Hero Insights: Creating Segments in Customer Insights

by Kylie Kiser, posted in Citizen Developer, Customer Insights, Dataverse, Hero Insights, MSDyn365, Series and Case Studies

If you are just joining us, I am working on a series to learn about Dynamics 365 and Customer Insights using superheroes! You can check out the full series on the Hero Insights page. Enjoy!

Welcome back to HQ, my dynamic band of heroes! Today we are going to talk about segments. A segment is just a portion of the customer base. So we want to define characteristics that fit a certain customer profile so we can group those records together for additional analysis or marketing or other fun stuff.

Creating Your First Segment

To get started, simply go to Segments on the left-hand side.

Customer Insights create segment
In the Segments area, one of Clippy’s descendants will give you a button to create “New Segment”. Click that.
Customer Insights Segment Details
Now you will enter the details for your segment. This includes if you want the segment to be continually updated based on criteria (dynamic) or if it should be a point in time statistic (static). You can also enter a name and description. Click Next.
Customer Insights Segment Logic
Next you will set up the criteria to add someone to this segment. You will notice that this can include data points from multiple data sets.

This is obviously very simple but could quickly get more complicated with different ‘And / Or’ logic. You may also notice that between our two data sets there is an Intersect operator. Here we can choose between Union (grab records that meet either of these criteria), Intersect (grab records that meet both of these criteria) or Except (Union then remove the Intersect).

Union Intersect Except
There are some handy icons to help you remember what Union, Intersect, and Except mean.

For those of us from a historic CRM background this level of detail is really cool! If you have used Marketing Lists in the past, this type of logic would be very difficult and likely be a static, manually maintained or recreated list. So I love the additional flexibility here.

Plus you can use these segments as criteria for other segments. Bur wait there’s more! You can also use the customer measures we will create tomorrow as criteria. So many possibilities!

Completed Segment

After you finish your logic you will need to save and activate. This will take a little bit to run depending on the size of your data. When it’s ready you can view the stats on the Home page of Customer Insights.

Customer Insights calculated segments
The home page will show cards with the current number of records within the segment.

These segments will automatically update as your data updates then you can see those changes overtime based on the small graph.

Customer Insights Segment History
Dive into the segment to see the member change over time and review specific records. You can also export the records for a more detailed review.

As I am looking at these segments I am quickly seeing how this could be used by an evil villain to plot against the good guys … will our heroes make it out unscathed? Can they figure out how to create measures without turning to the dark side? Find out in tomorrow’s post!

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