At the end of October Microsoft launched a way to capture even greater detail on its (and your) customers than Microsoft Dynamics CRM: the Microsoft Health platform.  Designed to work with devices and services from leading fitness service providers such as Jawbone, MapMyFitness, and RunKeeper; Microsoft Health aims to become your ‘go to’ app when it comes to keeping track of your health and wellbeing.

Small changes, big data

Taken at an individual level, the potential of Microsoft Health (and let’s face it, any fitness device, nutrition plan or exercise regime) to improve your overall wellbeing is obvious.  By keeping an eye on indicators such as calories, activity, quality of sleep, heart rate and blood pressure, users become more interested and invested, in making positive choices.

Incredible insights = incredible opportunities

Once you begin to scale that data up, it offers an incredible opportunity for all sorts of organisations, including Dynamics Partners.  Consider people that track their running routes with MapMyRun or cyclists using Garmin.  By uploading their routes to a database, businesses who are interested in serving the needs of those runners and cyclists as consumers can make informed commercial decision such as where to site new shops.  And when they want to contact those people, they’re going to want to use the CRM system best placed to do it.

Healthier lifestyles

In Todd Holmdahl’s (Microsoft Corporate VP) announcement he talks about the fact that (subject to user approval) the data uploaded into Microsoft Health’s Intelligence Engine could be made available to doctors and other healthcare professionals leading to a more tailored approach to healthcare.  It could help with large scale studies into the impact of diet and exercise and identify patterns of activity in cities and towns, even right down to postcode.

Dynamic data

Now, because this is Microsoft, there is naturally a fit for all of the other products in the Microsoft portfolio (as well as IOS and Android devices – nice to see acceptance that Windows devices haven’t completely won the market).  The word ‘customer’ is threaded throughout the announcement, as are references for partners being able to create and provide “customer insights”.  Given that you can’t even hope to properly manage customer engagement unless you’ve got a great CRM system; Dynamics CRM partners working in the healthcare, fitness or nutrition industry look like they’ve got a healthy new revenue stream for the future.  As for the rest of us, Microsoft has also announced the availability of the Microsoft Band to connect us up and get us ready to get healthy – we’d better start eating our greens...

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