Web tracking and personalization in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data (Preview) enables organizations to track website interactions from anonymous and known visitors. This data can be associated with customer profiles and used for segmentation and personalized website experiences.

For example, an insurance customer may browse coverage plans and use a quote calculator before creating an account. Web tracking can help connect those earlier interactions with the customer’s known profile.

Note: Web tracking and personalization is a prerelease feature and is subject to change.

The scenario: an insurance quote calculator

Let’s say an insurance company have a customer portal on Power Pages. Visitors can browse coverage plans and calculate a quote without logging in. Once they like their quote, they register for an account to save it and manage future claims.

The goal: don’t lose that pre-signup browsing history. When a site visitor calculates a quote as an anonymous visitor and then signs up, his account should show that he looked at the “Comprehensive Coverage” plan twice before registering — not start with a blank slate.

How it works, conceptually

There are two moving parts:

1. Anonymous tracking — the moment anyone lands on your site, a small script drops a cookie and starts logging page views. Customer Insights creates an “Unknown” profile keyed to that cookie.
2. Identity merge — when that visitor eventually logs in or registers, you tell Customer Insights, “this cookie belongs to this real person.” Everything the cookie did gets folded into their actual customer profile.

That is the overall approach. Now, let’s move forward with the implementation.

Step-by-step implementation

Step 1 – Enable the feature and get your script

In Customer Insights – Data, go to Web tracking & personalization, select Contact as your identifying table (this should almost always be Contact, not Account — Contact represents an individual person who can actually log in; Account represents an organization), and copy the generated JavaScript snippet.

Step 2 – Add the script to your Power Pages site

This is the part that trips people up: the “Header” web template in Power Pages isn’t the literal <head> tag — it’s a partial. The correct place is a Content Snippet named exactly Head/Bottom, set to type HTML, with no language specified so it applies globally. Paste your tracking script in there and publish.

Step 3 – Handle the Content Security Policy

If your site was created recently, Power Pages enforces a Content Security Policy by default, and it’ll block the tracking script’s domain unless you allow it. Go to Portal Management → Site Settings, find (or create) HTTP/Content-Security-Policy, and add the tracking script’s domain to script-src. You’ll see the exact domain to add in your browser console if it gets blocked — copy it from the CSP violation error rather than guessing.

Step 4 – Test as an anonymous visitor

Open your site in an incognito window and click through a couple of pages — say, your quote calculator and a coverage page. Back in Customer Insights, go to Customers → Unknown, and you should see a cookie-ID profile appear with those page visits logged, usually within about 30 seconds.

Step 5 – Link identity on login

Add a small script to the same Head/Bottom snippet, using Liquid to detect an authenticated visitor:

{% if user %}

<script>

if (window.msci && typeof window.msci.setUser === “function”) {

window.msci.setUser(“{{ user.contactid }}”);

}

</script>

{% endif %}

{{ user.contactid }} is Power Pages’ built-in way of exposing the signed-in contact’s ID via Liquid — no custom login code needed. This script runs on every authenticated pageview, which is fine; it just re-confirms the link each time.

Step 6 – Verify the merge

Register a test account, log in, and refresh a page. Back in Customer Insights, search for that Contact under Known customers — their timeline should now show the quote-calculator visit and coverage page views that happened before they ever logged in.

Step 7 – Make the data useful

Once this is flowing, the real payoff shows up in two places:

• Support: an agent looking at a contact’s profile sees their full journey — which coverage page they read, whether they used the quote calculator — before ever picking up the phone.
• Marketing/retention: build a segment like “known contacts who viewed Comprehensive Coverage but haven’t upgraded in 30 days” and trigger a targeted follow-up.

Why this matters more than it sounds

The key benefit is not simply tracking page views. The website engagement data can be associated with the customer record in Dynamics 365, alongside other customer information such as policies, support tickets, and claims.

This allows website interactions to become part of the customer’s overall record and provides the business with additional information that can be used for customer segmentation, engagement tracking, and personalized website experiences.

Conclusion

Web tracking and personalization in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data can help organizations connect website engagement with customer profiles. By capturing anonymous interactions and associating them with known contacts, businesses can gain more context about customer interests and use that data for segmentation and personalized experiences.

As this is a Preview capability, implementation details may change as Microsoft continues to develop the feature. If you need help implementing web tracking and personalization with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, contact the Inogic team at crm@inogic.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is web tracking and personalization in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data?

Web tracking and personalization is a Preview capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data that enables organizations to capture website interactions from anonymous and known visitors. The collected engagement data can be associated with customer profiles and used for segmentation and personalized website experiences.

2. Can Dynamics 365 Customer Insights track anonymous website visitors?

Yes. Web tracking can capture interactions from visitors who have not yet identified themselves. Customer Insights uses an anonymous visitor identifier to associate activity with an Unknown profile. When the visitor is later identified, the organization can associate the anonymous activity with the corresponding known customer profile.

3. How can anonymous website activity be associated with a known contact?

When an anonymous visitor identifies themselves, the website can provide the corresponding customer identifier to Customer Insights. This allows previously captured website interactions to be associated with the known contact profile, subject to the configured identity and tracking setup.

4. Can web tracking be used with Power Pages?

Yes. Power Pages can be configured to include the Customer Insights web tracking script. The implementation may also require additional configuration, such as adding the tracking domain to the site’s Content Security Policy and handling the association between an authenticated Power Pages user and their contact record.

5. What can businesses do with website engagement data in Customer Insights – Data?

Website engagement data can provide additional context about customer interests and interactions. Organizations can use this information with other customer data for scenarios such as segmentation, engagement analysis, and personalized website experiences.

