SAP’s new CDP aims to help organisations integrate and leverage data across different customer touchpoints. A key benefit delivered by a CDP is the ability to provide highly personalised experiences for customers at ever increasing scale. This in turn improves customer engagement and loyalty.
A unified and highly personalised customer experience is not possible without unified customer data. Unfortunately, most data exists within silos and separate legacy systems that weren’t designed to share or work together. Traditional methods for collating and centralising data, such as an enterprise data warehouse, have failed to solve the problem.
The Customer Data Platform CDP is a new approach. According to the CDP institute a CDP is a piece of package software that creates a unified customer database that is accessible all other systems. It can include CRM and ERP data, web forms, email, social media, ecommerce as well as website data.
CDPs have been used for a variety of marketing uses, but according to SAP this narrow marketing focus has impeded the true potential of CDP. SAPs CDP plans to go beyond marketing by adding a whole range of front-office, back-office and external data.
“We did not invent CDP, but SAP Customer Data Platform opens the concept to a new world of opportunities,” SAP Customer Experience President Bob Stutz said. “SAP Customer Data Platform is one of the most advanced enterprise-grade CDPs. It can truly deliver personalised experiences that nurture anonymous users into known, loyal customers using the customer’s preferred channels, unifying vast amounts of front-office, back-office and experience data as only SAP can.”
SAP Customer Data Platform is specifically designed to perform in four key areas:
- Connecting every data source in the organisation. When several data sources individually store customer data, the result is data silo proliferation and customer view fragmentation.
- Respecting customer data with a holistic data privacy strategy. In today’s data privacy landscape, brands need to understand how, when and where customer data can be used.
- Understanding large volumes of data. SAP Customer Data Platform offers powerful segmentation and activity indicators calculated in real time to help obtain a true understanding of customer preferences and behavior.
- Hyperpersonalising engagements based on a comprehensive view of the customer. This fuels engagement solutions across the organisation with actionable, permission-based, customer insights in real time, leading to relevant, engagements at the right time and place in the preferred channel and on the customer’s terms.
