Customer Centralization: The Power of SAP Data Cloud
It is very common for today’s global companies to own and manage several unique brands in multiple markets. With their unique identities and customer bases, it is not uncommon for each of these brands to have their own digital experiences. In fact, if a company want their brands to stay relevant with today’s digital-savvy consumers, dedicated and personalized websites with eCommerce capabilities is a must.
With this multi-brand strategy, each of these websites will need to manage extremely important customer identity data. From demographic login and “my account” information to onsite behaviors, this data is critical to understanding buyer preferences, needs and intent. Aggregated across multiple visitors, this data can then help form target customer profiles and personas that drive enhanced personalization.
Issues arise, however, when each of the branded sites has to manage their own customer data sets. Instead of the parent company organizing a centralized solution, this disparate approach creates data silos and leads to more manual aggregation and analysis. This limits the company’s ability to build knowledge, run efficient cross-branding and marketing campaigns, and mitigate exposure to regulatory violation risk.
The Value of Data Centralization
Without centralized data across the company’s brands, the organization stands to miss out on immense value. The ideal solution is to implement a Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIMS) system, giving customers an easier way of logging in and making use of the sites’ content and possibilities.
For starters, a CIMS lowers the barrier for customers to register and access the personalized content and offers that drive enhanced conversion and engagement. From an operations standpoint, being able to identify a singular user across different brands, experience and platforms allows marketers to aggregate this data into one central customer profile.
The value of this single source of truth is that the company can now intelligently use this information to target specific customers and segments with more customized and relevant communications. Even the consumer benefits: they receive more personalized content and even save time by not having to log in to various accounts in separate instances.
Centralizing data is all about building a 360-degree view of the customer. This view then enables a wide variety of new loyalty opportunities across the brands, thus giving the company an additional opportunity to improve the customer experience.
Navigating Tight Data Regulations
Legal regulations such as GDPR have put more power in the hands of customers when it comes to collecting, aggregating, analyzing, and utilizing their data. Companies – especially those managing multiple brands, sites, and stores – need to pay special heed to these regulations to avoid painful punishments.
Ensuring that your CIMS can handle all of these caveats is difficult. Wouldn’t it be great if there existed a cloud-based platform that would just take care of this out-of-the-box?
One possible solution that solves that delivers the profound benefits of a CIMS while addressing today’s regulatory challenges is SAP Customer Data Cloud. The platform allows organizations to deploy a large number of low-barrier registration options (such as Facebook, LI, Mobile, etc.) and single-sign-on experience for multiple sites. This confers the aforementioned benefits on organizations willing to make the investment while also providing deeper customer insights and more relevant and targeted customer communications.
As a global SAP Partner with considerable experience in implementing SAP Customer Data Cloud, we have seen the value and success that the platform can enable. Offer data privacy and trust to your customers by giving them control of their data through a comprehensive self-service portal, and consistently enforce consent and preferences across the whole enterprise to protect against any data violations.
If data centralization is a challenge that your company faces, feel free to reach out. We’re here to help.
