Have you ever thought:
• “Are we able to convert anonymous visitors into known customers?”
• “Is our customer data in good order and available?”
and
• “Are our digital services GDPR compatible?”
If your answer is “yes” to each question above, you can stop reading this blog post and get back to your “real” work. Otherwise, I recommend you continue.
In this blog post, I will give you an overview of how SAP Customer Data Cloud can answer these questions. But before giving answers, let’s have a short product introduction.
SAP Customer Data Cloud, also known as SAP CDC, is a part of SAP’s C/4 HANA product portfolio together with SAP Marketing, Sales, Commerce and Service cloud products. SAP CDC is a solution for customer identification, access management, consent and preference management and customer data storage. SAP CDC is also a full CIAM solution containing tools for registration, login and single sign-on, and it offers versatile integration interfaces.
How many of your customers are anonymous visitors, and who remains unknown?
You probably know only your customer’s name or email address or both but nothing else. Email and name are of course a good starting point, but how to know more and how to get more valuable information? SAP CDC offers ready-made features to gather more detailed profile data from a customer, like their habits, likes and behavior.
For example, you can ask specific and targeted questions from a customer when the time is right, and the customer is willing to give more information. Questions like “What is your favorite winter sport?” or “What is your date of birth?” can be asked for example as part of a login process. By using SAP CDC features, you can progressively profile your customers and convert customers from unknown to known step by step.
Can you combine profile data from multiple systems?
Another typical problem that companies commonly face is that customer profile data is spread across many different systems. For instance, a customer may have separate profiles with different data in commerce, marketing and CRM systems. Would it be useful for you to collect all those profiles’ data into a single data store, where all customer-specific data could be unified into a single record and delivered across your systems for further use? SAP CDC makes this possible.
With SAP CDC, you can combine your customer data from various sources, not only from company systems but also from 3rd party systems like LinkedIn etc., into one customer master data. By combining pieces of data from various sources, you can create extensive customer master data and use it for various purposes like delivering personalized content and marketing materials to the customer.
What about GDPR?
On May 25th 2018, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. The regulation brought a wide set of rights for individuals over their personal data, e.g. access rights to personal data and the right to be forgotten. If I ask you whether your systems are GDPR compatible, what would be your answer?
One fundamental idea behind SAP CDC is to build a trusted and transparent relationship with customers. Built on this idea, SAP CDC complies with key regulations of the GDPR. SAP CDC provides full visibility and control for a customer to data that has been stored about him or her. The customer can view, edit and delete personal profile data if they want to do so. Everything in the way the GDPR requires.
In the same way, SAP CDC offers also tools for consent management. With SAP CDC, you can manage consent records and versions like Terms of Service or Marketing consents in one system, and you can also capture customers’ preferences and consents. Above all, SAP CDC ensures a secure and audited platform for your customer data.
To sum up what SAP CDC can do for you:
• Provide single registration and login platform for your online applications
• Collect and combine customer data from various sources into one customer profile
• Help you know your customers better by progressive profiling
• Capture customer’s preferences and consents, and manage consent records and versions
• Provide the possibility to your customers to self-manage their own profile data, preferences and consents within single platform
• Analyze customer records and orchestrate data between applications for better customer profiling
• Comply with GDPR requirements
• Secure your customers’ privacy and data
So, do you know your customers, can you utilize your customer data efficiently, and are you GDPR compatible? If one or more answers is “no”, but you want to say “yes”, we can help you.
