MICROSOFT PRODUCT CAPABILITIES
Use what you know about a customer.
Customer Insights has two connected applications. Customer Insights - Data builds unified profiles from different sources. Customer Insights - Journeys uses customer signals, segments, and events to coordinate communications across the customer lifecycle.
Unified customer profiles
Connect transactional, demographic, and behavioural data, resolve matching identities, and enrich profiles for a more useful view of each customer.
Segments and measures
Build audiences and business measures from the data you hold, then use them to target relevant experiences and assess results.
Real-time journeys
Trigger journeys from events or segments and coordinate supported email, text, and push communications around customer behaviour.
Consent and journey insight
Manage communication preferences and consent, monitor engagement, and use Copilot assistance for supported content, audience, and journey tasks.
Build on real-time journeys
Microsoft removed the outbound marketing module in May 2026. New work belongs in real-time journeys. Customer Insights is licensed per tenant, with capacity for the profiles and people you use.
Put it to work with Braintree.
Braintree connects the source data, defines profile matching and consent rules, and builds journeys with your marketing and service teams. We help establish measures that connect engagement to business outcomes.
Microsoft product guidance
Start with the customer data you can trust
Braintree can scope how CRM, ERP, point-of-sale, website and survey data contribute to the customer profile. Source ownership, refresh frequency, matching rules and permitted uses are resolved before journeys depend on the combined data.
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Identify the systems holding customer identity and transaction history.
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Agree how duplicate or conflicting records are handled.
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Define the audience and business purpose for each journey.
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Confirm channel, licensing and consent requirements for activation.
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Two connected jobs: understanding and engagement
Customer Insights combines two applications with different responsibilities. Customer Insights - Data brings source records together into unified customer profiles. Customer Insights - Journeys uses audiences and triggers to coordinate engagement. A project can require one capability more urgently than the other; a combined name does not remove the need to design both data preparation and customer communication.
For example, a business may know a customer in its CRM, its transaction system and its event platform. The first task is determining which records represent the same person and what each source contributes. Only then can the team define a useful audience, such as customers who attended an event and have an agreed product interest. This is a workflow illustration, not a description of your existing data.
02
Matching rules are a business decision
Microsoft’s unification process separates source selection, deduplication within a table, matching between sources and the final unified view. These are distinct decisions. Two people sharing an address should not automatically become one customer, and a changed email address should not automatically create a new customer.
The data team needs representative examples of duplicates, shared contact details and conflicting values. A progressive approach tests matching rules and reviews the effect on the resulting profiles. Source-data quality remains important: unification does not make an incorrect source value true. Activity records such as purchases also need the appropriate relationship to the customer rather than being treated as another identity record.
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Journeys, consent and source freshness
Journeys can begin from a segment or a customer action, with the configured channel and message selected for the purpose. Email, text and push experiences require their own setup and commercial scope. Event timing must be understood: a journey responding to a trigger is different from a profile refreshed through a scheduled data process.
Microsoft’s current consent documentation places compliance profiles, purposes, topics and contact-point consent at the centre of the design. Legacy contact flags are not a substitute for checking the configured consent model. The organisation decides its requirements, and the implementation must preserve preferences through import, segmentation, sending and unsubscribe experiences.
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Prove the profile before scaling the journey
Braintree can map the source systems, establish the profile rules and configure the first activation use case. The engagement should identify the owner of every source and the action taken when a refresh fails or a customer challenges information.
Agree customer identifiers, duplicate rules and which source wins when values conflict.
Confirm connector access, refresh requirements and customer-activity relationships.
Define the first segment, trigger, message and measurable business purpose.
Test consent, opt-out and exception scenarios before increasing the audience.
BEFORE YOU DECIDE
