Explore the Cutting Edge of Data-Driven Customer Experience

Good morning and welcome to our webinar today, which is on the subject of exploring the cutting edge of data driven customer experiences. I'm John Tolbert lead Analyst at COO Cole, and I'm joined today by Adrian Nash, head of strategy at SAP customer experience and Martin Zelner CEO of net economy. So we are pleased to announce that coming next, September 13th, through the 16th, we will be having European identity cloud conference DIC 2021, and we will have both onsite and hybrid options available.

So look for the early bird discount and we hope to welcome you in September a little bit about our controls here. We're controlling the audio. So everyone is muted. There's no need to mute on mute yourself. We're recording the webinar and the, the webcast will be available the next day or so. And we'll also provide the slide decks that you will see today. We're gonna have a discussion format, and then we will take questions at the end. So you'll see a question blank and the go to webinar control panel. Feel free to enter your questions into that blank at any time. And we'll take those.

So I'll start off and talk about the evolution of the market, particularly from CIA consumer identity to customer data platforms, and then I'll turn it over to Adrian and Martin, and we will have the Q and a at the end. So digital transformations, probably the biggest driver for the need of customer data platforms. So before we get in and define that, let's just quickly review digital transformation.

It's, it's a term that we've heard many times where we're still kind of in the middle of it. Many organizations are beginning their journeys on that even today. And it's really about, as it says, digitizing everything, you know, ubiquitous sensors, the use of IOT devices and smart manufacturing, increasingly with customer interaction as well. And then this leads to the whole host of possibilities from a business perspective, you know, it can help with making your business more agile and more flexible could lead to additional services that are developed and delivered additional revenue.

But some of the foundational elements for bringing these things forward are things like consumer identity, data analytics programs informed by and enhanced by machine learning. But we also need to keep in mind security and privacy as we go forward in digital transformation as well. What does it mean? Or what is it, how is it a challenge for all organizations?

Well, first of all, it means more users and, you know, maybe most organizations are familiar with having workforce users, your employees, but, you know, increasingly over time, many other kinds of users have wound up in the, the user repository like B2B partners, suppliers, even customers. Now thanks to advent of systems like cm. We have more and more consumers, but then there's alsot device identity. And Y D you know, users own mobile devices. These are things that need to be provisioned and managed generally in a cm or CDP system.

So again, can compliment with the, the need for addressing digital transformation. That means we need more services to engage users with and services of course, run on infrastructure. There's a need for additional software to deliver. And increasingly we see more and more of these services delivered directly from cloud hosted environments. More services of course needs more data.

So it, it's not just employee or HR data and the intellectual property that your business uses to maintain a competitive advantage of this financial data, medical data, customer data, consumer data, things that are in personal nature that are subject to privacy regulations as well. So with more data, more services, more users comes more responsibilities and, you know, zero trust is a popular topic these days. And I like to think that it's kind of an embodiment of the principle of least privilege.

So all of this pertains to protecting information in the age of digital transformation principle, at least privilege separation of duties, governance, both at the identity, and then the data access layers, burdens proof required, certifications, things like that. So customer ID, so the bedrock for being able to do digital transformation in a consumer facing business, it it's driving massive changes to the way companies do their marketing and, and, and sales strategies. And it's really affecting all sorts of different industries as more and more.

Let's say, producers go directly to the consumer and engage with them. And, and this is not limited to any one particular geographic region either. I think one thing that consumers and customers of all kinds are demanding in the age of digital transformation is a painless online experience. And that starts with easy options for registration and continues through authentication and authorization.

Being able to have multiple choices for authenticators that are sort of right size for the business, as well as, you know, offering some degree of convenience for the user and increasing security and authentication and identity assurance levels. So this means cm is more than just a security domain. It is also an important revenue generating enterprise in itself. It's an access enabler and can be a, a revenue generator, but these customer identities have to be properly verified and then protected. So what's a customer data platform. So we've moved from consumer identity.

