SAP Customer Experience creates personalized, 1-1 relationships with customer data control to knock down barriers to purchase and build customer loyalty.
As Alex Atzberger says, “Customers are Done with Creepy”. That feeling when a business knows too much about you can be downright Orwellian – how did they get this information, and how are they using it? As more and more stories surface of businesses abusing customer trust and with governments implementing measures against data abuse such as GDPR, how should commerce businesses react? How can we, and our clients, break down barriers on the path to purchasing, and build customers’ trust, gaining one view of the customer, but giving them control over personal data at the same time?
SAP’s approach to helping brands build trust and loyalty was to change the dynamic of the relationship between the customers and the brand. With Customer Data Cloud at the heart of the SAP CX portfolio, the customer now sets the rules of engagement with the brand, as opposed to the brand imposing its rules of engagement onto the customer. With control in their hands, the customer now progressively feeds more information about themselves in exchange for a more relevant buying experience.
Working together, SAP Marketing, SAP Commerce, and SAP Customer Data Clouds allow customers and brands to create the deepest personalization on the market. This is how:
SAP Customer Data Cloud
This component of SAP Customer Experience is the central hub that holds the golden record of each of your customers. This is the dream of every CEO – to be able to view each individual customer’s preferences, in order to deliver the best customer experience possible.
Customer Data Cloud accomplishes this in 3 areas:
SAP Customer Identity – allows your customers to sign in to your customer experience across devices and channels in a secure way, so you have access to their profile, but with their protection as the highest priority.
SAP Customer Consent – gives customers complete control over their data use in an intuitive, easy to use format. Also addresses regional data protection laws, including GDPR.
SAP Customer Profile – the golden record. Use this to effectively market and sell to customers across every touchpoint by allowing your business users to have access to the profile for segmentation and marketing purposes.
Image source: https://developers.gigya.com/display/GD/Identity+Access
The Customer Data Cloud ensures the information you need on your customers is being disseminated to the right components of your business organization, to drive the right interactions across marketing, sales, service, and commerce. It also allows any of those channels to contribute back to the golden record, and update customer permissions, in real time, to keep valuable data up to date, secure, and approved for use by each individual customer.
SAP Marketing Cloud
SAP Marketing Cloud acts as the “mission control” of the population of customers and prospects, allowing marketing teams to apply rules and analytics to customers by segment, and to determine segments using built-in AI. This is because SAP Marketing uses “precision-driven, In-Moment Marketing”. It helps marketers cut through the noise, delivering personalized messages in a responsive format – the right message in front of a prospect, at the moment they are most receptive to it.
What is In-Moment Marketing?
“Moments” here mean times when customers are open to making a purchase. It could be a very large purchase for a life moment, such as a house, or a wedding ring, or a child’s college education. But what about daily moments? Moments when a customer wants to be entertained, or is hungry, or saw something shiny and exciting (like tech or clothing) that they must have? In-Moment Marketing allows you to determine the behaviour that customers demonstrate when they are in the moment of being ready to make a purchase. That way, you can take advantage of these moments with relevant, personalized content, to influence the decision the target customer will make.
How does Marketing Cloud build trust with customers?
As the relationship with the customer changes, marketing messages are automatically updated. It delivers these messages through multiple channels, working with the customer the entire way to ensure their data is only being used in ways they feel comfortable with. It’s a tool that allows marketing to operate as comprehensively and timely as needed, but with customer trust. Getting this right is crucial, and with SAP Marketing Cloud, this becomes a normal part of your business.
SAP Commerce Cloud
Your commerce site is the most robust customer-facing aspect of your brand when it comes to your digital experience, so running it on a best-in-class platform ensures your customer experience is both compelling and effective. SAP Commerce Cloud allows business users to personalize, more granularly and 1-1 focused than ever before.
In fact, with SAP Commerce Cloud’s omni-channel commerce capabilities, you can personalize your customer experience no matter how a customer is interacting with your commerce ecosystem. This breaks down barriers and tells customers what they need to hear, in a way they’re comfortable with, to be compelled to complete a purchase. This is because it’s based on their unique needs and preferences.
Personalization in SAP Commerce Cloud works based on:
Real-Time Segmentation – automatically adapt to the customer’s behaviour, based on rules for segments. Each customer’s place in each segment can evolve as the system learns more about them. Quickly and responsively develop segments to more effectively target customers on their needs, based on analytics that supports positive outcomes when certain events are triggered.
Contextual Merchandising – putting the right mix of products in front of the customer at the right time.
Context-Driven Customer Recovery – targeting customers who, for whatever reason, abandoned their cart or left the site, to tempt them back with a personalized message.
Together, a 360-degree view of the customer:
These three key pieces of a front-end suite make it so no one can touch your customer experience, including your competitors. By setting up rules across your touchpoints, based on what the customer is doing in the moment, you can guide customers down the path of least resistance to purchase and build their loyalty. Using the Customer Data Cloud, you create a golden record of the customer. Using Marketing Cloud, you segment customers into groups, with live rule-based response to new information and target effectively as individual customer behaviour evolves. Using Commerce Cloud, you deliver the customer-driven personalized experience across all of your commerce channels.
SAP is working year-after-year to improve business processes worldwide from the back-end ERP to the front-office CX suite, which is why we continue to support their organization as a system integration partner. SAP’s goal is to offer a suite of products that integrate together and integrate with other services, in an ultra-scalable micro-services architecture – so no matter what your needs are, for scale, or evolution, you’re covered. SAP Sales and Service Clouds are also key ingredients for best-in-class customer experience, and we’ll be providing more detail on these areas, soon.
If you’re interested in learning more about our work or scheduling a meeting to discuss your business needs, please get in touch with us: