2 ways Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing uses AI for customer experience

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – within all areas of business, across every sector – is becoming increasingly commonplace and Microsoft is baking more and more functionality into its Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution with each update, or Release Wave.

AI-powered insights, paired with AI-driven actions, is allowing businesses to make better financial decisions, create better content and react better to customers’ needs. Here we take a look at two areas within Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) Marketing where intelligence can empower teams to elevate the customer experience and foster loyalty.

Measuring Customer Performance Indicators (CPIs) and optimising the customer journey

Many marketing professionals may think that they track customer-centric metrics – for example, a ‘customer satisfaction score’ or ‘product return rate’ – but often the data points are important to the business rather than the customer themselves. The personas applied to customers and the journeys they take usually encompass buying patterns, interests and motivations, but once again this level of understanding is driven by company data.

A robust set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is extremely important to measure company goals, but what about measuring the fulfilment of customer’s objectives too? For example, the above mentioned ‘customer satisfaction score’ could be transformed into a CPI of ‘online chat availability’. This information can in turn be used to enhance the performance of a satisfaction score. CPIs will vary across sectors, geographical regions and even products, but could include things like convenience, flexibility or cost or time savings.

Let’s imagine a retailer with a low value ‘product return rate’ KPI, that evaluates the meaning of that metric to mean their product is fantastic and customers are happy. However, when they delve into the related CPIs of ‘ease of product return’ or ‘expense of product return’, they may find that negative customer experience is impacting the return rate… and therefore customer satisfaction and repeat business.

This retailer, finding that a customer experience has not matched their expectation, can now do something about it and influence, or optimise, the customer journey. This could inspire making a strategic process change – such as creating a self-serve option through an app. However, the company can also immediately action a personalised gesture – like offering free delivery on their next purchase – to show that they understand they fell short on this occasion and want to make it up to the customer.

Simply put, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing holds the intelligence to help you track your Customer Performance Indicators then design predict and deliver more engagement opportunities and new levels of personalisation to the customer journey. Plus, KPIs and CPIs are closely related so by using and acting on the latter, you will positively impact the former. ‘Customer satisfaction’ alone will not tell a business exactly what it is doing right or wrong so by carefully considering what specific outcomes satisfy your customers and utilising AI-driven software, you can turn insights into better customer experiences.

Providing an AI brainstorming partner for content inspiration

All marketers want to understand each and every customer and send them communications about the right thing, at the right time, using the right language, but it’s a huge undertaking… unless intelligent, integrated business software is relied upon. One feature within D365 Marketing – called Content Ideas – empowers businesses by giving them a helping hand with ‘on point’ inspiration for email content.

The large language model – called GPT-3 – that facilitates the AI technology within Content Ideas can perform natural language tasks as if a human were writing it. Not only can it create original text, but it can also summarise content and analyse it for sentiment, amongst other things.

This AI writing partner sidekick will therefore generate original content based on key points that the business’ marketer types in, and also draw upon the tone, structure and style from previous successful marketing emails to a specific customer or segment of customers.

The feature, naturally, can’t do it all on its own, but rather an expert content creator can hit the right starting notes, so they never have to start with a blank page ever again. Not only does the feature help marketing teams to produce personalised language and content but also time efficiencies, so more time can be spent on other crucial tasks. The author remains in control and can choose to use, edit or ignore the suggestion, as there is a risk that content isn’t factual. As the tool is developed further by Microsoft, even more functionality will become available, like being able to add further instruction on audience and tone and being able to copy and paste between different suggestions.

The new role of marketing is to personalise the customer experience across all touch points and utilising intelligent technologies like Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows businesses to forge deeper, stronger customer relationships. If you’d like to know more about revolutionising your marketing efforts and how D365 empowers teams to elevate the customer experience – with a little help from AI-powered features – email us on info@brightbridgesolutions.com or call 0330 133 5000.