Picture this — A world where every interaction with customers feels like a conversation among old friends, where every product recommendation seems chosen straight from their priority list, and where every marketing message resonates as if it were penned just for them.
This is made possible with the SAP Customer Data Platform — an intelligent system that transforms the way companies manage their critical business and customer data, build customer relationships, and ensure long-term customer loyalty and trust across their entire enterprise.
In this article, we’ll discuss the main features and capabilities of the Customer Data Platform in SAP, how it improves customer experience and data management functionality, and where our team of expert SAP consultants can help optimize your overall SAP investment.
What is the SAP Customer Data Platform?
The SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a comprehensive customer data management platform designed to connect different types of data from various sources in one place and surface relevant insights to improve customer engagement and facilitate more robust connections between front and back-end operations.
Understanding Customer Data Management in SAP
SAP Customer Data Management (CDM) solutions leverage both out-of-the-box and customized connectors to import, export, and exchange data from various data sources and improve data consolidation and management across the entire Customer Data Cloud.
SAP CDM functionality also allows users to utilize raw customer data to build unified customer profiles and contextual profiles that make it easier to match, merge, and manage customer identities, attributes, and events.
The unified customer profile facilitates data matching based on weak identifiers (i.e., a common IP address shared by multiple users) and a low confidence level, while the contextual profile relies on stronger identifiers (i.e., an ID number specific to one user) and higher levels of confidence to identify customers and match them to their data.
Customer profiles allow marketers, salespeople, and other service providers to personalize omnichannel customer experiences and improve overall engagement by leveraging relevant customer data and tapping into actionable customer insights.
In SAP, customer profiles comprise the basis of:
- Personalized activity indicators
- Total audience management
- Customizable CX workflows
- Dynamic customer segmentation
Key Features of the Customer Data Platform
When it comes to building customer trust, ensuring customer needs are met, and creating more engaging customer experiences, comprehensive SAP Customer Experience (CX) solutions, like SAP Customer Data Management (CDM), SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP), and the SAP Customer Data Cloud (CDC) have you covered.
Even better, SAP’s interconnected landscape lets users choose their own experiences, meaning they can implement all of the in-built SAP Customer Experience solutions or just the ones they need the most.
Here’s a closer look at the main capabilities included in the SAP Customer Data Platform:
1) Stronger understanding of key customers
When it comes to gaining better insights into customer data, leveraging a rich data model to bridge the gaps between functional data silos, and enhancing customer data management through generative AI and operational intelligence capabilities, the more information, the better.
Customer profiles
SAP CDP allows companies to improve customer profile management and relationship association on both the individual and account levels through comprehensive B2B and B2C customer profiles.
Industry accelerators
With industry accelerators fueled by customer data, companies can create industry-specific data models and propensity models to solve unique business challenges.
Preintegrations
By leveraging preintegrations with back-office data and a common data model, companies can connect their most important enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and other cloud operations to enrich insights and improve performance.
2) Better-focused customer engagements
The SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP) allows companies to leverage real-time data insights to improve customer interactions, drive stronger engagements through intuitive customer profiles, and generate more opportunities for future growth.
Real-time data
SAP CDP facilitates real-time data collection from multiple sources and allows companies to outline unique customer profiles for enterprise-level B2B and B2C use cases.
Advanced data orchestration
Intelligent enterprise data orchestration capabilities allow companies to create and deploy orchestrations that make customer and account data available in the right customer engagement systems across their SAP landscape.
Intelligent decision-making
With advanced attributes for audience management and customer segmentation in the SAP CDP platform, companies can facilitate more informed decision-making across teams and ensure users have the data they need on a regular basis.
3) Relevant customer data management
Inaccurate, outdated data can often stand in the way of a company reaching its true potential. SAP CDP is built on an enterprise identity and data privacy foundation, making it easier to ensure business-critical data remains accurate, secure, and credible over time.
Data governance
SAP CDP leverages intelligent customer engagement systems built on data privacy permissions to orchestrate customer data more effectively and improve data governance across teams.
Data privacy
With respect to data privacy and protection, SAP CDP allows organizations to consolidate their critical customer identity and purpose data in one place.
This way, they can better understand customer behavior, respect how customers engage with their own data, and improve the efficiency of their core customer-facing operations.
Data expertise
Zero-party data expertise helps users activate permission-based profile data and exchange it between different customers, teams, and systems.
Main Advantages of SAP CDP for Business Users
Here are the Top 5 advantages of the SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP) for users across industries:
360-Degree Customer View:
CDP provides a comprehensive, real-time view of customer data from multiple data sources, including customer demographics, behavior, purchase history, interactions, and preferences. A 360-degree customer view enables businesses to better understand their customers (and their behaviors) and deliver more personalized experiences across the board.
Data Consolidation:
The SAP CDP solution streamlines customer data collection, cleansing, and unification from various touchpoints and channels to ensure data consistency and accuracy and reduce errors and duplicate records. With a consolidated data source, business users can trust their data is accurate and up-to-date and make better, more informed decisions.
Customer Segmentation:
The CDP platform empowers business users to create highly targeted customer segments and campaigns based on specific criteria, such as demographics, behavior, or engagement history. This enables marketing teams to deliver personalized marketing campaigns, offers, and initiatives, improving campaign effectiveness and customer engagement across teams.
Real-Time Insights:
CDP SAP capabilities provide real-time analytics and insights into customer data, behavior, and trends. Business users can access up-to-date customer data and key performance metrics, allowing them to respond quickly to changing customer preferences and dynamics in an ever-changing market.
Marketing Integration:
The SAP Customer Data Platform seamlessly integrates with various marketing tools and platforms, like email marketing, social media, advertising, and more, to facilitate better connections across all core marketing initiatives. Business users can leverage these integrations to orchestrate and automate marketing campaigns and ensure consistent messaging and customer experiences across channels.
How Can We Help?
Whether you need help implementing the SAP Customer Data Platform to improve customer-facing business processes, additional support connecting customer data across all business units, or just an extra hand supporting integrations between other systems, Surety Systems is here to help.
Our senior-level, US-based SAP consultant team has the functional knowledge, technical skills, and real-world experience to help you achieve all your most important SAP-related goals and objectives.
You name it, we’ve got the best-fit consultant for it!
Partnering with the Best
Interested in learning how the SAP Customer Data Management Suite can improve data consolidation and management across multiple sources or where our team of expert SAP consultants can fit in your organization?
Contact us today for more information!
