MB-260: Describe support for near real-time updates

Doesn’t every company dream about having the latest interactions from customers at hand seconds after they happen? A full sync of all data from your systems to CI-D can take hours, but there’s a way for you to get these interactions updated near real-time. There are APIs for updating customer profiles in near real-time (seconds). When the full sync of your data is finished, the near real-time data will be updated.

Prerequisites

To connect with the near real-time API you must have the following:

• A Customer Insights – Data environment
• Unified customer profiles
• Activities configured and run
• Contributor or Administrator permissions to authenticate your account

What can be updated?

Fields, and only fields, on unified customer profiles can be updated, but not created or deleted. You can’t export these updates to external systems, they’ll only stay in CI-D.

Activities can be published and connected to a unified customer profile. These unified activities which are shown in the timeline don’t change after they’re created. It’s important to know that the segments and measures aren’t updated by the real-time updates and they’re not part of any exports.

How?

Real-time updates overwrite the value from the full data source but, out of the box, profiles expire after four hours and activities after 30 days. This can be changed

There are two ways you can use the near real-time API. Indirect with the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data connection. This connection can be used in Power Apps, Power Automate and Logic Apps.

The other way is direct. If you are or have a developer, you can connect directly with the API through code.