The post Web tracking and personalization overview (Customer Insights Data) – (Preview) first appeared on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Tips and Tricks.

When organizations move to Customer Insights – Journeys, one question often comes up immediately: what happens to the consent preferences we already have?

Your contacts and leads may already contain years of email preferences through fields such as Email and Bulk Email. Asking every existing customer to provide consent again is not only unnecessary, but it can also create friction and potentially leave you with incomplete consent data.

The challenge is that real-time journeys use a different consent model. They rely on contact point consent records linked to compliance profiles and purposes, rather than treating the legacy consent fields on contact or lead records as the source of truth.

This is where the Load Consent feature in Customer Insights – Journeys becomes useful.

Load Consent helps organizations migrate existing consent preferences from contacts, leads, or legacy subscription lists into the new consent framework in bulk. Instead of manually recreating consent records or launching another opt-in campaign, you can use the consent data you already have to establish a compliant foundation for your real-time journeys.

In this blog, we’ll look at how Load Consent works, what it reads from your existing records, and how you can use it to migrate consent data into Customer Insights – Journeys.

Why Existing Consent Data Must Be Migrated to Customer Insights – Journeys

Real-time journeys do not use the legacy Email and Bulk Email preference fields as their primary consent source by default. They rely on contact point consent records tied to compliance profiles and purposes. For more details on compliance and the consent center, refer to our previous Blog.

That is a fundamentally different model from the legacy Bulk Email flag, which used to act as a single source of truth on the contact record itself. If you skip the consent migration step, you risk creating a gap between your historical consent data and your new real-time journey configuration. Contacts may be unable to receive communications because no contact point consent records exist, while historical opt-outs may not be reflected correctly in the new consent model.

What Load Consent Actually Does

Suppose your organization is setting up real-time journeys for the first time and wants marketing emails to respect the Bulk Email preferences already recorded on your contacts, rather than starting consent collection from zero.

At a high level, Load Consent reads existing consent signals from contacts or leads and converts them into contact point consent records against a compliance profile and purpose you choose. It’s a one-time (or repeatable) bulk operation, not a live sync, so it’s a migration tool, not an ongoing integration.

A few mechanics worth understanding before you run it:

• It only pulls from the single email field configured in your audience settings, not every email field on the record. For more details, you can refer to this doc.
• It evaluates both the Bulk Email and Email flags together. Either one set to “Do Not Allow” is enough to opt the contact point out.
• When multiple contacts or leads share the same email address, the tool won’t opt that address in unless every linked record agrees: one holdout sets the whole address to opted out.
• It can also generate tracking consent records from the contact’s tracking preference (leads don’t carry a tracking field, so this only applies to contacts).

Prerequisites

Before running Load Consent, make sure the following are in place:

Access & permissions

• Read access to contact and lead records
• Create and update permissions on contact point consent records

Setup

• A compliance profile with the purposes already created, since Load Consent needs somewhere to write the records to
• The audience configuration email field correctly set, since this determines which email address gets loaded
• If you operate across multiple business units, a plan to run Load Consent separately for each business unit/compliance profile combination

A quick note on the “Do Not Allow” dropdown fields: both contacts and leads carry two separate two-value fields that Load Consent reads directly, Do Not Allow Emails (schema name: donotemail) and Do Not Allow Bulk Emails (schema name: donotbulkemail). Each one is a simple option set of Allow or Do Not Allow, with no in-between “not set” state, which is exactly why a single field flipped to Do Not Allow is enough to opt a contact point out when the load runs.

How to Load Consent:  Navigate to the Consent Center. Go to Customer Insights – Journeys > Audience > Consent Center.

Click the Load consent button from the ribbon bar as below:

Choose your source: Decide whether you’re loading from contacts, leads, or a legacy subscription list. In this blog, let us use contacts as the consent source.

Note: You’ll also see Subscription list as a selectable source alongside contacts and leads. That’s because subscription lists were how the legacy Outbound Marketing app tracked consent. Since Outbound Marketing is being retired, Load Consent lets you pull that legacy list data directly into Customer Insights – Journeys.

Select the destination compliance profile and purpose. Pick the compliance profile you want the consent records created under (usually a profile that already has a preference center attached) and the specific purpose. Here we will be using the preexisting Default Compliance profile

Map the fields: Confirm which purpose reflects Bulk Email (commercial communications) and which reflects Email (transactional).

A quick note on the “Do Not Allow” dropdown fields: both contacts and leads carry two separate two-value fields that Load Consent reads directly, Do Not Allow Emails (schema name donotemail) and Do Not Allow Bulk Emails (schema name donotbulkemail). Each one is a simple option set of Allow or Do Not Allow, with no in-between “not set” state, which is exactly why a single field flipped to Do Not Allow is enough to opt a contact point out when the load runs.

Run the load: The system evaluates each record against the rules above and creates or updates the corresponding contact point consent records.

Verify the results: Spot-check a sample of contacts, particularly ones with duplicate records sharing an email address, to confirm the resulting consent status matches what you expect. The bulk contact point consent records were loaded as shown below:

Before using this feature directly on production, consider the Do and Don’t mentioned below:

Do:

• Export your existing consent data to Excel before running any data restore. A restore reverts consent records to their backup-time state, and you’ll want a reference copy
• Double-check which purpose you’re mapping Bulk Email vs. Email into: typically, Commercial and Transactional respectively, but confirm against your own compliance profile naming
• Run a small test batch first if you have a large volume of duplicate email addresses, so you can validate the opted-in/opted-out outcome before committing broadly

Don’t:

• Don’t expect Load Consent to pick up consent stored in a custom field. If your organization tracks consent somewhere other than Allow Bulk Email, you’ll need Import from Excel instead. Audience configuration won’t help here either. It only lets you choose which email address field is read, not which consent field is read, so a custom consent field is invisible to Load Consent regardless of how audience configuration is set up.
• Don’t treat this as a live sync. It won’t automatically pick up future changes to contact or lead fields
• Don’t assume it applies to any data source beyond contacts, leads, and legacy subscription lists. There’s no support for pulling consent from anywhere else, and subscription lists are a legacy Outbound Marketing concept: you can’t create new ones in real-time journeys, only migrate the ones you already have

Conclusion

Migrating to Customer Insights – Journeys does not mean you have to rebuild your consent data from scratch.

