We cover the details of the coming together of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing, announced at Microsoft Inspire last week.
What are Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing?
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is Microsoft’s customer data platform that helps deliver personalised customer experiences and provides a holistic view of customers. The platform’s capabilities provide insights into who your customers are and how they engage with your platform. Data can be analysed across multiple sources to get a single 360-degree view of your customers.
Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to create personalised journeys across all touchpoints to strengthen relationships and earn loyalty. The Dynamics 365 Marketing app works seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft Teams, and other products and allows you to make faster and better decisions using the power of data and AI.
What will the new product be called?
The merged product will simply be called Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Within this product, two distinct apps will be included:
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data (formerly the standalone Dynamics 365 Customer Insights)
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing)
Why is Microsoft making this change?
With the merging of a unified customer profile with the ability to orchestrate customer journeys in real-time, at every customer touchpoint, into one, simple, low-priced offering, the new, combined offering simplifies licensing to make it easier for customers to buy and use the applications as their business grows.
When will the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights be available?
The new Customer Insights combined offering will be generally available on September 1, 2023. At that time, new customers will only be able to purchase the combined offering. Existing standalone Dynamics 365 Marketing and/or Customers Insights customers will have an opportunity to renew their existing licensing for one contractual cycle before transitioning to the new Customer Insights combined licensing. This renewal, however, must be contracted before September 1, 2024.
How will Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights be licensed?
As with the standalone Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customers Insights solutions, the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be sold on a prepaid capacity model, where capacity is pooled at the tenant level.
The new product will have the following two capacity units:
- People Interacted – equivalent to the marketable contact unit in Dynamics 365 Marketing. An interacted person is any Dataverse entity (such as a contact, lead, account, or an Insights profile) which is interacted with. An interaction is defined as either through an outbound interaction or an inbound interaction, such as filling in a form through a website. The interaction can be sent through out-of-box channels available in Customer Insights – Journeys (for example, emails, SMS, or push notifications), other Microsoft channels (for example, ACS), or third-party systems integrated with Customer Insights – Journeys (for example, other SMS providers).The base licence includes a default capacity entitlement of 10,000 People Interacted.
- People Unified – equivalent to the previous profile meter in Dynamics 365 Customers Insights. A person represents a uniquely recognised individual that is created through a collection of defined data source sets from several systems. The base licence includes a default capacity entitlement of 100,000 People Unified.
How much will a licence cost for Microsoft Dynamic 365 Customer Insights?
Although UK-specific pricing has yet to be announced, the base product will cost $1,700 per tenant per month for new Dynamics 365 customers, or at a discounted price of $1,000 per tenant per month for existing, qualifying Dynamics 365 customers.
After purchasing the base product, customers can then purchase additional capacity of either capacity unit as required.
Summary
We look forward to seeing how the new streamlined product compares to the original two standalone offerings and hope that the merged pricing will see savings for organisations that invest heavily in their marketing function. If you are an existing client of Strategy 365 and wish to discuss this new product with one of our experts ahead of its September releases, then feel free to get in touch with one of our experts.
