Enhance customer engagement apps with Microsoft Power Platform Integration

  • 8 minutes

Power Platform is Microsoft’s low-code application development platform that spans Dynamics 365, Office 365, Azure, and standalone applications. It combines the power of Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Pages into one business application platform that provides quick and easy app building and data insights.

Diagram that enumerates the products included with Power Platform.

The Power Platform is important to Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps for many reasons. First, all Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps are called model-driven applications. Model-driven applications are built using Power Apps. They're based on a data model store within Microsoft Dataverse, which we cover in the next unit. Components such as forms, views, charts, and dashboards are used to present data to end users.

Model-driven applications aren't the only component of the Power Platform used by Dynamics 365 applications. Overall, the Power Platform components used by Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps can include:

  • Power Apps: Power Apps provides a rapid low code development environment for building custom apps for business needs. It's a suite of app development services with a scalable data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) and the ability to interact with cloud & on-premises data sources. Power Apps enables the creation of web and mobile applications that run on all devices.

  • Power BI: The business analytics capabilities provided by Power BI are often used to connect to Dynamics 365 applications and provide important insight into an organization. These visualizations can be used inside Dynamics 365 apps like Dynamics 365 Sales or Customer Service.

  • Power Automate: Items called business process flows are the primary component in Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps. They help guide people to get done. For example, Dynamics 365 Sales includes business process flow that helps guide sellers beginning with a Lead and ending with a closed sale.

  • Power Pages: Many organizations provide customers with self-support options where customers can access a portal and find answers to questions, engage with support, or even open new support tickets. Power Pages makes it easy for organizations to create externally facing sites that connect to Dataverse that customers can access.

  • Copilot Studio: As agents continue to work into our daily lives, Microsoft Copilot Studio allows you to create custom agents that can be used to extend the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps. For example, you could create an agent to help customers with support questions and reduce your representatives' workload.