One of the most interesting features that I saw demoed at CRMUG Summit in Nashville was the integration between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portals and Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights (DCI). There is some documentation on the subject, but it assumes some familiarity with DCI, and as a DCI newbie, it took a bit of trial and error to get everything connected properly. However, now that I’ve got it figured out, you’ll find it’s simpler than it looks.

What is Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights?

For those of you not familiar with Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights, it’s an Azure-based service whose goal is to provide a 360-degree view of how a specific customer is interacting with a company’s brand. Now, you might be thinking that it should be the job of the CRM itself to give you that 360-degree view. I know that in my years in the industry, the “360-degree view” has been a common sales buzzword for Dynamics 365/CRM. However, in the real world CRMs aren’t always as integrated with other systems as we’d like them to be, so DCI is trying to make it easier to have a consolidated view all of the interactions that are happening with various systems.

To be clear, none of these interactions occur directly with DCI; it is simply the hub where these interactions are consolidated and can be reported on.

How does Customer Insights Integrate with Dynamics 365 Portals?

The built-in integration adds four interaction types to DCI:

1. Portal searches
2. Viewing a knowledge article
3. Viewing a blog post
4. Viewing a forum thread

When a user on your portal performs any of the above actions, an interaction is logged in DCI related to that user, and can be reported on. This allows you to see what users are doing on your Portal, and when.

Simple Step-by-Step Instructions for Integrating Dynamics 365 Portals with Customer Insights

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be releasing a number of blog posts that will detail the steps I took to get interactions occurring on a Dynamics 365 Portal into Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights. These posts will include:

1. An overview of Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights, including basic setup instructions, and the concepts you need to know for the Portals integration
2. Connecting your Customer Insights account to Dynamics 365 for Portals
3. Embedding your Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights dashboards on the Case form in Dynamics 365

The Use Case for Our Integration

I will borrow the use case that was presented in the documentation and demoed at CRMUG Summit. The scenario involves wanting to see what portal activity occurred before a case was submitted. For example, if a user submits a case about having issues changing their password, and the support team member sees that the user has already viewed the knowledge base article on that subject, the support team member can skip the step of referring them to the article. Being able to improve the customer experience by using Customer Insights data is really one of its main goals; the integration with Portals is a great way to do that.