There were two waves released for Dynamics 365 in 2024: Wave 1 and Wave 2. This blog focuses on updates that relate to Customer Insights 2024 Wave 1.

The Dynamics 365 2024 Release Wave 1 focused on providing salespeople with timely information, expediting opportunity close rates with actional insights, increasing productivity and empowering businesses through open configurability and expanded AI leadership.

You can find more information in the following blogs:

Customer Insights Data

Moments that matter

Respond to customers’ expectations in real time to engage them in moments that matter.

Unlimited application installs now in Customer Insights

  • With this change, we remove the application installation limits for Customer Insights – Data and Customer Insights – Journeys in the installation management experience for paid installations. The number of trial installations is still limited. Admins can now install additional applications without limits.
  • Licenses are still purchased and assigned at the tenant level. If you have more than one tenant, you need licenses and quota on each tenant to access Customer Insights applications.
  • Quota for interacted people and unified people aggregates at the tenant level and is shared across all environments and installations. Additional application installations generate more quota usage at the tenant level. Make sure you own the quota that is used across all environments on a tenant.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Unlimited application installs now in Customer Insights

Real-time personalisation

Meet your customers where they are by capturing, updating, and harmonising data from various sources and in real time.

Personalise omnichannel experiences with no code using Optimizely

  • Easily configure a connection to and from Optimizely with Customer Insights – Data.
  • Consume Customer Insights – Data segments within Optimizely.
  • Run experiments or campaigns based on your Customer Insights – Data segments in Optimizely.
  • Use experimentation and interaction data from Optimizely in Customer Insights – Data.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely, marketers can:

  • Leverage the predicted lifetime value of a customer to create targeted experiences on web, social, email, and offline channels with Optimizely.
  • Create a segment for high-churn customers in Customer Insights and use it in Optimizely to increase engagement when they next visit the website.
  • Activate audiences across channels in journeys to further target the original visitors with the same offer if the prior web and message touchpoints failed to convert them and export the segments into advertising and social platforms for re-targeting.
  • Use defined audiences to create “lookalike” segments on social media platforms. This strategy helps them identify and engage potential new customers who share characteristics with their existing audience, expanding their reach and intensifying customer engagement efforts.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Personalise omnichannel experiences with no code using Optimizely

Elevate customer experiences in real time

Customer Insights helps you collect web interactions in real time, enabling personalised experiences and a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs and preferences.

This capability includes the following features:

  • Real-time web tracking: Ensure that your customer data is ingested in real time with a tracking script that can be added to your website. Capture high-intent signals such as “viewed pricing page,” “added item to the cart,” or “downloaded e-book” in real time.
  • Real-time unknown profiles: Capture web data from all your visitors even if they’re not authenticated and let the system automatically create unknown profiles in real time.
  • Real-time unknown-to-known: Merge unknown profiles into known profiles in real time, so you can always have the 360-degree view of your customers.
  • Real-time web personalisation: Leverage our APIs to read your customer data, including segment memberships, web events, or demographic data in real time to personalise the web experience for your visitors.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Elevate customer experiences in real time

Unify sales and marketing

Build customer loyalty with a unified platform and ambient insights that unify sales and marketing.

Keep Facebook audiences in sync with single connection export

With this feature, you can manage all your Facebook Ads exports using one connection. Set which custom audience in Facebook ads you want to update directly within the export settings, rather than during connection setup.

  • Although you still need to reauthenticate your Facebook Ads connection every 60 days, you’ll gain time by managing multiple exports with a single connection.
  • No action is needed when this update occurs. All your existing Facebook Ads connections and exports continue to function seamlessly.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Keep Facebook audiences in sync with single connection export

Customer Insights Journeys

Copilot and AI innovation

Revolutionise how marketers work and what they can achieve with Copilot in Customer Insights and AI innovation.

Timeline highlights enable quick access to actionable record updates

The timeline highlights feature provides a succinct overview of the most recent and critical updates in the Dynamics 365 timeline, resulting in the following benefits:

  • Concise catch-up: Generates a brief catch-up list of the three most recent key events from the timeline of the record. Each event can be aggregated from across multiple activities.
  • Enabled by default: Automatically available, and can be disabled in Power Apps.
  • Scalability: Works within apps like Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and custom, model-driven Power Apps, providing a unified experience across Dynamics 365.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Timeline highlights enable quick access to actionable record updates

Moments that matter

Respond to customers’ expectations in real time to engage them in moments that matter.

Easily reference copies of sent emails in the timeline

Reference copies of emails (including personalised output) directly in the contact or lead time:

  • See exact copies of emails sent in the contact and lead timelines.
  • Review the output generated by advanced personalisation features such as conditional content.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Easily reference copies of sent emails in the timeline

Capture responses from external, third-party forms

  • Capture form submissions from any external form and use them to create new leads or contacts in Customer Insights – Journeys.
  • Easily create JavaScript with mapping of your form fields to existing entity attributes.
  • Embed the capture script into multiple pages containing the same form.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Capture responses from external, third-party forms

Streamline form filling and event registration with form prefill

Your customers can now register for upcoming events with minimal effort, simply confirming or updating their prepopulated data. The ease of use enhances the overall customer experience and boosts your conversion rates.