And now we increasingly see enterprises that are interested in customer data platforms. They're designed to address some problems that maybe some other enterprises have encountered along the way, particularly things like less than ideal marketing situations. There are multiple engagement channels that users expect today from mobile to web to onsite, or even across multiple sites within, you know, the same conglomerate. There are multiple data sources. I think this is a really big driver and we'll get into that over the next few minutes as well.

And then, you know, different privacy regulations and different jurisdictions. The, the silos of customer data think about organizations that do have CIN, but they probably also have CRM. There may be other cases where there's user behavioral data, transaction history, all of them needs to get rolled into data analytics for analysis, and then it has to be actionable. So there needs to be connections to marketing automation tools, which are often external to cm CRM systems themselves.

And then again, privacy, you know, how to unify have, have one approach for dealing with privacy and commit consent management, regardless of where in the world you may be operating. So the top four features that I see in customer data platforms, the ability to aggregate data from multiple sources, again, you know, cm, CRM, others, this requires good, strong APIs that are secure, and the ability to customize them as needed identity integration.

This too is important in terms of being able to accept, let's say, you know, many users like to use social logins, but they also have identities tied to maybe one or more email addresses, being able to pull that together, manage their profiles and give consent an withdrawal consent. As they see fit. CDPs can also help with the analysis of customer data from all those different sources, generally applying things like machine learning algorithms for predictive purposes.

And then again, it needs an attachment to something to make an actionable outbound integrations for those cm CRM systems to things like marketing tools and reports. So with that, I'd like to bring in Adrian and ask what, what do you see as some of the key differences between CIM platforms and customer data platforms? Because SAP offers both. Yeah.

Thank you, John. And thanks everyone for joining today.

So yeah, you know, as, as, as you mentioned, John, you know, we, we see that there's not just one solution that helps solve the challenges of that digital transformation when it comes to knowing the customer. Right.

You know, each organization that I work with coming from, you know, a tech vendor like SAP is on a different stage of that, that digital transformation. So it really depends on what question is trying to be answered at that point of the, of the transformation, you know, is it who is the customer? So that might be the, you know, the, the customer identity element of, of your, of your strategy.

So, you know, the first place that you need to solve a challenge is your organization gets more complex because your serving more channels and customers are demanding the continuity between those channels. It might be that you start with the digital identity management solution, like a customer identity and access management, which is really about first party onboarding from a login and a registration perspective across those digital channels, but really securing that, that engagement whilst increasing the overall experience of that onboarding process.

So, you know, someone like SAP, you know, we have a customer identity and access management solution, which is really the digital identity across those, those touchpoint, right? It might be mobile apps. It might be websites might be I U T devices. It's really the, this is who I am as a, as a consumer. And it might be many tens of millions of, or hundreds of millions of consumers at that, at that scale. And then the next question along that maturity cycle is really okay.

I have this profile data that I collected off the registration form it's owned by the customer, and they can, you can add data to that, that, that kind of interaction over time. But then how do I know how or where, and when I can use that data and, and with the, you know, the regulation changes like the CCPA and the evolving kind of regulations across the globe, it comes to more of a question of, I wanna stay compliant as an organization in that region, but I also don't wanna break the customer's trust because trust is really easy to break and really hard to, to earn in the end.

So along that digital transformation, that kind of maturity of data, we often see customers starting with the customer identity part to unify across those digital channels. Then thinking about consent and preference management to guide how that customer wants to engage, what channels, what, which communication frequency, you know, what data processing elements are allowed on top of that data based on the, the permission of the customer.

And then as, as organizations have solved those challenges with either customer identity and access management or consent and preference management, then there's other silos of fragments of the customer across systems of engagement.

And that really is why we've seen as a trend customers implementing those identity and consent management solutions, but then looking to more the CDP to in real time connect those systems of engagement with the most relevant piece of information about that customer in real time, so that you can have that best conversation with the customer, whether they're walking into store, whether they're calling up the call center, whether they're buying online, whether they're opening an email, whether they're, you know, feeding back on a social channel, all of those interaction points should come together with a view of the customer that's dynamic and in that moment available.

