Microsoft adds more features to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as rollout of Wave 2 features begins

It's October 1, which means it's time for Microsoft's Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 Wave 2 features to begin rolling out. Microsoft also is using the Wave 2 rollout kick-off to announce a few additional incremental features coming to its Dynamics 365 Customer Insights customer data platform. 

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a service for customer support which includes self-serve and assisted scenarios across multiple channels of customer engagement. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is meant to provide the 360-degree view of the customer and provide insights into personalized customer experience. And then, there's the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights add-in for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which is meant to help agents and customer service managers "to make better decisions to improve operational efficiency with confidence and achieve customer satisfaction," according to Microsoft's definitions. (Any Dynamics 365 service that has "Insights" as part of the name is typically touted as an AI-centric service by Microsoft officials.) 

Today's news is about No. 2 of  this list of these three related and confusingly named things -- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Microsoft officials said in July when they first went public with a partial list of Wave 2 features that Dynamics 365 Customer Service  Insights would be getting a a new analytical view, as well as new capabilities to help agents use similar case suggestions in resolving customer issues. And Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights would get more extensibility via the Microsoft Power Platform, especially with Power BI, officials said at that time.

Today, Microsoft officials said Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will get a new cross-channel analytics capability called "engagement insights," which is meant to help users better measure and understand user behavior across web, mobile and connected devices. Customer Insights also will be getting new integrations with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, which will provide customer profiles with sentiment and customer feedback data.

Customer Insights also will be getting more AI functionality, including out-of-the box machine learning templates and improved integration with Azure Synapse Analytics for advanced analytics. It also is on track for more new features designed to help strengthen data governance and loss prevention with policies around classification, labeling and protection for data based on its sensitivity.

The Wave 2 features will be rolling out between now and March 2021.