Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (“Customer Insights” or “CI”) is an intuitive and flexible customer data platform that can unlock insights and enable personalized customer experiences. It aims to simplify connection to customer data from multiple sources and consolidate it into comprehensive customer profiles. These profiles can then be made available to your users in a number of ways, including directly as 'customer cards' in D365 CRM, as a basis for Power BI reports and dashboards, as input for flow processes. Power Automate work, etc. It provides the ability to predict missing data values, customer churn rate and more using other similar profiles. You can even extend the capabilities of AI by creating custom machine learning models using Azure Machine Learning.
These are promising opportunities for many types of businesses, whether small/large, B2C/B2B, or product/service. Almost all businesses have large islands of rapidly growing customer data that are almost always spread across multiple systems and repositories. Customer Insights provides the ability to easily merge your different data sources without investing at the enterprise level or waiting weeks, months, or years for other types of solutions. Although Customer Insights is a relatively new SKU, it builds on many existing technologies from Microsoft, including Power Platform connectors and the Power Query engine. Azure services provide additional storage and functionality when needed. It's also worth noting that Microsoft is investing everything in terms of investing in this product and it continues to mature quickly, with new features being added at a rapid pace.
As with all things that sound too good to be true, there is a little warning next to all of these hopes and dreams. The main factor that can limit the potential realization of the CI vision has nothing to do with the defects of the product itself. Rather, it is the age-old law of data processing called "garbage in, garbage out". That said, if your source data is scarce, incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, inconsistent, or duplicated, the resulting reports and analysis will become confusing rather than reliable information. It is important to make sure that you are collecting all the relevant data that you need and that you invest in continuous efforts to achieve and maintain high data quality in order to reap the potential benefits of analytics and AI solutions.

Here are some steps you can take to keep your CRM data clean and ensure it stays clean:
Analyze Existing Data - Identify quality issues and gaps in your existing data.
Create a Data Quality Plan - Prioritize issues, identify fixes and solutions, and set the pace for initial and ongoing efforts.
Implementing Account and Contact duplication - There are several techniques for identifying and merging duplicate records.
Reparent Orphan Records - Use smart field mapping to determine which account a contact belongs to.
Use data validation services - Use vendor services to verify names, addresses, emails, websites and more.
Enrich Your Master Data - Identify data providers to gain additional insight into companies (firmography) and people (demographics).
Customer Insights has some very interesting features. When you combine it with the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, Power Platform, and Azure Machine Learning, the possibilities grow exponentially. Remember, everything depends on a solid, high-quality database!