In financial services organisations, customer data is often dispersed between different systems, and gaining a complete view of the customer can be challenging.
Customer Insights for Microsoft Dynamics 365, enables salespeople to go far beyond having a simple 360-degree view of their customers by proactively serving up actionable insights at the right moment to enable them to provide the right customer with the right next best action, and more. This allows sales teams to drastically improve sales processes, as well as help them identify opportunities to cross sell, up sell and retain valuable customers. In this blog, we discuss how the Customer Insights feature makes Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM the perfect all-round fit for financial services.
How does Customer Insights improve sales processes?
Customer Insights is an intuitive Microsoft Dynamics feature that brings together sources of customer data (from the CRM in addition to other systems your organisation may have) to provide a central view of all your customers, where machine learning can provide proactive customer insights. The CRM system’s AI capabilities add automation into the sales process, making it easier for salespeople to manage their workloads and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks - allowing them to focus on selling.
The three simple steps to great insights
Step 1 – creating a 360-degree view of your customers: Dynamics allows you to get access to your customer data wherever it sits in your organisation, enrich it with 3rd party sources, aggregate it to show meaningful trends, and present it in a coherent, unified way.
Step 2 – Unlocking insights: Microsoft Customer Insights uses machine learning to identify trends in your data and predict next best actions, discover or define new audience segments, determine customer sentiment and even predict customer lifetime value.
Step 3 – Activating insights: Insight without action, so this last step is crucial. Microsoft Dynamics prompts your staff to act at the right time, by presenting timely prompts, automatically optimising workflows and presenting the right information at the right time.
Some examples of how this helps financial services organisations
Acquiring new customers: Salespeople can use Customer Insights to progress existing opportunities to the next stage of the sales funnel, as the system prompts them when they need to take action, such as following up phone calls with a customer, or sending an email. This helps reduce missed opportunities and increase the efficiency of sales processes, on top of streamlining the sales pipeline.
Retaining existing customers: Through insights into customer relationships and interactions, your salespeople are able to assess and evaluate how a relationship is evolving. The system has embedded communication tracking, which not only logs each interaction with a customer, but can prompt and remind salespeople when they need to take action. If you haven’t sent an email to a customer recently, for example, the system will remind you to do so; likewise, Dynamics 365 will ensure you don’t over-communicate, by suggesting that you exclude customers from certain campaigns, and alerting you if another salesperson has been in contact with the same customer previously. This allows you to stay on top of your workload easily and efficiently, and enables your sales team to collaborate in order to maintain good relationships with all of your customers, improving retention and loyalty.
Optimise Customer Journeys: real-time customer journey modelling means that you can model and measure customer experiences within key sales and onboarding processes improving efficiency but most importantly improving customer experiences.
Enrich Customer Data: Dynamic 365 Customer insights includes built-in enrichment capabilities including sources such as Dun and Bradstreet, Leadspace and Experian to help profile your customer based and gather additional information that will help you to more effectively identify patterns and behaviours within your customer base and turn these into actionable insights or automated segmentation processes.
Leverage AI Copilot: The Copilot capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics provide an easy way to interact with your customer data, asking AI to do the hard work of looking for behaviours and patterns and helping your team to identify opportunities or issues earlier so that they can be handled more effectively. As Microsoft continue to introduce integrated Copilot capabilities across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, these capabilities will soon be unlocking the power of AI to help your and your team gather and act upon customer insights with minimal effort.
Customer insights is just one feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM that is extremely useful for financial services organisations. In a sector where having excellent customer insights is essential, Dynamics has a vast range of features that make it the perfect all-round fit for the financial sector: complex information capture for product applications, integrated document handling and compliance, and many more.
To find out more about Microsoft Customer Insights head here: Customer Insights (microsoft.com)
Contact us here to find out more about how Inciper has helped other Financial Services Organisations leverage the power of the Microsoft Dynamics Platform and Customer Insights.
