Define activities
When organizations talk about gaining a 360-degree view of the customer, they're referring to understanding what the customer is doing across all the company's different data sources.
The activities capability of Customer Insights - Data lets you consolidate these customer activities from your various data sources and associate them with a customer's unified customer profile. These activities appear on the Customer Profile screen in the timeline view.
Customer Insights - Data activities capability includes two components:
Activities Page: Used to define activities and view currently created activities.
Timeline grid: Consolidated activity list for a single customer in chronological order.
Not only is the timeline view visible on the customer profile dashboard, but it can also be embedded and viewed:
Within model-driven apps such as Dynamics 365 Sales or Dynamics 365 Customer Service, from the Customer Card add-in,
Or within a Power BI dashboard.
Define activities
Data sources that are ingested to Customer Insights - Data as tables typically either contain customer profile data or transactional data. Tables that contain profile data are typically used to define the fields and data that are included in each customer’s unified customer profile. Transactional data typically represents activities that should be associated with a customer. For example, items such as purchases, visits to a website, or a case opened by a customer are represented by activities in Customer Insights - Data. A single data source could potentially have multiple transactional or “activity” tables available that you can work with. To be used as an activity, the table must include at least one date field such as purchase date, review date, or date opened. After activities are defined, they display on the customer’s timeline grid in chronological order. Each Activity type is grouped together to display a total of the activities associated with that type.
Activities are created from the Activities area under the Data heading. You create an activity by selecting the Configure activities button at the top. Only tables with a date field are available to create activities for. If the system is unable to identify any tables with date fields, the Configure activities control is disabled.
To define an activity, you must provide the following data:
Activity tables: Defines the table that includes transactional or activity data.
Activity fields: Maps the fields in your table to specific activity fields.
Relationships: Defines how your activity is related to the Customer Profile.
Activity tables
The first thing you need to do when defining an activity is to specify the tables that the activity is based on. When you select a table for the activity, only tables that have date fields are available. Any tables that were used in your Customer Profile aren't displayed. Once you identify the table you want to use for your activity, you need to provide the following values:
Activity Type: Defines the type of Activity that is created from the table.
Primary Key: Defines the field in the table that represents a unique value for each record.
Activity fields
In Customer Insights – data, activity records specific fields that are used for the activity. You need to map the fields in your table to different activity fields. You need to define these values:
Activity name: Defines the name of the activity as it displays in the application.
Timestamp: Defines the field to use to identify when the activity occurred.
Event activity: Defines the field that identifies the name of your activity.
Web Address (Optional): Provides the URL address of the record if there is one.
Additional detail (Optional): Provides more details about the activity.
Show this activity in the timeline on your Customer Profile: Specifies if this activity should be displayed on the customer profile activity timeline.
When you choose to display on the timeline, you can also specify the Icon that you want to use to represent the activity.
Activity relationships
Activity relationships are used to connect your activity table to your customer profile table. This ensures that the correct activities are being displayed on the correct customer profile. You can specify a relationship by selecting the Add relationship button. When creating a relationship path, you need to specify these values:
Foreign key from activity table: Defines the field from the activity table to use in the relationship.
To table name: Specifies the table that your activity table is in a relationship with.
Relationship name: Specifies the name used to identify the relationship. The name must start with a letter and can only consist of letters and numbers.
Once you configure all the necessary details, you can choose to create the activity.
