Microsoft enters the customer experience space
Microsoft Customer Experience Platform will build on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
Microsoft this week announced the launch of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform designed to orchestrate AI-driven customer journeys. The platform has integrations with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Advertising.
The platform will aggregate customer data — behavioral, transactional and demographic — at scale (with built-in privacy management) and use an AI solution to resolve identities. It will use real-time contextual insights and analytics to predict customer intent. It aims to lift advertising performance through audience intelligence and improve ecommerce results through AI-driven personalized recommendations. Among customers are Walgreens and Chipotle.
Why we care. For several years now, Microsoft has quietly trailed far behind Salesforce as a CRM provider with its Dynamics 365 product. Adobe, Oracle and SAP were the other vendors in the race, but they each offered far more than CRM.
The Adobe Experience Platform, Oracle CX Cloud and SAP Customer Experience emphasized cross-channel engagement; indeed CRM often seemed to be an afterthought, as if they were resigned that customers would plug their CX offerings into their existing Salesforce instance. With Dynamics 365, the opposite seemed to be the case.
No longer. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, while reliant on the Dynamics Customer Insights product, looks like an expansive customer engagement offering, resolving customer data, predicting intent, automatically creating and orchestrating customer journeys and analyzing the results. The question of whether it scales is answered by the interest of clients like Walgreens and Chipotle with their millions of customers.
The future of this initiative is hard to predict. After all, IBM once offered a leading marketing cloud solution. We’ll be watching to see how invested Microsoft is in delivering on these promises.
Customer journey orchestration: A snapshot
What it is. Customer journey orchestration software lets marketers connect real-time data points from across channels, touchpoints and systems, allowing users to gain insights into the customer journey over time. This allows marketers to explore the customer journey using data.
Why it’s hot today. Businesses know they need to be customer-focused in each aspect of their marketing operations. As a first step, brands need to understand how consumers are finding them. Whether it be via search, advertisement, or word of mouth, the medium used will set the trajectory for the rest of their journey.
Meanwhile, the average person uses many devices to access the internet, and Cisco forecasts that the number of devices connected to IP networks will increase to more than three times the global population by 2023. With so many devices, people shift back and forth depending on the task at hand and their current environment. Consumers and business buyers turn to an average of nine channels to browse product inventory, look for advice, and make purchases.
Capturing their interactions post-discovery, such as communication with a call center or visit to a retail outlet, helps brands see which of their assets are helping them along their path. What’s more, brands need to know what those who convert do post-purchase–this information helps companies win repeat business and encourage customer advocacy. Customer journey orchestration tools do just that.
What the tools do. The majority of vendors offer one or more of the following capabilities to give marketers an understanding of the customer journey: data gathering from a wide variety of channels and touchpoints; analysis using artificial intelligence and machine learning, and customer journey visualization.
Many vendors also offer customer journey orchestration (CJO) capabilities, which allow users to act upon the insights and actually deliver the next step in the customer journey in real-time.
Why we care. Customers expect to have consistent experiences at each of these touchpoints. They want personalization, a trend that continues to grow. Tools like customer journey analytics software give brands the ability to gain insights from their audience and act on them.
Dig Deeper: What is customer journey orchestration and how are these tools helping marketers?
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