Microsoft"s September release for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights brought the availability of triggers for Microsoft Flow, better performance for the Power BI Connector, and the ability to reorder and duplicate match rules. At the start of this month, the tech giant"s Dynamics 365 release wave 2 also reached general availability, bringing over 400 updates and features for various services, including Customer Insights.
Now, Microsoft has detailed the new features that are being brought to Customer Insights as part of its October update. In a condensed form, these include:
- PowerApps template connected to Customer Insights now available
- Compounded segments
- Compounded measures
- Measures: Usability improvements
- Option to manually override system match records (preview)
- Guided learning in the demo
Expanding a bit on each of these, starting with PowerApps, a pre-built template connectivity feature is now offered. This enables users to introduce data from Customer Insights to PowerApps with a helpful template available already. To utilize this option, users should select the "Create" option here, and then search for "Customer lookup with Customer Insights – Tablet" template.
Moving on, segments can now be built over existing segments, or over measures. To enhance this capability, Microsoft has introduced a series of validation checks to ensure avoidance of system issues in compounding scenarios. As far as the front-end is concerned, UI changes such as breakdown of selectable entities, notifications to indicate segment dependency, and more, have been added. Moreover, users can now also build measures over measures. It should be noted that while a measure is being updated, those that are dependent on it may not show the latest data values.
Further in regards to measures, a bunch of usability improvements have been made; these can be observed in the table below:
| Improvement | What does it mean for you? |
| Moving the location for the measure type selection (the very first action needed as part of a measure definition), and adding text that explains all three types in brief | Now you don’t need to make an early decision without prior understanding of the three measure types |
| Canceling a previously needed selection on the New measure panel | Quicker measure definition and shorter time-to-value |
| Adding relationship names to the measure builder entity drop-down | Now you can define the way you want to select a set of entities for your measure calculations |
| Canceling a previously needed selection on the Variable editor | Quicker measure definition and shorter time-to-value
|
| Adding a new operator in the Variable editor: “To the power of” (^) | New scenarios can be served via the editor |
| Adding on the Variable editor a link to a specific documentation sub-topic around variables | Using the variable editor may be less intuitive for first time users. You can use this link to quickly understand this capability. |
| Adding a Status field to the measures table screen | Now you can further understand if any given measure is active or being processed now |
There is also an option to manually override system-identified match records with custom-made ones. As such, the ability to specify records that always match, and those that never match, is provided. And finally, the "Demo" feature in Customer Insights is getting some more focused tutorials for end-to-end capabilities. You can check these out by selecting any of the three tours available in the Demo mode from the environment selector on top of the Customer Insights interface.