Microsoft’s CDP updates to help marketers understand customers better
Last week, Microsoft announced new updates to its customer data platform (CDP) to help marketers gain deeper insights into customer behavior during and after the pandemic.
The company has launched new engagement insights to help marketers uncover customer intent and behavior with cross-channel analytics from their websites, mobile apps, and connected devices.
“Customers talk about Microsoft’s unique ability to connect data holistically across departments and teams with AI-powered insights to drive better outcomes. This is precisely the business need that we identified and addressed with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP),†saidOpens a new window James Phillips, President, Microsoft Business Applications.
Business Applications Group Pres. @JamesMPhillipsOpens a new window announces new innovations for the Microsoft customer data platform
— Microsoft Stories and News (@MSFTnews) October 1, 2020Opens a new window
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The new enhancement, currently in preview, will allow organizations to automatically augment profiles with survey responses to truly uncover sentiment and drive detailed segmentation of customers, empowering agile actions that build brand loyalty and driving a detailed understanding of customers. Furthermore, organizations can enrich customer profiles with proprietary audience intelligence on brand affinity and user interests or using third-party enrichments such as Experian and Leadspace.
The company has also refreshed its analytics suite with new AI analytics integration with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Organizations can leverage a library of prebuilt AI templates for churn prediction, product recommendations, and customer lifetime value, giving business users the ability to run AI/ML-based analytics on their data for quick insights without having to involve data scientists and IT.
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New turnkey integrations also mean that marketers will now be able to drive meaningful actions across the customer journey. It will make it easier for marketers to share insights with any application, be it Microsoft or third-party platforms. Customer Insights is designed and built to be vendor-agnostic, from ingesting data from any source to activating insights on multiple destinations, including AutopilotHQ, Bing ads, dotdigital, Facebook, Google Ads, HubSpot, LiveRamp, Marketo, Mailchimp, SendGrid, and more.
The final update is to Microsoft Information Protection. New data privacy and security features will help organizations better control and secure sensitive data with data classification and permissions. This allows organizations to configure policies to classify, label, and protect data, based on its sensitivity.
Is 2020 the Year of the CDP?
Microsoft’s announcement comes at an interesting time as competitors such as Oracle and Salesforce have rolled out corresponding updates to their respective platforms earlier last month. Oracle’s CDP now supports real-time data collection and personalization through its digital streaming technology. Salesforce also unveiled its CDP, which will be made available this month.
Clearly, the pandemic poses certain challenges for marketers and brands – customer priorities have shifted and so has purchase behavior. With a majority of customer-brand interactions moving online, it has become imperative for brands to deeply understand their customers and increase the efficacy of those engagements.
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The recent trends in the CDP space suggest that vendors are keen to help marketers unleash the true promise of AI and advanced analytics to capitalize on these behavioral shifts.
“Across the world, so much has changed since last year. The global Covid-19 pandemic has impacted almost every organization and its customers. We have been inspired to see how many organizations are using Customer Insights to not only survive but thrive through this challenging environment,â€Â said Phillips.