Combine CRM and Powerful Reporting to Understand Customer Behaviors

If you have multiple silos of customer data—Excel spreadsheets, a marketing database, an e-commerce website, and an accounting system—it’s difficult to get a 360-degree view of customers. You spend endless hours trying to identify buying habits so you can target customer segments with specific messaging.

Think about the time you spend in a day, a week, a month, or a quarter trying to get information from different places, organizing it, and then presenting it so you can digest it or explain it to stakeholders in your organization. It probably takes more time than you want!

You’re not alone…check out this survey of global executives:

• 91% say effective data and analytics strategies are an integral part of their digital transformation.
• 80% believe their organizations struggle to mature as users of data and analytics.
• 55% say data silos and poor data management are the biggest barriers to effective data analytics.

Businesses also often discover they have multiple business units collecting the same data. The units don’t share the data and don’t realize they’re collecting the same data.

As a result, they’ve got inconsistencies in the data. So, when it comes to reporting, there’s a lack of trust in the data.  If you can’t trust it, then you have to base your decisions on assumptions.

Information You Trust Changes the Game

Data is the new currency. It’s your lifeline. Assuming it’s easy to access, you can trust it, and you can digest it, data be extraordinarily impactful. And it can help you change the game when you think about how your data can be used.

For example, from a service perspective, you’ve got SLAs. Perhaps a truck or two breaks down in your fleet so you can’t meet the SLAs for some customers. If you know this proactively, you can use reporting to identify the impacted customers to manage expectations. And that can go a long way to help reduce churn and increase retention.

Or perhaps you’re pulling information from the e-commerce website to analyze purchase habits and segment customers. This can help you identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell. Other benefits you generate by enhancing your reporting capabilities include identifying new services to offer or to modify to meet customer demands.

Essentially, you can do more with less by understanding how to retain and expand your customer base.

If you’re not leveraging data now, it’s time to jump in because other organizations are ramping up and taking advantage of their data.

Power BI and Dynamics 365 CE: The Dynamic Duo

If you’re looking to streamline reporting and get more in-depth customer insights within Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE, check out the Aspire 22* presentation by Jason Wietharn, the Microsoft CRM Practice Director at Velosio. Jason demonstrates how the combination of Power BI and Dynamics 365 CE can help you leverage the wealth of customer information all your systems currently collect.

One of the biggest benefits Power BI provides is the visualization of data that organizes and presents information in a way that’s easy to digest and tells a story. You can create views for all levels of the organization—including the CEO, business unit directors, and frontline staff looking at day-to-day activities. They can all look at the same data but from different perspectives so they can make decisions relative to their role.

You also have the ability to quickly connect to hundreds of data sources with pre-built connectors to apps in the cloud, on-premises, e-commerce, and on user desktops. In addition to Microsoft applications, this includes other enterprise platforms as well as third-party add-ons. This breaks down all your data silos and brings the information to one central repository.

Unlike standard dashboards and reporting in Dynamics 365 CE, with Power BI, you can set up data calculations, entity associations, and workflow automation, which gives you capabilities that accelerate decisions. Plus, you can tie in artificial intelligence and natural language queries to identify patterns and trends, and then see suggestions on the best actions or next steps to take.

Users have the option to access Power BI as an embedded application within Dynamics 365 CE so they can access reports without ever leaving the CRM application. They can also use a portal if they prefer to work directly in Power BI. The reports your users generate can flow automatically into Outlook, Teams, and other Office applications to facilitate collaboration.

Transform Customer Experiences and Drive Intelligent Decision-Making

By creating a reporting environment that captures storytelling in action—customized to how your audiences want to consume the data—you can truly transform customer experiences and drive intelligent business decisions.

And if you need assistance with deploying Dynamics 365 CE and Power BI, contact Velosio today. We’re here to help!

• Aspire 22, the annual Velosio conference, brought together Dynamics users, finance and business leaders, and IT professionals from across the country. The one-day online event showcased the business possibilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions powered by today’s modern technologies.