So, you know, that's why SAP has invested in those areas. That's why we have both a customer identity management solution consent and preference management solution for those organizations trying to solve those challenges of who the customer is. And how can I engage with that customer? Sorry. And then we have the customer data platform that was recently launched from an SAP perspective, which is really about ingesting data from any system or engagement in real time, combining it together to a real time customer profile.

That's based on the permissions that you give from a data privacy perspective, and then activating that data across systems of engagement, not just marketing, but also marketing to really give that kind of differentiated experience when the customer engages. So this is why we built the CDP at SAP.

It's really to ingest all of this structured and unstructured data across systems that produce data, whether that's point of sale systems, to service engines, to loyalty platforms, to website visits, feeding in the data to the, the customer data platform, which knows how that data can then be used later on, but unifying the, the, the customer profile across different attributes and different types of data, so that ultimately you can power a consistent and con a continuous message to the customer or conversation to the customer across those different systems.

But you can't do that unless you understand the guidelines of how and where, and when you can use that data, which is why privacy at the core is, is, is a critical piece of, of the, the customer data platform strategy. And it has to be omnichannel ready, meaning that you need to be able to fill those use cases where a hundred percent confidence is needed on top of the data.

Like in a, when you're speaking to someone as they walking to a store, or when you pick up the phone from a, a customer services representative perspective, you need to be a hundred percent sure that that's the customer that you're talking to. This is the products that they've purchased. And in more marketing use cases, you might think, okay, I need to know that the customer might have looked at this product. I might have a relevant product and service to offer that will then more personalize that experience.

So a CDP should be able to cover all of those different use cases, across many different systems of engagement, to ultimately power that moment of engagement as, as the customer chooses to engage with you as an organization. So that's really the, you know, the, the, the maturity kind of curve that we see when we are working with SAP's enterprise customers on this, on this digital transformation, but there is a bit of con confusion in the market. And rightly so, you know, the, there there's a been a spaghetti of kind of, you know, Arons that, that kind of cause confusion in this market.

But really, if you think about the different solutions across the MarTech landscape, the CDP is really that unified customer data, but it's real time so that it can power those systems of engagement. It has persistency. So it can take the fragments of the customer from those different platforms. It's a package system, meaning that there needs to be low code connectors or no code connectors to your ecosystem, your heterogeneous ecosystem. It has to be again, real time so that you can activate on the signals that are coming in from the customer, and it needs to have open access to that data.

So whether you are building an application, whether you are buying a, a subscription to a marketing platform or using an SAP solution, it needs to be able to kind of power those capabilities. And if you think about other solutions that are associated or commonly in the same group, as in the conversation, as the CDP, a DMP, for example, is used to retar customers across those third party channels.

So it's really, you know, audience management, so that, you know, if you're looking at a product on one site and you go to another site and they're running, you know, ad ad tech, or on that site, it really shows the, the, the content that you've been viewing to draw them back into, into the, into the conversation. So DMP is important, but it's not the same thing as the CDP CDP is really hinged on that first party data, but the unstructured data and structured data, whereas a DMP is a third party data asset CRM, you know, CRMs ultimately drove a business process, right.

You know, who am I selling to? What, what have they purchased? How can I best serve them best? But CRM data in the end is quite static or quite structured. It's not the unstructured signals of everything that's happened in the past to this point of time, which is where a CDP expands on the CRM, which is why I come from SAP customer experience rather than SAP customer CRM.

You know, so customer experience is about all of the signals, not just a structured data around the, the customer profile, for example, and then a data warehouse. You know, the CDP is actually a source of data pushing into the data warehouse and a data warehouse might contain customer information, might contain order information. It's analytics to, for you as a business to have better BI on, on, on top of the data that you collect. But it's not strictly related to just customer data, as many domains of data. And the idea of a data warehouse is really for insight, right?

