The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys 2025 release wave 1 includes more Copilot features and additional functionality to its existing tools to help empower businesses in creating more personalized journeys for their customers across all touchpoints. These updates are planned for delivery from April to September 2025 and are aimed at streamlining marketing strategies to help improve customer satisfaction and retention. These advancements can help organizations utilize artificial intelligence (AI)-driven insights to revolutionize their operational strategies and further enhance customer journeys.1
For Admins
Allow Individuals to Re-Enter One-Time, Dynamic Segment Journeys
Audience members moving between stages of a customer life cycle sometimes repeat a specific stage of the life cycle journey. For example, a customer may purchase a different product in the buying journey. When they return to that segment, they should be able to re-enter that journey. Admins can enable this feature for their users.
When marketers design one-time journeys, there will be a checkbox to select if they want to enable audience members to go through the journey multiple times if they qualify for a life cycle state more than once. Currently, audience members are blocked from going through one-time journeys a second time. Feedback from marketers indicated that they wanted to allow customers to repeat specific dynamic segments of a journey. This feature is a powerful tool for marketers to control how customers travel through their journeys because not all customers follow the same path. We look forward to sharing this exciting feature, as it can allow clients’ marketing teams to have the freedom to run journeys to their specifications.
Public preview for this feature is available now and is scheduled for release in April 2025.
For Marketers
Copilot Changes2
Copilot for Dynamics 365 is constantly evolving, and this release wave provides an update to its functionality in Customer Insights – Journeys. Copilot will now assist users with creating customer journeys. Marketers can use natural language to describe the journey they wish to create, and Copilot will generate it for them. Users can employ Copilot to generate a list of example journeys to help guide their creation of customer journeys. After Copilot creates a customer journey, users can preview and modify the Copilot-generated journey to their preferences before adding their content.
This new update helps streamline the journey-creation process, reducing the time spent on manual, repetitive tasks. It also helps new users get comfortable working in Customer Insights – Journeys by building templates using their natural language input. With this, Copilot helps users quickly create highly customized journeys that can improve customer engagement. Copilot will also give users a detailed summary of the journey it created before they start adding relevant content.
Public preview for this feature is available now and is scheduled for release in April 2025.
Enhancing Customer Journeys
We are excited to share how D365 can help enhance the overall user experience with the addition of the following features to Customer Insights – Journeys. Each feature adds another level of customization that helps marketers collect and analyze valuable customer data. Having more control over how journeys are executed is a great way to quickly and easily improve the experience both as a marketer and a customer.
Custom Reporting
While marketers can still access custom reporting through Microsoft Fabric, it is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution for some organizations. This new update allows users to export Customer Insights – Journeys data to external storage solutions without needing Fabric. Marketers can now take full advantage of the data they’ve collected with Dynamics 365 by using the reporting and analytics available in their organizations. Data can be securely exported directly into a user’s preferred storage solution.
Public preview for this feature is available now and is scheduled for release in April 2025.
Pause & Resume Journeys
Brand reputation is extremely valuable to companies, and it’s important to be able to mitigate and control journeys in the face of unforeseen events such as natural disasters. Businesses may need to pause certain campaigns because they may seem insensitive to the situation. They could also run into operational/supply chain disruptions that slow or completely halt production of a particular good or service. In these situations, businesses previously had to make the difficult decision of whether to stop processing their active journeys.
Instead of having to stop and create a new journey to recapture that audience, they can simply be paused and resumed at any time. This allows companies to manage customer journeys flexibly and offers more freedom in utilizing them. Our team is excited to share this feature because it can help users gain even more control over how they run their marketing mix. We believe in empowering users to make key, timely decisions that benefit their organization.
Journeys can be paused manually to prevent new customers from entering and resumed when an organization is ready to accept new customers. Journeys can still be stopped if they are in the paused state.
This feature is scheduled for release in April 2025.
Time Zone-Based Engagement
Customer privacy regulations are becoming increasingly prevalent and crucial to implement today. Local and legal requirements can dictate when marketing communications are sent. In Customer Insights – Journeys, users can now set quiet times based on the journey’s time zone. These settings ensure that customers only receive calls and messages during appropriate times. This helps build customer trust and heightens the effectiveness of the marketing materials.
The enhanced option set allows multiple ways to send focused messages during specific times. Customer time zones can be defined for journeys and users can set the days, dates, and times to avoid contacting customers. These time-sensitive options can also be customized for journeys, which controls how each step in the journey is activated.
This feature is scheduled for release in April 2025.
Wait on Segment Membership to Trigger Journey Steps
Users can now have greater control over customers’ experiences going through journeys. You can now wait for a customer to become a member of a segment before they go through the next step of a journey. This is an additional parameter that marketers can set, allowing them to wait for customers to perform certain actions before moving them along the journey.
This new feature adds another tool to a marketer’s toolbox, allowing them to further customize how customers embark on their journey. Marketers seeking ways to refine their data can find these new methods offered by Customer Insights – Journeys and the Dynamics 365 suite of applications very helpful.
Public preview for this feature is available now and is scheduled for release in April 2025.
How Forvis Mazars Can Help
Leveraging a certified Microsoft Partner can help you unlock the full potential of these updates in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Our experienced technology consultants are ready to help you prepare and implement these upgrades in a highly efficient way to help reach your business objectives. We can help you further automate your operations to enhance customer insights journeys across your organization. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you today!
- 1“Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys in 2025 release wave 1,” learn.microsoft.com, March 3, 2025.
- 2 Copilot additions are restricted to the following Microsoft Azure geographic areas: Asia Pacific, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, France, India, Japan, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States.