The Load Consent feature helps organizations bring existing consent preferences from contacts, leads, and legacy subscription lists into the contact point consent model used by real-time journeys. This allows you to preserve historical opt-ins and opt-outs while establishing the compliance structure required for future communications.

However, Load Consent should be treated as a data migration process, not an ongoing synchronization mechanism. Before running it in production, make sure your compliance profiles, purposes, audience configuration, and consent preferences are correctly configured. Testing with a smaller data set can also help identify issues involving shared email addresses or incorrect consent mappings.

Once the consent data has been successfully loaded and verified, your organization can begin using Customer Insights – Journeys with a stronger and more reliable compliance foundation.

The key takeaway is simple: your existing consent history still has value. Load Consent helps you carry that history forward instead of asking your customers to start over.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the Load Consent feature in Customer Insights – Journeys?

Load Consent is a built-in feature in Customer Insights – Journeys that helps migrate existing consent preferences from contacts, leads, or legacy subscription lists into contact point consent records. These records can then be used with compliance profiles and purposes in real-time journeys.

2. Does Load Consent automatically synchronize future consent changes?

No. Load Consent is a bulk migration process and not a live synchronization feature. If consent preferences change on a contact or lead record after the load has been completed, those changes are not automatically reflected in the contact point consent records.

3. Which consent fields does Load Consent use?

For contacts and leads, Load Consent evaluates the legacy Do Not Allow Email and Do Not Allow Bulk Email preferences. The configured audience email field determines which email address is used when creating the contact point consent records.

4. Can Load Consent migrate consent stored in custom fields?

No. Load Consent does not read consent values from custom consent fields. If your organization stores consent information in custom fields or another external data source, you may need to use an alternative approach, such as importing consent data from Excel.

5. What happens when multiple contacts have the same email address?

When multiple records share the same email address, Load Consent evaluates the consent status associated with that shared contact point. If one of the linked records indicates that email communication is not allowed, the resulting consent outcome can affect the shared email address.

6. Can Load Consent be used for leads as well as contacts?

Yes. Load Consent supports contacts and leads as consent sources. It can also be used to migrate consent information from legacy subscription lists created for Outbound Marketing.

7. Do I need a compliance profile before running Load Consent?

Yes. You should have the required compliance profile and purposes configured before running Load Consent because the feature needs a destination for the contact point consent records it creates or updates.

8. Should I test Load Consent before running it in production?

Yes. It is recommended to test the process with a smaller data set first, especially if your environment contains duplicate records or multiple contacts sharing the same email address. This helps verify that the resulting consent records match your expected outcomes.

The post Your Existing Consent Data Shouldn’t Have to Start From Zero first appeared on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Tips and Tricks.

Managing a full-capacity event can get tricky when cancellations leave seats open and new registrants have nowhere to go. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys simplifies this with its native event waitlist capability, allowing marketers to manage capacity, queue new registrants, and automatically fill available seats. This blog walks through how to set up and manage a waitlist for a single-session webinar.

Why It Matters

Marketing events are judged on turnout, and turnout is judged against capacity. A webinar platform license, a guest speaker’s time, or a virtual room’s bandwidth all have a ceiling — and every empty seat at that ceiling is wasted spend. Before this feature, closing a full registration list meant either turning latecomers away entirely or manually chasing down replacements every time someone cancelled, usually in a spreadsheet parked outside the CRM. Which is a real pain for the Marketing Team.

Waitlisting solves this in two ways. First, it keeps demand visible instead of discarding it — everyone who wanted in after capacity was reached becomes a tracked, Waitlist record created rather than a bounce. Second, it automates the backfill, so a cancellation on Tuesday can be replaced with a confirmed registrant by Wednesday without an event coordinator manually working the list.

What the Feature Does

At its core, the feature lets you attach a maximum capacity to an event (and, separately, to individual sessions within an event). Once the capacity reached, further registrations are waitlisted. Which can be managed and maintained in any of 2 ways:

• Automatic backfill: when a spot opens up, the system finds the longest-waiting waitlisted contact and registers them immediately.
• Manual backfill: when a spot opens up, the contact is flagged as eligible, and you decide when and how to invite them to claim the seat.

How to Set It Up: A Single-Session Webinar

For a webinar, there’s no session-level agenda to worry about — capacity and waitlisting are configured once, directly on the event.

1. In the Customer Insights Journeys app > under Event Planning > Open the Event work area and go to Events > Open your webinar event (As I am setting it up, its publish status = Draft initially, and when done with set up, we can make it Live).
2. On the General tab, under the Capacity area. Set the maximum event capacity to the number of attendees your webinar platform can support.

3. Set the Waitlist for this event to Yes by changing the toggle “Enable waitlist” = yes
4. Once toggle is set to Yes, the “Auto-register waitlisted contacts” field gets visible, which is set to No by default.

Depending on the “Auto-register waitlisted contacts” setting on the event, the Auto-register waitlisted contacts behave as follows:

• If it’s set to Yes, the system generates a registration for that contact automatically and flips their status reason to Registered.