Really so that you can become a data driven decision making organization. And, and, and that's why CDP, it could be one of those streams using those no code connectors into the data or those prebuilt packaged solutions into the data warehouse. And then obviously there's a variety of different custom solutions out there, but the scale and the performance and the speed of the requirements of a CDP has meant that it's, it's not been an easy technology to bring to market, right.

And only now you're seeing enterprise vendors like SAP enter that market because the technology has evolved to a state where we can deal with the data, quantities, the data volumes and the, and the velocity of data that, that streams into the CDP. So maybe that that's more from an SAP perspective, but I think, you know, what would be great is if we could take a, a perspective from, from, from SAP's customers or from, from a, a partner of SAPs called net economy. So maybe Martin, you could help us understand from a customer perspective, what are the attributes of a CDP?

What are the, some of the industries? What are some of the use cases that you are seeing as you're engaging with customers on that topic? Sure. Happy to do so. Hello everybody.

So digital transformation and the need for customer data platforms, customer data, and we've been working with numerous customers across different industries is always a challenge when you need the right information at the right point in time, because it's somewhere buried in some backend systems, you have fraction online, but you don't have it in the context where you need and the customer data platform substantially changes. So what are the, the key attributes of, of a customer data platform?

Adrian, could you switch to the next slide please? So you might meet security here. Security is not, not an attribute. It's a prerequisite. If you are dealing with customer data, you need to make sure that whatever you do in there, you have the right content.

You, you, you make sure that only the data that you're allowed to access is accessible. And so I'm, so one, one key attribute that, that we found is the flexibility of data structures. You have different sets of data, somewhere buried in different silos within the, the enterprise.

And you need to be able to replicate this information with the customer data platform, which demand it to, to have a very flexible data model so that you can literally push any kind of data into that, that system performance and scalability is also key because you're not only maintaining millions of records of customers, but also all the, the attached information that you have somewhere in your enterprise. So you, the platform needs to be fast, needs to deliver things in real time and also scale with the growing business real time and event centricity is another attribute.

So it's, it needs to be able to handle all the streams of information that flow into that platform, but also act on those events, because that helps you to connect the, the, the different dots within your enterprise. Whenever a customer does something, the, the complexity of integration is a, is a big challenge and the big hurdle that you need to overcome when you build the customer data platform.

So the ease of integration into various data sources is key to it and, and having a set of adapters to standard systems, and also a simplified way to integrate with such sources is very essential for a platform and need to be able to enrich information by combining it, or by computing something out of the additional information stream that is flowing into the customer related platform, and also to create segments that you use for different audiences to manage them. It has to be API driven and easy to use because you need to connect it with different touchpoints, with different systems.

And there should be a very simple way to do that. And of course, if you have to write a lot of code just to, to, to prepare it for first use, you have a huge barrier for, for the, the introduction of the customer data platform. That's why having it in a, in a low code, no code environment. So that customizing is quite easy and you can move it closer to the business. Users is also vital.

That doesn't mean that that extensibility for more complex topics shouldn't be supported, but, but the barrier needs to be very low when using that now let's, let's have an outside interview on the CDP and how to use it in a, in an organization. That's a try to outline a perspective that usually customers would take. If they look into how to introduce a CDP into their organization, first, you, you aggregate your direct customer data.

So everything that you have around customer records, somewhere in, in, in the data sources, or perhaps in the cm that you already have put that into into one place and plan it with additional customer related information. For example, order history is customer related, but it's not really customer data. And there is a lot of information which somehow has a relation to a customer is stored in some silo, which can't be accessed in real time. So merging that together into one holistic view on the, on the customer is, is very important.

And, and by doing so in the end, you're using the customer data platform as a real time cash for all the information that you already have about the customer. You keep it automatically up to date by our connectors. So the CDP is connecting to all these data sources, and if there are changes somewhere, it, it replicates them into the CDP.

