MB-260: Describe Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data components, including tables, relationships, enrichments, activities, measures, and segments

Components

There are many components you need to know about in Customer Insights – Data (CI-D), these are what make your customer picture clear. Who is your customer, where do they work (if B2B), what have they bought, which emails have they read, which of your websites have they visited, and how much have they spent on you. Some of the most important components are:

• Tables
• Relationships
• Enrichments
• Activities
• Measures
• Segments

Let’s go through these and describe what they are. Later in the series, we’ll go through how you use them and all the technical features.

Tables

Tables is where information about the different types of data is stored. Contact is a table, company another and e-mail a third.

In all tables you have different attributes, this is where the details of the tables are stored, for example name and e-mail address of the contact.

In CI-D a table will be stored with a name, source, when it was last updated and the status of the table.

Relationships

How are the different tables connected? In CI-D that’s through relationships. In the image below you can see that cases are connected to contacts with the relationship “CaseToContacts”. For the tables to be connected they must have a foreign key, an identifier which is on both tables, so they can be connected.

There are three different types of relationships

• Non-editable system relationships
• Non-editable inherited relationships
• Editable custom relationships

The two first can not be edited and are created from the data unification process and automatically from ingesting data sources.

Enrichments

Enrichment is adding data sources to enrich your data in CI-D. This is where you connect to other sources to add more data to existing customer data, thus getting more insights from your data.

Activities

Every interaction a customer has with your company is an activity.

Activities in CI-D can be;

• Create a case
• Receive an email
• Purchase one of your products
• Unsubscribe from your newsletter

Measures

How much does a customer spend on your services in a year? How many emails do they open? And how many emails don’t they open? These are all measures you can create with CI-D measures.

Segments

Segments are a way of grouping your contacts together. You create queries which find contacts who match that and make them a member of the segment. These queries can be based on demographic, transactional or behavioural attributes from your contacts.

Segments can be used for example in Customer Insights – Journeys in a Customer Journey.