The new platform will enable organizations to create individual but anonymized 360-degree customer profiles using data from multiple sources within and outside of a company, including online sources and social channels.
Klein’s announcement, made on the first day of the online event, underscores SAP’s commitment to the growing market for customer experience (CX) software and its role in building the Intelligent Enterprise.
“You cannot think about CX separately; it needs to be considered as an integral part of an intelligent enterprise,” Klein said. “That’s why CX is one key element of SAP’s holistic strategy.
“We are continuously evolving our CX portfolio while keeping our focus areas at heart – SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Services Cloud, and our brand-new SAP Customer Data Platform,” he added. “Our investments in those areas — most recently the planned acquisition of Emarsys — demonstrate our commitment to the CX market.”
Addressing his virtual audience, the SAP CEO noted that meaningful customer experiences have three key characteristics: “They are hyper personalized, they are seamless, and they are delivered across all channels your customers opt for.”
“How can brands stand out, how can you build customer relationships for life?” Klein asked. “By delivering the right information at the right time. And that is only possible with highly personalized experiences. At the center of those experiences is one key ingredient: data. That is why I am so excited to launch our new SAP Customer Data Platform.”
Customer experience has become an increasingly important differentiator for brands, especially during the current coronavirus pandemic. As Klein said the keynote, “COVID-19 has challenged all companies to accelerate their business transformation and forced them to reinvent the experience for their customers.”
As a result many companies are turning to customer data platforms to help deliver personalized experiences for a variety of marketing uses and to help improve customer loyalty. However, a unified customer experience is impossible without unified customer data and most data originates in separate systems that were not designed to share with anything else.
In addition, while a customer data platform may unify customer data, a narrow marketing focus has often limited their true potential. SAP’s new customer data platform aims to tap the full power of the platforms by adding context to commerce, sales, and service experiences, as well as providing a more effective tool for marketing.
SAP Customer Data Platform is designed to tackle four key opportunities to increase brand reach and effectiveness while respecting data-privacy:
Connecting every data source in an organization together with external data to create unified customer profiles
Enabling a transparent, trustworthy data-privacy strategy
Providing organizations with a complete understanding of customer preferences and behavior
Combining back-office and front-office data to build highly personalized profiles of customers
SAP Customer Data Platform is built on the foundation of SAP Customer Data Cloud, which in turn is based on Gigya (acquired by SAP in 2017) technology. SAP Customer Identity and Access Management and SAP Enterprise Consent and Preference Management are then woven in for a secure and compliant digital profile.