You can enrich the, the data with all the digital activities in real time, because other than data that is transactional or where you have to query actively the customer, everything that the customer is leaving as a trace in, in, on the digital touch touchpoints is literally something that you get for free. So integrating that set of information is also vital.

You do that by integrating into the digital touchpoint, by creating those holistic views, you can create segments and manage the audience in, in real time, but you can also use this customer information stream that is flowing in from different sources to dispatch events. For example, if a customer is doing something in, in, in a certain touchpoint, you can create an event and use it to trigger a communication or an experience on another touchpoint, like a mobile phone, which he might have attend later already.

And that simplifies also the architecture, how you use such processes or how you implement such processes. And finally, you can securely consume all the customer information, even though they don't originate from the CDP at any touchpoint in real time, because you have it at your disposal and you don't need to, to take care about the integration and how they come there, or about the latency that that might be necessary to catch that information from a backend system.

Now, when we are looking into certain industries and use cases that we found, we have a very strong footprint in, in retail. So couple of they are not prioritized. So I don't say that these are the most important use cases for that industry, but those are definitely some that, that we see. So having a received history for a customer for all the purchases, all the online and offline sections that the customer had is definitely relevant and interesting for, for a CDP. And that's normally some kind of a challenge because this received archive, they grow big.

They take some time to, to access that information and, and using that to drive the context of a customer interaction sometimes can become a challenge. It's easier to show that somewhere in the customer history, but using that at every point in the experience is much more of a challenge. Another case we found is for example, active warranty management. So the customer buys goods, there is a certain warranty period on that goods.

And just imagine if you, if you know exactly which products the customer already bought, and which of those have an expiring warranty period, you can get into a conversation with the customer and, and sell him additional stuff for services or an extension of the warranty period. And by doing so also increase the relevance that you have as a retailer with a customer.

Another, another use case is the omnichannel event integration. So when you have different activities of a, of a customer in different touchpoint, maybe online or offline, which you can somehow digitally capture, you can use that event in real time to trigger an action that increases the experience of a customer, like doing something in a store and getting instantly information on a mobile phone or on other touchpoints. I don't say that this is not possible in other ways, but the customer data platform vastly simplifies such such activities.

Another industry that we have been looking into is consumer products. So building a multi-brand consumer context can be a challenge because you have, might have different brands with a different go to market model and, and aggregating those brands and, and getting the consumer context, which in the end is much bigger. If you can combine all those different activities is definitely something which can be interesting for, for consumer industries.

Since a lot of those companies are selling indirectly via distribution partners, also integrating with their sales channels, with their go to market with their activities could make a ton of sense, like having a consumer company directly integrating with the retailer who is selling this, this product is something which is significantly simplified by the introduction of the customer data platform. Or you can, since you get closer to your consumers, you can use something like in moment profile enrichment.

So if you see, see that a consumer is purchasing your goods or using your goods, you can, in the moment of that event, for example, use the survey to get additional feedback, to increase your relevance, or to offer additional services. That's something where customer data platform can play a significant role because it centralizes all this event and information flowing in, but let's also jump into a different industry, which is not comparable with, with the direct consumer industries that we have in mind when we get asked.

So like insurance, where we also have some footprint in insurance, usually have different different systems for different types of, of products and services and creating a holistic insurance inventory is definitely something where the CDP can play a major role because it simplifies the process of aggregating all these different inventories from totally separated systems at one central point and provided in in real time, it can also create the 360 interaction context by aggregating all these different lines of business and, and communications, which sometimes are very, very heterogeneous and put also the, what happens so far and which conversations that we have with that, with the customer history into one point.

And of course also use a similar methodology like with the consumer goods in the moment of such an event, you can create additional relevant, which is, which is very important for insurance companies. But for example, because usually you have them file it somewhere and you don't, your policy is fight somewhere and you don't have interaction and to become relevant or to remain relevant. Insurance companies should, should go for a positive event where they can make a difference with the customer.