With auto-register turned on, there’s no manual step at all — the system changes the status reason from Waitlisted to Registered on its own the moment a seat frees up.

• If it’s set to No, the contact isn’t registered automatically. Instead, they need to be invited to confirm they still want the seat, typically via a segment and journey that targets people whose registration is waitlisted and flagged as invited.

Unlike the above option, someone must manually change their status reason from ‘Waitlisted’ to ‘Registered’ using the segment or journey automation.

Let’s keep the “Auto-register waitlisted contacts” toggle to yes as below:

Once setup is finished, clicking on the Go Live button publishes the event and makes it available to registrants.

Once the event is live, the auto-generated Event URL can be dropped into an email and distributed through a customer journey to a targeted segment for registration.

The event registration form that I have created and sent for registration is as follows:

When the user clicks on the “Register Now” button, the “Event Registration” record will be created automatically.

You can refer to the MS doc for more details about Marketing forms. Let’s now look at the Journey side, which triggers are available.

In Customer Insights – Journey app > under Real-time journeys > Journeys> create a new Journey record:

The available triggers are as follows:

The two waitlist triggers

Two journey triggers ship with the feature, and they cover the two moments in the waitlist lifecycle you’re most likely to want to message around:

• Marketing event registration created — fires when a new waitlist registration is created, useful for an immediate “you’re on the list” confirmation.
• Marketing registration created from waitlist — fires when a registration’s status reason flips from Waitlisted to Registered, useful for the “a seat opened up — you’re confirmed” moment

Select the appropriate trigger and choose your event record as below:

For this blog, let’s keep the Journey very simple. When the Event Registration record is created, the Registration confirmation email should be sent. In reality, it can be complex with follow-up steps, and you can use the custom trigger when the status reason of the event registration record is updated. You can refer to the MS doc for more details about the custom trigger.

How It Works

The mechanics are simpler than they might sound, and they hinge entirely on the status reason attached to each event registration record.

Every registration that comes in after capacity is reached is saved with a status reason of Waitlisted, rather than Registered.

In our example, when the 11^th attendee (as the capacity is set as 10) tries to register for the webinar, they will experience the waitlist form instead of the simple registration. Now they will click on the “Join a waitlist” button as displayed below:

Event registration record still created with status reason as Waitlisted, shown below:

When an existing registrant cancels (freeing up a seat), the system revisits the waitlist and identifies the oldest record — the contact who has been waiting longest, based on registration date and time.

As the “Auto-register waitlisted contacts” setting is set to Yes in our scenario, the system will auto-change the “Waitlisted” status reason to “Registered” — no manual step is required.

The status reason field is really the backbone of the whole feature — it’s what a segment or a journey trigger reads to know whether someone is holding a confirmed seat or still in the queue.

You can select a particular “Event Registration” record and can cancel the registration manually if needed, the 2 buttons available on selection of the record are Check in and Cancel Registration as shown below:

You will observe the warning on the event record itself that the event has reached its maximum registration capacity. For more details, refer to the MS doc.

With waitlisting configured for this webinar, here’s what happens end-to-end:

• Maximum event capacity is set to 10, Waitlist this event is set to Yes, and Auto-register waitlisted contacts is set to Yes.
• The Marketing event registration created trigger fires the moment someone lands on the waitlist, so they can immediately receive a “you’re on the waitlist, we’ll notify you if a slot opens” email rather than being left wondering through Journey.
• The Marketing registration created from the waitlist trigger fires the moment they’re promoted, sending a follow-up confirmation with the standard join link and calendar invite through Journey.

Conclusion

With event waitlisting, Customer Insights Journeys can automatically manage registrations as seats become available, while journey triggers keep registrants informed at each stage.

Looking to extend your Dynamics 365 capabilities? Explore Inogic for more Dynamics 365 solutions.

Have questions? Email us at crm@inogic.com

FAQs

1. How do I enable a waitlist in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Journeys?

Open the event, go to the Capacity area, set the maximum event capacity, and enable the Waitlist option. You can then choose whether waitlisted contacts should be automatically registered when a seat becomes available.

2. What happens when a Dynamics 365 event reaches its maximum capacity?

New registrants are added to the waitlist instead of being registered directly. Their event registration record is created with the Waitlisted status reason.

3. Can Dynamics 365 automatically register contacts from an event waitlist?

Yes. Enable Auto-register waitlisted contacts on the event. When a registered attendee cancels and a seat becomes available, the longest-waiting contact can be automatically moved from Waitlisted to Registered.

4. What journey triggers are available for event waitlists?

Customer Insights Journeys provides two relevant triggers: Marketing event registration created, which can be used when a waitlist registration is created, and Marketing registration created from waitlist, which can be used when a waitlisted contact is moved to a confirmed registration.

5. Can I manually manage waitlisted registrations in Dynamics 365?

Yes. Waitlisted registrations can be reviewed and managed from the Event Registration records. You can also manually cancel registrations when required and use journeys or other automation to manage communication with waitlisted contacts.

The post Setting Up Event Waitlists in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys first appeared on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Tips and Tricks.

Building a customer journey should be simple: describe your goal, and the system builds it. In reality, marketing teams spend hours configuring triggers, wait steps, branching conditions, and channel sequencing to bring a single campaign idea to life.

For many teams, a five-minute idea becomes a two-hour project, and often ends with a request to Marketing Operations to “just build it for me.” This inefficiency slows campaign execution and keeps specialists buried in repetitive configuration work instead of strategic thinking.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is now closing this gap with Journey Creation Agent, a new AI-powered capability that turns plain-English descriptions into fully structured, ready-to-review journeys. Instead of manually assembling every step, you simply describe what you want to achieve, and the agent drafts the entire journey: steps, timing, branching, and channel sequencing included.

