Enhancing Customer Journeys with Entity References in Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is unveiling a powerful new feature designed to reshape customer interactions – the ability to personalise journeys using custom events with entity references.

Understanding Entity References

What are entity references? They act as links between information in a system, facilitating a deeper understanding of relationships. In this context, entity references efficiently capture and integrate data from various tables within the Dataverse into customer journeys. Instead of manually inputting attributes, you can refer to an entity, essentially a table of related information, and effortlessly include it in your custom triggers. This simplifies the process and enriches customer interactions, making engagement more impactful.

Elevating Customisation

This feature’s significance lies in enhancing message personalisation. Previously, creating custom triggers involved manually adding multiple attributes, limited to 29. With entity references, this limitation is bypassed. Imagine you want to initiate a journey for customers who bought a specific product on your website. Rather than laboriously inputting attributes, you can now effortlessly capture the purchase event and product details through an entity reference and also draw on any personalised data already in the system. This streamlines the process, bringing efficiency to your efforts.

Key Feature Aspects

Entity references for custom triggers offer several advantages:

  • Utilisation of Custom Triggers: This feature allows you to incorporate custom triggers within journeys that are intricately linked to attributes tied to related Dataverse entities.
  • Enhanced Message Customisation: Craft messages that truly resonate with your customers by tapping into the increased personalisation potential offered by entity references.
  • Attribute Freshness Assurance: Ensuring that your attributes remain up-to-date is paramount. With this feature, you can be confident that the information you’re working with is current and accurate.
  • Dynamic Journeys: Customer journeys can now filter and branch based on values in the related records or tables that have been linked through entity references.

These updates bring a multitude of custom trigger functionalities:

  • With entities now being added as attributes, all columns within that table can be used for branching or checking conditions in a customer journey. This means that data that isn’t directly related to a contact can be connected allowing for deeper personalisation.
  • The ability to link unrelated tables or rows of data means that communications can also use information that isn’t directly linked to a contact or lead through a look-up field or relationship.
  • With this update custom triggers can be called from Websites, Events, and Power Automate Flows. You can also call the trigger through existing journeys to achieve seamless integrations across different systems and locations with real-time data analytics for usage and integration in customer journeys.

A Glimpse into the Future

Microsoft Dynamics 365’s capability of employing custom events with entity references empowers businesses to create tailored customer journeys. This feature promises to reshape customer interactions, driving towards a future of enhanced personalisation and engagement.