So you can use that moment to offer additional service, to, to come up with a survey or, or some other benefits for a customer to increase the, the relevance and, and yeah. Help building long term partnership and loyalty. Those are just some examples. There are much more for different industries, but I hope I could give some insight into what we can do with a, with a CDP. So we kind of talked about some of the, what we think are the, the key attributes.

What would you say in terms of, is this mostly SA delivered kind of service, or do you see customers wanting to implement this, you know, either on premise or in their own infrastructures, a service environment, what are the most common deployment models that, that you're dealing with? Yeah.

I guess maybe, maybe I'll start there and, and Martin, you can jump in if you have anything to add, but I, I think it, it's probably, you know, it's a little around the, the industries that you kind of work in, you know, but I think, you know, the, the kind of the initial focus that the at least, you know, myself and the teams from SAP have been looking at is really those industries where yeah, that experience is very vocal to the customer.

You know, like their retail direct to consumer consumer products, you know, utilities, all of those kind of areas, especially when it's selling to an individual or to, to an organization where, you know, the, the scale and capacity that you need to leverage for the number of consumers and, and, and, and, and, and people as part of the platform means that to really make a cost effective solution, it needs to be SAS, you know, and I think some of the technology around, you know, some of the SAS platforms that we've seen over the recent years has meant that it's been quite hard thing to achieve technically, but I, I think at least from the, the engagements that I've been seeing, it's more about like a platform that can scale to many hundreds of millions, maybe even, you know, billions of, you know, if you're starting from that anonymous phase of, of, of customer profile through to the, you know, the customer advocate, you know, SAS is, is very much the natural option.

Maybe Martin OT, I a hundred percent agree. I mean, you can't solve the technical challenges for building a sophisticated customer data platform with OnPrem technology. So it needs to be cloud native and that's very close to SA already. And I think when, as long as the security aspect is solved, definitely SAS has in, in every dimension, a significant over doing something on premise.

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, recent research we've seen most companies indicate that probably greater than 90% are interested in SAS delivered services first. So that totally makes sense to me. So we've talked a little bit about cm and CRM and other things that feed into customer data platforms. What other kinds of upstream systems maybe that, that you do see commonly that customers want to import, or maybe even what are some interesting things that maybe are not as common, different kinds of upstream systems that need to feed data into customer data platform?

From my, from my perspective, it, of course depends on the industry you are in, because it it's totally different when you are in financial services compared to retail. But in, in, in the core, of course, the, those are the, the, the systems of record that are obvious, but there is definitely also a significant set of, of some custom built solutions that have certain amounts of consumer related data, not consumer data, but consumer related data.

So I think from a, from a integration perspective, it's important to have a couple of standard integrators or a couple might not be enough to have a set of standard integrators that help you to integrate with the obvious systems that are there, but also to provide a very open and flexible concept of integrating literally anything into the platform, because that's what reality shows, that's the, what you find on the custom in the customers scenario. Yeah.

I, I think I, you know, I would agree with, I would agree with that. If you think about, you know, the core, the core repurpose of a CDP is really to know more if you're an organization selling to an individual, it's about knowing more about that customer at that point of time, so that you are talking to that customer in a way that is, is personalized to them.

You know, whichever channel they kind of engage. The great thing about that experience is that, you know, whether it's it is John it's myself or Martin or, or anyone really, we all see and live and breathe those experiences every day. So if you think about like the way that you engage with an organization, those are really the channels that could feed into a CDP.

So, you know, especially in, in, like in, in the times of the pandemic, you know, where we've, we've gone from perhaps walking into the store to, you know, ordering online, picking up in store to, you know, ordering food from, from restaurants online, you know, that we usually visited in store. So it could be, if you think about like the way that you engage with organizations, any part of that engagement holds data about that, engage that piece of the engagement, which could then feed into the CDP.