In this guide, we’ll explore what the Journey Creation Agent is, why it matters, how it works with real business examples, the requirements to get started, and the tangible benefits it brings to marketing teams.

Why Do We Need a Journey Creation Agent?

Building a journey from scratch involves far more than dragging tiles onto a canvas. It requires deliberate decisions about when the journey starts, how long to wait between messages, what happens if contacts don’t respond, and which channel to use at each stage. Getting all of this right takes both platform expertise and significant time.

This creates two persistent challenges in most organizations:

• Business users with promising campaign ideas must depend on specialists to translate those ideas into journeys, which delays execution.
• Even experienced journey builders spend considerable time on repetitive configuration work rather than strategy and content development.

Journey Creation Agent eliminates this friction. It lets anyone with a clear goal describe that goal conversationally, and the system assembles the steps using best-practice patterns for timing and branching.

What is a Journey Creation Agent?

Journey Creation Agent is an AI assistant built into Customer Insights – Journeys that transforms plain-language descriptions of campaign goals into ready-to-review journeys. You describe your target audience, what you want to send, and roughly when, and it proposes a complete flow using the segments and content already in your environment.

It’s important to understand what the agent does today: it assembles existing building blocks into a journey.

The agent does not create new audience segments, and it does not write new email or SMS content for you. However, if those assets are already prepared, the agent can put together a logical, ready-to-refine journey in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

What Can It Do?

• Turns a conversation into a journey: Describe your goal, audience, and timeline, and receive a proposed journey with steps, wait periods, and branching already mapped out.
• Works across channels: The agent can sequence email, SMS, push notifications, and custom channels, and set up conditional branches. For example, send SMS only to contacts who didn’t open the earlier email.
• Nothing goes live without your review: Before publishing, you get a visual preview of the proposed journey and can request changes or open it in the journey designer for manual fine-tuning.
• Uses your real data: Journey proposals are grounded in the segments, triggers, and content already in your environment, so the output reflects what is actually available.
• Connects with Sales and Service: You can build journeys triggered by events elsewhere in Dynamics 365. Such as a new opportunity, a stalled deal, or a resolved support case. This helps marketing and sales stay in sync without manual handoffs.

Key Requirements Before You Start

Before implementing the Journey Creation Agent, ensure the following prerequisites are met:

• You need a Marketing Manager or Marketing Professional role, or equivalent permissions, to create and publish journeys.
• Currently, the agent responds only in English.
• This is a preview capability, so it is not intended for production-critical use, and functionality may change.
• Having your segments and content (email, SMS, or push notification drafts) ready in advance makes the conversation faster and initial proposals more accurate.
• Using the agent draws on your organization’s allocated Copilot credits. Monitor usage accordingly.
• An administrator must enable the feature in AI Hub, and your tenant must be opted in to use the underlying AI model through Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Power Platform Admin Center.

To enable, navigate to Settings > AI Hub > “Add and manage agents.” Verification is simple: check AI Hub under AI Agents to confirm “Journey Creation Agent” appears as added and enabled.

You can verify this by going to AI Hub and checking under AI Agents that “Journey Creation Agent” shows up as added and enabled, with just a simple set of configuration steps involved – no lengthy setup needed.

The steps that are configured for this setup are as below:

1. Overview: A quick summary of what Journey Creation Agent does and the value it brings, before you turn anything on.

2. Prerequisites – Confirms the requirements are met (like tenant opt-in for the AI model and required licensing) before the agent can be enabled.
3. Settings – Where you actually toggle the agent on/off and configure any environment-specific options for how it runs.

4. As this agent uses “Microsoft Dataverse” connector will be used by this agent, so make sure you have connected those through Copilot Studio as below:

Business Scenarios: Real-World Examples

Scenario 1: Onboarding New Contacts

A company runs regular sign-up campaigns. Every time someone new joins a particular audience list, the marketing team wants them to receive a short series of welcome emails. Manually building this means configuring a segment-based trigger, adding each email in sequence, and setting appropriate gaps between them.

The marketing executive opens Journey Creation Agent and simply describes the outcome: start a welcome journey whenever a new contact is added to the target segment, and send a short series of onboarding emails over the first few days. Using the / shortcut, they point the agent to the exact segment and let it pick up the associated email content already prepared in the library.

Within moments, the agent proposes a segment-based journey with an entry condition, three touchpoints in sequence, and sensible wait periods between sends. In this example, the “Welcome” email is sent immediately when the contact joins the segment, again after Day 5, and once more after Day 10—a gentle series of reminders. The marketer reviews the flow and opens it in the journey designer for a final check before publishing.

Scenario 2: Nurturing New Leads

Sales regularly receives leads from a web form, but not every lead is ready to speak with a salesperson immediately. Marketing wants a structured nurture sequence that keeps leads engaged until they show more interest.

The marketing manager describes the goal conversationally: build a lead nurture journey that automatically follows up with anyone who submits the relevant form, using associated email content. The agent checks the form and linked content assets and proposes a journey that starts immediately upon form submission, sends the intended email, and branches based on whether the lead engages.

Scenario 3: Sending a Recurring Newsletter

Many teams run regular newsletters for specific audiences. Perhaps a monthly update for customers or a topic-focused newsletter for subscribers. Manual setup typically requires creating a recurring schedule, tying it to the right segment, and ensuring timely delivery. With Journey Creation Agent, the content marketer describes the desired pattern: send a newsletter to the chosen segment on a set cadence, covering a given topic.

Across all three scenarios, what normally requires significant manual configuration is drafted in minutes through simple conversation, freeing marketers to focus on messaging and strategy rather than mechanics.

