Comparison of Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights are CRM products that serve different department’s core responsibilities, though they have some overlapping functionality.

It can be confusing to understand the differences at first, so let’s start with a quick comparison table.

 

Key Differences Between Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights

The most obvious difference is that D365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights each focus on the needs of 3 different departments: sales, customer service, and marketing. But there’s a lot more complexity than that.

• Dynamics 365 Sales centers on the efficacy and speed of the sales pipeline with elegant sales process and communication management, including AI-generated reminders, forecasting, and automations.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service focuses on improving customer support and fulfilment, including full-scale case and queue management, predictive models, and self-service tools.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights concentrates on understanding your prospect and customer base, proving success against spend by fully integrating lead channels, tracking revenue paths, and providing both predictive and actual reporting. It uses Microsoft Copilot AI to spotlight insights which allow for data-driven strategies across the entire organization.

Your company can use one of these solutions as a standalone, or two or more of them together. And all of them work together with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem: Microsoft (Office) 365, the Dynamics 365 ERP applications, Copilot, Power BI, and the rest of the Power Platform.

To decide which solutions are best for you, it’s essential that you examine your company’s current line of business solutions, look carefully at your unmet business requirements, and discuss with an experienced Dynamics Partner like Encore.

How Do Sales, Customer Insights, and Customer Service Fit into Dynamics 365 as a Whole?

Dynamics 365 is a suite of ERP and CRM applications that can be used together to provide company-wide solutions for both the SMB and enterprise business sectors. At Encore, we provide implementations, integrations, training, and support for all of these solutions.

Within Dynamics 365, the Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights applications are three core solutions that focus on traditional aspects of Customer Relationship Management. These three solutions all speak the same inherent language, because they are built on Microsoft’s Dataverse, which uses a standardized system of data tables and relationships. So these solutions share data seamlessly together if your business uses more than one.

It’s also important to note that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights now includes the functionality that was previously held by Dynamics 365 Marketing. Customer Insights now encompasses both AI (Copilot)-powered analytics and strategically integrated marketing automations.

Differences in Pricing Between Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights

The biggest difference in pricing between D365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights is that Customer Insights is priced per tenant, whereas Sales and Customer Service are priced per user.

It’s also important to note that, for both Sales and Customer Service there are different license levels (“Professional” and “Enterprise”) that correspond to the depth of use and scope of functionality. Here’s a quick summary table:

 

There is also substantially reduced “attach” license pricing for users accessing more than one Dynamics 365 solution.

For more information on attach licenses, read our full overview of Dynamics 365 CRM License pricing.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Pricing

Unlike D365 Sales and Customer Service, Customer Insights is priced per tenant: starting at $1,700/tenant/month USD ($2,306.60 CAD) for the standalone application.

Pricing for Larger Volumes of Customers

The base price for a standalone D365 Customer Insights system includes unlimited users and up to 100,000 Unified Profiles and 100,000 Interacted People (definitions below).

1. United Profiles: The total number of profiles that represent the interactions captured in your database.
2. Interacted People: The total number of contacts that your company connects with via outbound activities such as email blasts or inbound such as form submissions. Note that every unique person you include in any email is counted as an “Interacted Person” for this purpose.

You can purchase “packs” of additional profiles and people as your audience grows.

Use Cases for D365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights

Each of the D365 apps can be used to manage a wide range of relationships and functionalities.

Dynamics 365 Sales is used for tracking all communications between individual salespeople and customers (or even donors) as well as managing consistent sales processes and pipeline. The D365 sales pipeline not only displays actual and anticipated revenue, but also triggers automations, notifications, and activities to ensure the forecast is met.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is more useful for improving customer and employee satisfaction, as well as reducing costs with easily managed self-serve tools. Also, even though “customer” is the word in the product name, D365 Customer Service works well for managing relationships with “members” in organizations like co-ops or professional associations.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is used for integrated marketing management powered by AI analytics. This includes targeted communications, customer journeys, brand consistency, revenue attribution, and success metrics across all channels. Copilot surfaces trends and commonalities within pools of prospects and customers, while advanced intelligence tools offer live KPI performance tracking, goal progression, and trend comparisons.

Overlaps in Functionality

Although Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights are each aimed at a different use case, there are 4 notable overlaps in functionality.

1. Communication Sending and Tracking: All three solutions can send emails to groups of people, although in somewhat different ways. They can also both track and visualize all activities and communications between your users and the outside world.
2. Core Record Types: All three solutions contain and rely on the same base utilities of Accounts, Contacts, and activity management.
3. Reporting Tools: They all have powerful reporting tools that surface forecasts, actuals, and trends, and this reporting can be further enhanced with Power BI.
4. Microsoft Ecosystem Connections: All of these tools can work with each other and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem: Microsoft (Office) 365, Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, and the Power Platform to create a unified source of data, and automations across apps.
5. Adaptability: All of these applications can be configured by a skilled Dynamics 365 CRM Partner to fit specific business needs, and re-configured as your company grows and changes.

Differences in Functionality Between D365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights

The biggest difference in functionality between D365 Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights has to do with how they engage users and customers.

For instance, Sales uses Leads and Opportunities to work and manage the revenue pipeline. Customer Service, however, relies on Cases and Queues to complete service requests and handle support issues. Customer Insights uses Copilot AI, Customer Journeys, Marketing Emails, and Events to keep campaigns in motion and data quality high.

Is D365 Sales, Customer Insights, or Customer Service Right for My Business?

Because the entire D365 suite is so adaptable and extensible, it can be hard to know which solutions are best for your business. Furthermore, many businesses benefit from having 2 or more Dynamics 365 solutions.

In general, we find that D365 Sales is the most used solution.

Customer Service is often added on alongside Sales to nurture ongoing relationships once customers are acquired. Customer Service is especially relevant if you are a membership or customer relationship-based organization, and you find that your customer service team is struggling with consistent quality.

D365 Customer Insights is a great solution for companies who are investing in growth via marketing, want to leverage their existing customer databases, automate repetitive tasks to free up the marketing team for more creative and strategic work, and have a strong sense of brand identity. D365 Sales and Customer Insights are often combined to create a clean hand-off of valuable data about each customer.

To get a clearer picture of your needs and opportunities with this technology, you should talk with a Dynamics 365 CRM Partner who can advise you across the whole Microsoft stack. If you are ready to seek specific advice for your company around Dynamics 365, please contact us. We’d love to help.

Related Resources

• Dynamics 365 License Pricing Explained
• What Is Dynamics 365 Sales?
• What Is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights?
• What Is Dynamics 365 Customer Service?
• D365 Field Service vs Customer Service

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