine your strategies. These interactions provide essential clues about how customers respond to your campaigns, allowing you to improve engagement. With Customer Insights, you can enable users to create segments that are based on customer data as well as marketing engagement data with no need to set up data pipelines between your marketing system and your customer data platform.
This enables, for example, marketers to generate a segment of loyal customers, based on high predicted lifetime value scores and a high marketing engagement rate. Similarly, sales representatives can gain more accurate insights into purchase intent based on engagement data from current campaigns. Finally, you can easily accomplish retargeting scenarios, advertising to customers on major platforms if they don't engage with your messages, consequently increasing their conversion rates.
Feature Details
Use behavioral data collected by Customer Insights - Journeys in Customer Insights - Data to create segments and measures. Interaction data such as email opened or link clicked is available without any extra steps.
- Easily discover and use marketing interactions while creating segments, enhancing the personalization of engagement strategies.
- Create powerful customer measures with interaction data along with any other data you bring into Customer Insights - Data.
- Identify customers who aren't engaging with emails and create a retargeting strategy.
- Use unification to get a more accurate and complete view of your customers’ interactions. Unified customer profiles based on multiple contacts combine their interaction data and give you insights about the person and how you interact with them.
For example, a marketing manager for an online retail store runs an email marketing campaign. Each month, they email customers who spent $100 or more and offer them a 5 percent discount coupon. While the campaign had a high email open rate, only a few customers opened the coupon link. So they want to contact those who opened the email with a more enticing 10 percent discount.
With Customer Insights, the interaction data from your previous campaign flows seamlessly into the platform, allowing you to refine your target audience to only include customers who opened the email. By focusing on those who showed interest, you increase the likelihood of turning that interest into actual purchases.
Enabled for:
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| Change history | |
|---|---|
| Public preview date moved to Mar 2025 General availability date moved to Jun 2025 | Dec 04, 2024 |