How to Use Journey Creation Agent

Step 1: Start a New Journey with the Agent

In Customer Insights – Journeys, go to Journeys in the left-hand navigation under the “Real – time journeys” area, click on “New journey” button as below:

Upon clicking on the button, you will be able to see the Journey Creation Agent (preview) page as shown below. If you don’t want to use it, then you can skip and create from blank as well.

Now, let’s use the Journey Creation Agent (preview) feature to create the journey.

Step 2: Describe What You Want to Build

This is where you tell the agent what you have in mind. You can either start typing your own description straight into the text box, or lean on the ready-made prompt cards the agent offers, such as Onboarding, Lead Nurture, or Re-engagement. If none of the visible cards match what you need, select “See more” to browse the full list of pre-built prompts and pick one closer to your scenario, then tweak the wording to fit. The more detail you include about your audience, timeline, and preferred channels, the more complete the first draft will be. You can also type / in the message box to quickly search for and reference an exact segment, trigger, or content asset by name.

Step 3: Answer Any Clarifying Questions

If the agent needs more information to build an accurate journey, it will ask follow-up questions – for instance, whether the journey should start on a fixed date, as soon as a contact qualifies, or when a specific event happens. You can pick from the suggested options or simply type your answer.

Good to know: if a dedicated “Welcome” or “Onboarding” email has not been created yet, the agent does not leave that step blank. Instead, it picks another existing email record from the environment as a placeholder, so the journey structure stays complete and ready to review. This is a helpful stand-in, but it also means it is worth double-checking each step’s assigned content before publishing, and swapping in the right email once it has been created.

The agent picks up existing content correctly whenever a matching email is already available in the environment. In this case, since a “Welcome” email already existed, the agent picked it up on its own and reused it across all three touchpoints without needing any manual correction.

If a dedicated email had not existed yet, the agent would instead have picked another existing email record from the environment as a placeholder, keeping the journey structure complete and ready to review. Either way, it is worth glancing over each step’s assigned content before publishing, just to confirm it is exactly what you intended.

Step 4: Review the Proposed Journey

The agent presents a structured proposal covering the journey type, each touchpoint with its suggested content, the wait periods between steps, the branching logic, and how contacts enter and exit the journey. Go through each section to confirm it matches what you had in mind.

Step 5: Refine Through Conversation

If something is not quite right, just say so in the chat – for example, asking to change a wait period, add a condition after a step, or swap in a different piece of content. The proposal updates immediately based on your feedback.

NOTE:

Do as much refining as you can in the agent chat before clicking “Review and Publish,” since after that point, you’re back to standard manual editing on the canvas.

Step 6: Move to the Journey Designer and Publish

Once the structure looks right, select “Review and Publish” to open the journey on the standard canvas with every proposed step, condition, and content assignment already in place.

From the journey canvas, now you can make any further manual adjustments – adding or removing steps, changing conditions, or adjusting timings – exactly as you would with a journey built from scratch.

When everything looks good, publish the journey as usual.

For more details, you can refer to the official Microsoft documentation here.

Benefits of Journey Creation Agent

• Faster journey creation: What once took hours of manual configuration is now drafted in minutes through simple conversation.
• Lower dependency on specialists: Business users without deep platform expertise can build solid journeys independently, freeing Marketing Operations specialists for higher-value work.
• Consistent, best-practice structure: The agent applies sensible defaults for timing and branching, ensuring journeys follow best practices even when built by non-experts.
• Better alignment across teams: Because the agent can trigger journeys from Sales and Service events, marketing, sales, and support can coordinate outreach without manual back-and-forth.

Conclusion

Journey Creation Agent transforms how marketing teams build customer journeys. By turning plain-language goals into structured, editable journeys, it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for business users while keeping every decision firmly in human hands.

Ready to transform how your marketing team builds customer journeys?

Reach out to us at crm@inogic.com to explore how Journey Creation Agent can accelerate your customer engagement strategy. Our team of Dynamics 365 experts is here to guide your implementation and maximize value from day one.

FAQs

1. What is Journey Creation Agent in Dynamics 365?

Journey Creation Agent is an AI-powered assistant built into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys that converts plain-language descriptions of campaign goals into fully structured, ready-to-review customer journeys. Instead of manually configuring each step, you describe your objective, and the agent drafts the complete journey including entry conditions, touchpoints, wait periods, and branching logic. All existing segments and content in your environment are used to create accurate, actionable journey proposals.

2. How long does it take to build a journey with Journey Creation Agent?

What typically takes 2-3 hours of manual configuration can now be completed in minutes. You describe your campaign goal in conversational language, answer a few clarifying questions, review the proposed journey structure, and refine it through chat. Most users report drafting a complete journey in 5-15 minutes, compared to hours when building manually on the canvas.

3. Can Journey Creation Agent write email content or create new segments?

No. Journey Creation Agent assembles existing building blocks only. It does not create new audience segments, write email copy, or generate SMS and push notification content. However, if your email, SMS, and push assets are already prepared in your environment, the agent can select and sequence them intelligently throughout the journey structure.

4. What permissions do I need to use Journey Creation Agent?

You need a Marketing Manager or Marketing Professional role in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, or an equivalent set of permissions, to create and publish journeys with the agent. Additionally, a system administrator must enable the feature in AI Hub, and your tenant must be opted in to allow the underlying AI model through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Power Platform Admin Center.

5. What channels can Journey Creation Agent use in customer journeys?

Journey Creation Agent can sequence multiple channels including email, SMS, push notifications, and custom channels. It can also set up intelligent conditional branches, such as sending SMS only to contacts who did not open a previous email. This cross-channel capability helps ensure coordinated, multi-touch customer engagement automatically

The post From Idea to Journey in Minutes: Meet the Journey Creation Agent first appeared on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Tips and Tricks.

