Microsoft Dynamics 365 update is focused on harnessing data

Microsoft announced a major update to its Dynamics 365 product line today, which correlates to the growing amount of data in the enterprise and how to collect and understand that data to produce better customer experiences.

This is, in fact, the goal of all vendors in this space, including Salesforce and Adobe, which are also looking to help improve the customer experience. James Philips, who was promoted to president of Microsoft Business Applications just this week, says that Microsoft has also been keenly focused on harnessing the growing amount of data and helping make use of that inside the applications he is in charge of.

“To be frank, every single thing that we’re doing at Microsoft, not just in business applications but across the entire Microsoft Cloud, is on the back of that vision that data is coming out of everything, and that those organizations that can collect that data, harmonize it and reason over it will be in a position to be proactive versus reactive,” Philips told TechCrunch.

New customer engagement tooling

For starters, the company is adding functionality to its customer data platform (CDP), a concept all major vendors (and a growing group of startups) have embraced. It pulls together into one place all of the customer data from various systems, making it easier to understand how the customer interacts with you, with the goal of providing better experiences based on this knowledge. Microsoft’s CDP is called Customer Insights.

The company is adding some new connectors to help complete that picture of the customer. “We’re adding new first and third-party data connections to Customer Insights that allow our customers to understand, for example audience memberships, brand affinities, demographic, psychographic and other characteristics of customers that are stored and then harnessed from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights,” Philips said.

All of this might make you wonder how they can collect this level of data and maintain GDPR/CCPA kind of compliance. Philips says that the company has been working on this for some time. “We did work at the company level to build a system that allows us and our customers to search for and then delete information about customers in each product group within Microsoft, including my organization,” he explained.

The company has also added new sales forecasting tools and Dynamics 365 Sales Engagement Center. The first allows companies to tap into all this data to better predict the customers who sales is engaged with that are most likely to turn into sales. The second gives inside sales teams tools like next best action. These are not revolutionary by any means in the CRM space, but do provide new capabilities for Microsoft customers.

New operations-level tooling

The operations side is related to what happens after the sale, when the company begins to collect money and report revenue. To that end, the company is introducing a new product called Dynamic 365 Finance Insights, which you can think of as Customer Insights, except for money.

“This product is designed to help our customers predict and accelerate their cash flow. It’s designed specifically to identify opportunities where to focus your energy, where you may have the best opportunity to either close accounts payables or receivables or the opportunity to understand where you may have cash shortfalls,” Philips said.

Finally the company is introducing Dynamics 365 Project Operations, which provides a way for project-based business like construction, consulting and law to track the needs of the business.

“Those organizations, who are trying to operate in a project-based way now have with Dynamics 365 Project Operations, what we believe is the most widely used project management capability in Microsoft Project being joined now with all of the back-end capabilities for selling, accounting and planning that Dynamic 365 offers, all built on the same Common Data Platform, so that you can marry your front-end operations and operational planning with your back-end resource planning, workforce planning and operational processes,” he explained.

All of these tools are designed to take advantage of the growing amount of data coming into organizations, and provide ways to run businesses in a more automated and intelligent fashion that removes some of the manual steps involved in running a company.

To be clear, Microsoft is not alone in offering this kind of intelligent functionality. It is part of a growing movement to bring intelligence to all aspects of enterprise software, regardless of vendor.