  • To have the form automatically filled, your customer needs to open the form from the link sent in the Customer Insights-generated invite email.
  • Available for marketing and event registration forms.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Streamline form filling and event registration with form prefill

Refine email content in running journeys

  • Easily edit links and personalisation in your live email messages without stopping your journey or creating new versions.
  • Track the performance of your edited links and compare their performance to the original links.
  • Get more control over your email content and optimise your engagement and conversion rates.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Refine email content in running journeys

Optimise email content based on customer behaviour across devices

With comprehensive device data, you can:

  • Get insights into the type of applications and platforms your customers use to engage with your emails: device type, email client, operating system, and browser type.
  • Filter data based on the customer journey version and date.
  • Customise the date range of your emails.
  • Download a list of customers using a specific device type, email client, operating system, and browser type.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Optimise email content based on customer behaviour across devices

Split audience into groups to deliver unique customer experiences

The journey split tile creates branches in your journey to split up the participant population and provides them with different experiences. You can split by percentage or by number, each of which supports up to 25 branches.

  • Split by percentage: Breaks the audience up randomly into the percentages associated with each branch. The random assignment is done for each participant individually, therefore, this works best for larger populations (more than 2,000 participants). This option is useful for scenarios that need randomness, such as sending an experience survey to a subset of your customers.
  • Split by number: Fills up branches from left to right based on how many participants are configured to go down each branch. This is best for scenarios that need specific numbers of participants, such as offering a promotion for the first 1,000 customers that sign up for a newsletter.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Split audience into groups to deliver unique customer experiences

Improve engagement and compliance with double opt-in

  • Administrators can enable double opt-in at a compliance profile-level and can easily enforce the double opt-in flow for all the forms using the compliance profile.
  • Familiar concepts like triggers and journeys are used to orchestrate the double opt-in process, allowing you to customise the process to meet your business needs.
  • New contacts (or leads) won’t be created until the customer has confirmed their opt-in, keeping your contact and lead lists free of bad data.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Improve engagement and compliance with double opt-in

Ensure messages go to the right contact email address

  • Administrators can add multiple alternative email recipient fields to a contact’s audience configuration in addition to setting a default email recipient field.
  • Marketing professionals can pick which email address field to use for their messages during journey creation, allowing them to target a specific email address of a contact.
  • Choose whether consent is synced between contact point consent records and the contact’s consent attributes with a new feature switch, giving you control over how consent is checked for your emails in Customer Insights – Journeys.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Ensure messages go to the right contact email address

Control how fast customers can enter a journey

Control how fast customers enter your journey with journey rate limiting. By setting a rate limit, you’ll be able to spread out the number of customers who begin your journey over time.

  • Set rate limits per day or per hour.
  • Choose which days of the week customers can enter the journey.
  • Rate limits only apply to segment-based journeys. Trigger-based journeys don’t support rate limiting at this time.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Control how fast customers can enter a journey

Improve reliability of insights with advanced bot protection

Enhanced bot protection can prevent false positives and filter out any incorrect activity. Bot protection is critical for your marketing campaigns to improve data accuracy and reliability.

  • Prevent bot clicks on your emails: Avoid inflated engagement metrics, incorrectly triggered journeys, and skewed analytics.
  • Avoid unexpected journey results: Prevent your journeys from unexpectedly triggering or branching due to clicks made by bots.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Improve reliability of insights with advanced bot protection

Easily manage customer consent from contact and lead forms

  • Get a summary view of the consent provided by each contact or lead to understand if the customer is contactable.
  • Easily modify the consent for a contact or lead’s email addresses, phone numbers, and custom channels directly from the contact or lead forms, giving you control over the type of messages sent to the customer on each channel.
  • Drill down into the consent provided to each compliance profile configured for your organisation, giving you the ability to understand the customer’s consent for each line of business.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Easily manage customer consent from contact and lead forms

Streamline email creation with real-time HTML edits

  • Real-time live editing: Code directly within the email editor and see changes in real time.
  • Protect your HTML code: Wrap your HTML code in tags to keep it consistent across email clients.
  • Efficient email customisation: Streamline email creation, eliminate rendering hassles, and reduce support tickets.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Streamline email creation with real-time HTML edits

Full Details of 2024 Releases

For more information, please refer to Microsoft’s Release Documentation:

Dynamics 365 2024 Release Wave 1

Dynamics 365 2024 Release Wave 2

What other applications are updated as part of Dynamics 365 Releases?

Dynamics 365 Releases usually contain hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, including:

  • Sales
  • Customer Service
  • Field Service
  • Finance
  • Supply Chain Management
  • Project Operations
  • Finance and operations cross-app capabilities
  • Human Resources
  • Commerce
  • Business Central
  • Customer Insights – Data
  • Customer Insights – Journeys
  • Copilot for Sales, Service and Finance
We hope you found this article interesting and informative. For more ideas on how to streamline, automate and digitally transform your business (thereby saving you time and money):
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Caroline Robertson Project & Planning Manager
Caroline has lived in the CRM and technology world from her very first job! From Sales Executive to CRM Consultant, Project Manager to Marketing Team Leader, she loves ticking things off a list so has a reputation for "getting things done". Outside work, she is a dedicated mother and rescue pup parent as well as caring for her siblings and parents.
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