Creating a marketing campaign takes time and careful planning. From designing the email to selecting the right audience, every step plays a role in its success. However, even well-planned campaigns don’t always deliver the expected results. When engagement falls short, marketers often spend hours reviewing reports and analyzing campaign performance to understand what can be improved for future campaigns.

• Was the audience targeted correctly?
• Could a different subject line have performed better?
• Was the email sent at the right time?
• What changes can improve the next campaign?

Finding these answers usually involves reviewing multiple reports, comparing previous campaigns, and relying on past experience. While this approach can be effective, it is often time-consuming.

To simplify campaign optimization, Microsoft introduced the Outreach Optimization Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. It analyzes campaign performance and provides AI-driven recommendations, helping marketers identify opportunities to improve future campaigns without spending hours reviewing analytics.

Steps to enable Outreach Optimization Agent (Prerequisites)

1. Go to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys
2. Navigate to the Settings area and click on AI hub as below
3. Click on ‘Add and manage agents’
4. Make sure all Prerequisites are met in order to add an agent
5. Click on the Add an agent button to add ‘Outreach Optimization Agent’
6. Now the agent is enabled for the environment

What is the Outreach Optimization Agent?

The Outreach Optimization Agent is an AI-powered assistant that helps marketers improve the performance of their email campaigns. Rather than simply displaying campaign statistics, it analyses customer engagement and suggests areas where your outreach strategy can be improved.

Think of it as an assistant that continuously reviews your marketing activities and points out opportunities to make your next campaign more effective.

How to Configure the Outreach Optimization Agent in a Journey

Once your customer journey is ready, you can enhance it by adding the Outreach Optimization action. This allows the AI to determine the best time to send your email, helping improve customer engagement without any manual effort.

Step 1: Open Your Customer Journey

Navigate to Customer Insights – Journeys > Journeys and open the journey you want to optimize.

In this example, we have a journey that is triggered when a customer submits a marketing form. The journey sends a confirmation email after the form submission.

Step 2: Add the Outreach Optimization Action

Click the + (Add) icon where you want to optimize the email delivery.

From the list of available actions, select Outreach Optimization.

This action uses AI to analyze customer engagement patterns and determine the most suitable time to deliver the email.

Step 3: Configure the Action

Once the action is added, configure the required details.

• Select the email that should be optimized.
• Choose the date by which the email should be delivered.

The Outreach Optimization Agent will use this information to determine the best delivery time while respecting the recipient’s quiet hours.

Step 4: Save and Publish the Journey

After completing the configuration, save your changes and publish the journey.

From this point onwards, whenever a customer enters the journey, the Outreach Optimization Agent automatically analyses historical engagement data and schedules the selected email at the most appropriate time before the specified date.

Step 5: Monitor the Journey Performance

Once the journey has been running for some time, navigate to the journey analytics page to review the campaign’s performance.

Monitor key metrics such as:

• Email deliveries
• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Customer engagement

These insights will help you understand how AI-optimized delivery contributes to improving your email campaigns.

As this agent is in Preview, refer to this Microsoft blog: Doc

Conclusion

Successful marketing is about continuously improving your campaigns. The Outreach Optimization Agent helps marketers make smarter decisions by using AI to optimize email delivery and improve customer engagement. Instead of spending hours reviewing campaign reports, marketers can use AI-driven insights to identify opportunities for improvement and make future campaigns more effective.

As the feature is currently in Preview, you can also refer to the Microsoft documentation to learn more about its capabilities and latest updates.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the Outreach Optimization Agent in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys?

The Outreach Optimization Agent is an AI-powered feature that helps marketers improve email campaign performance. It analyzes customer engagement patterns and determines the best time to send emails, helping increase engagement with minimal manual effort.

How does the Outreach Optimization Agent decide when to send an email?

The agent analyzes historical customer engagement data and schedules the email for the most appropriate time before the delivery deadline you specify. It also considers the recipient’s quiet hours while scheduling the email.

Do I need to manually configure the Outreach Optimization Agent for every email?

You need to add and configure the Outreach Optimization action within your customer journey. Once the journey is published, the agent automatically optimizes email delivery for customers who enter the journey.

Can I monitor the performance of AI-optimized email campaigns?

Yes. After the journey has been running, you can review its analytics to monitor metrics such as email deliveries, open rates, click-through rates, and customer engagement to evaluate campaign performance.

Is the Outreach Optimization Agent generally available?

At the time of writing, the Outreach Optimization Agent is available in Preview. Microsoft may introduce additional features and enhancements before it becomes generally available.

The post Outreach Optimization Agent (Preview) in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights first appeared on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Tips and Tricks.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is one of the most preferred modules offered by Microsoft, which provides a flexible platform that enables organizations to engage their audience across every stage of the customer journey.

It empowers businesses to create personalized, timely, and meaningful interactions based on customer behavior and preferences. As we all know, understanding your customers is not a one-time activity; it is a continuous journey that evolves with every interaction. Targeting the right audience to perform any marketing activity is the key to success.

When running marketing activities in Customer Insights – Journeys, the most important question to answer is:

“Who exactly should receive this message or journey?”

This is where Segments play a key role.

What Are Segments in Customer Insights – Journeys?

Segments in Customer Insights – Journeys allow you to group Contacts or Leads based on a defined set of attributes or behaviors. These segments act as the foundation for targeting audiences in real-time journeys, emails, and other marketing engagements.

Using segments, you can:

• Filter Contacts or Leads using specific conditions
• Target audiences based on demographic or behavioral data
• Ensure messages reach the most relevant audience

Segments help transform generic marketing campaigns into highly targeted and strategic journeys.

