Consider situations where account managers or service representatives are unable to view the complete details of marketing emails sent to customers. While copies of these messages are available in each CRM record history, they only display the default template text and don’t include personalisation details.
Marketing teams increasingly personalise messages by using data to increase engagement, so these limited email histories hold little value if some text is missing or entire content blocks differ from what the recipient receives.
That’s why Microsoft has updated Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journey to provide full visibility in the record timeline, showing the exact email content received by each recipient.
Referencing complete and accurate communications quickly and effectively helps account managers and other sellers understand each message’s content. For instance, imagine a scenario where a marketing email has confirmed the purchase of a customer insurance policy. The email in the timeline will present exactly what the contact sees, including email design, personalised information and dynamic content. We can point to an additional example of a service agent who needs to look up a real-time email that references specific case information.
Let’s explore what this looks like in practice.
Email Clarity for Service Teams
As a service rep, you can understand exactly what the contact has received, such as personalised offers. Your service teams will no longer need to second-guess or go back and forth with the marketing team to uncover the precise details.
In Dynamics 365, you can use the timeline control to select and expand the relevant email delivered from Customer Insights, allowing you to view the full email content. This feature helps service agents gain context and answer questions more quickly, improving alignment between communication and service teams.
Quickly reference the recipient email with accuracy and efficiency.
Providing Sales Teams with Email Visibility
Microsoft has regularly discussed its strategy to support organisations in aligning marketing and sales teams. Sellers don’t have the time and resources to go back and forth to understand what messages their contacts are receiving, but it’s important they can freely access these communications. Previously, the timeline would only reference the email with a timestamp or a default message template. But with this enhancement, they can keep informed by viewing the email precisely. For example, marketing may have sent an email regarding a new service, so the seller can now accurately see what the contact has received, including any promotional offers. As a result, they can confidently reference this in their interactions with full knowledge of the precise details.
This supports the sales process, saves time, and helps improve the overall customer experience by avoiding knowledge gaps across organisations and keeping sales and marketing on the same page.
Sellers will see the full content of the email, including dynamic content, personalisation and design.
Video Demonstration: Personalised Emails in the Timeline for Dynamics 365 and Power Apps
Video Transcript
It’s always helpful for sellers and service agents to see what marketing emails a customer has received to ensure alignment between teams and start conversations with relevant information, but this is of limited value if team members can’t see a precise copy of these messages. For example, here we can see an email has been sent, but this version on the contact timeline is missing the personalised detail that the recipient would have received, including a name and a case reference.
A recent enhancement for Dynamics Customer Insights – Journeys, formerly Dynamics Marketing, overcomes this issue to improve visibility by enabling everyone to easily see an exact copy of each marketing email delivered to a contact or lead. Let’s switch to a different app and take a look.
We’re now on the same record in Dynamics Customer Service. Upon opening the email, the full message is now shown, including all the personalised details for this contact as well as enhancing visibility to help everyone improve customer experiences. Having access to the exact marketing emails that are sent is also beneficial from a compliance and auditing standpoint.
In addition to these types of basic personalisation, marketing teams can also use Customer Insights to apply conditional rules in email templates that dynamically adjust the content based on what’s known about a recipient. This allows marketers to change the text and images that are delivered to different recipients in the audience by using data to increase relevance and boost engagement.
However, just as we saw earlier, these advanced personalisations weren’t visible in lead or contact timelines which only reflected the default content from an email template. To avoid back and forth with marketing teams and remove uncertainty the timeline in Dynamics and Power Apps now displays emails that also reflect conditional message rules to show an exact copy of the emails delivered to each recipient. Here, you can see a copy of the email sent to this contact featuring all the personalised content which includes those conditional rules.
Now, we’ll switch to another contact who was part of the same audience. They were sent a message using the same template and here the timeline entry accurately shows a different version of the content, which was triggered by our conditional rules. These are just some of the ways in which the new timeline email referencing feature helps teams stay in the loop and better understand what information is shared with customers.
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Smooth Operations: Simple and Speedy Email Referencing
Dynamics 365’s enhanced email timeline referencing reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to fostering collaboration and synergy across sales, marketing, and service departments. By bridging communication gaps and providing actionable insights, this update enables organisations to deliver more personalised and responsive customer experiences, driving long-term success and growth.
Access to this enhancement requires some administration, if you need support configuring your solution, contact ServerSys today.