Types of Segments in Customer Insights – Journeys

There are two types of segments available in Customer Insights – Journeys:

1. Automatic Refresh (Dynamic Segment)
2. Static Snapshot (Static Segment)

In earlier versions of the Marketing app, users could choose the segment type directly while clicking the New Segment button. In the current Real-time Journeys experience, this behavior has changed.

Now, you must:

1. Create the segment first
2. Define the segment type later from the Settings panel

Where to Find Segments in Customer Insights – Journeys

To access segments:

• Go to Customer Insights – Journeys
• Navigate to Real-time journeys
• Select Audience → Segments

At the segment record level, you will notice a Type field that indicates whether the segment is configured as a Static Snapshot or an Automatic Refresh.

How to Create a Segment in the New Experience

When you click New Segment, you are no longer prompted to choose between Static or Dynamic upfront. Instead, the segment is created first, and its behavior is defined later.

During creation, you have two options:

1. Using Query Assist (Copilot)

Query Assist allows Copilot AI to help generate segment logic.

• Start typing in the Query Assist box
• Select a predefined prompt such as “Contacts who opened an email”
• Click Create

You can either:

• Click Use to apply the suggested query
• Or click Create manually to skip AI assistance

Once selected, Copilot helps build the initial query structure based on the chosen prompt.

During creation, you have two options:

1. Using Query Assist (Copilot)

Query Assist allows Copilot AI to help generate segment logic.

• Start typing in the Query Assist box
• Select a predefined prompt such as “Contacts who opened an email”
• Click Create

You can either:

• Click Use to apply the suggested query
• Or click Create manually to skip AI assistance

Once selected, Copilot helps build the initial query structure based on the chosen prompt.

You can find more details in this doc for understanding the building segment with “Query Assist”.

2. Creating a Segment Manually

If you prefer full control:

• Click Create manually, or
• Leave the Query Assist box empty and click Create

This opens the Segment Builder, where you can define your logic from scratch.

Building Segment Logic Using the Segment Builder

Inside the Segment Builder, you can define segment criteria using:

• Attribute-based conditions (e.g., Industry, Country, Job Title)
• Behavioral conditions (e.g., email opens, form submissions)
• Include or Exclude specific Leads or Contacts

You can explicitly include or exclude records. Even if a record does not meet the defined conditions, it will always be included or excluded if specified manually.

If you include or exclude any lead explicitly, then even if it has not met the pre-defined condition, it will always be filtered and will be included or excluded from the segment member list.

When you open Segment Builder, you can start creating a new group by clicking on the desired options (either Attribute or Behavioral). if required, you can Include or Exclude a particular audience as well.

Refer screenshots below:

Example Use Case: Targeting Manufacturing Leads from India

Let’s consider a practical example.

Use case:
Target Leads from the Manufacturing sector located in India.

Segment conditions:

• Industry equals Manufacturing Services
• Country/Region equals India

You can create an Attribute group and define these conditions accordingly. Once the logic is complete, save the segment.

Before activating it, you can preview the audience size.

Estimating Segment Size Before Activation

Before marking a segment as Ready to use, you can:

• Click Estimate to preview the expected number of segment members
• Review the estimated member count to validate your logic

This helps ensure your targeting criteria are accurate before using the segment in a journey.

The members count can be previewed from here:

Segment Settings: Static Snapshot vs Automatic Refresh

The Settings panel is where the segment type is defined.

By default, all newly created segments are set to Automatic Refresh.

Let us consider one of the Dynamic Segment graphs. As you can see in the graph below, the segment size has been updated (increased) over the duration.

If there is a use case where you want to create the Segment as Static, then explicitly you have to set it as “Static Snapshot” option as shown below:

In “Static Snapshot,” the simple segment size will not be updated dynamically, and it is of one-time use.

Let us consider one of the Static Segment graphs, as you can see in the graph below, the segment size has remained standstill over the duration, as it was a one-time activity.

Key Differences: Static Snapshot vs Automatic Refresh

FAQs

What Is Automatic Refresh (Dynamic Segment)?

In Automatic Refresh, the segment membership updates dynamically.

This means:

• New Contacts or Leads that meet the criteria are automatically added
• Records that no longer meet the criteria are removed
• The segment size changes continuously over time

Dynamic segments are ideal for:

• Ongoing marketing journeys
• Real-time audience targeting
• Long-running nurture campaigns

You can observe these changes visually through segment growth graphs, where the member count increases or decreases over time.

What Is Static Snapshot (Static Segment)?

In Static Snapshot, the segment captures audience members at a specific point in time.

This means:

• Segment membership does not update after activation
• The audience remains fixed
• It is typically used for one-time activities

Static Snapshot segments are best suited for:

• One-time email campaigns
• Event invitations
• Compliance or audit-based targeting

Segment graphs for Static Snapshot segments show a flat line, indicating no change in membership over time.

When Should You Use Each Segment Type?

• Use Automatic Refresh when your audience changes frequently and journeys run continuously.
• Use Static Snapshot when you need a fixed audience for a specific moment or campaign.

Choosing the right segment type ensures accurate targeting and optimal journey performance.

Conclusion

Segments play a critical role in successfully targeting audiences within Customer Insights – Journeys. Whether you are grouping customers based on demographic attributes or behavioral interactions, segments allow you to make your marketing more strategic and data-driven.

Automatic Refresh segments are ideal for real-time, evolving journeys, while Static Snapshot segments are best suited for one-time or fixed audience scenarios. Understanding the difference between these two options helps you design more effective journeys and deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

The post Static or Dynamic Segments? A Complete Guide for Customer Insights – Journeys first appeared on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Tips and Tricks.