So if you think like all the way from, like, if you're a retail customer, it might be, as you are in store, maybe being offered to sign it to the loyalty program, to E receipts, to the point of sale data, then maybe relevant campaigns through a marketing email, through a push notification, through an SMS, through that digital commerce experience, maybe enrolling to the, to the, to the loyalty program, which then what happens in the background. Once you click that buy button, it also connects to the, you know, the digital supply chain.

So everything's then happening to get that product to your, to your front door are effectively also signals that are relevant to the CDP. So I think, you know, the, the, the way that customers are, or, or, or the way that the market is thinking about this is that the CEP could connect those pieces together, which is why it's important that it's an omnichannel solution, as opposed to just solving a challenge around marketing.

So, you know, Adrian, you mentioned something a little earlier that I thought was really interesting and kind of goes along with other observations I had in terms of you were talking about pre-built connectors. Do you find that that's, that's a primary expectation that customers have, or do you find this, this is a really good selling point. And then Martin, from your perspective, is the availability of prebuilt connectors, something that is important on your side?

Yeah, I think maybe, maybe just the reality is if, if you look at enterprise organizations, they, even though they might have preferences for particular vendors of technology, you know, like we, we as SAP have a very loyal customer base, and we're very happy with that partnership, but there are also those organizations that have either a, a real mix of solutions. Maybe they've gone across all of their ecosystem and selected this vendor for this purpose, this vendor, for this purpose, this vendor for this purpose.

And they have a very heterogeneous cloud environment, you know, that it, it's very, it's very mixed. So part of the challenge that you have when you're thinking about like, experiences is fragmentation, right? So the fact that I just registered a warranty online, and then I create a call center ticket. If those things are not connected, even though they might be from two different vendors, it's a very hard thing from a customer perspective to have that disjointed kind of engagement.

You know, the, the fact that the customer services rep doesn't know that you just registered a warranty and it's a very frustrating experience. So that's what drives the need for the con the ecosystem around a CDP.

And we, especially, we, as technology vendors, you know, coming from SAP, we need to make it easier to onboard that heterogeneous environment of those fragments of the customer. So, you know, it's been an area that we've been investing in from a low code, no code kind of connector library around the CDP, but, but you know, that's, that's gonna continue to evolve.

I think maybe, you know, Martin, from your perspective, I think from, from a pre implementation perspective, the customers expect a set of standard connectors there because not having them would, would lead to two sign, significant downsides. One, the, the implementation side takes more time.

So if you, if you decide for an CDP platform, I think that's a perfect, perfect example also of agility in the, in the introduction, because you don't have to connect all the systems around, you have to start somewhere. And when you have standard connectors starting somewhere, it's quite easy because you, you, you have already the, the connectors there to connect, for example, doing SAP E P system, which is very likely to be somewhere in the company. And the other aspect is that you have to do effort and maintenance for that integration by yourself.

While when it's done from the vendor site, that's something where you, where you get risk out of your company, where you can delegate it to the vendor site, and you benefit from all those future improvements that come in with a new version of that connector. So, so having out of the box integration with the best practice platforms that you always find in, in, in companies and that's way beyond SAP, there are a lot of other vendors that need to be considered, I think is crucial for, for a decision. Okay.

Well, I just wanna remind everyone that there is a question and go to meeting control panel, feel free to submit questions, and we'll take them as we go. Next question here is how would you describe a CDP centric approach to a potential customer, Maybe Martin mcg first? Okay. I was waiting.

I, I think there is, there is a significant level of pain and understanding on the customer side, that the question, where does my customer data recite in the enterprise is one where they never got a clear answer, neither from the vendors, nor from their internal it stuff. And that's in the end, the question that we, that we are going to answer with the introduction of the CDP, that would be my simple statement towards it. Yeah. Yeah.

I think we, we see, we see the, you know, when we are engaging with, with customers talking about the CDP, we see the pain coming from multiple areas, you know, it might be that, you know, for example, the, let's say, you know, I'm getting, I'm getting emails on the email channel with different product recommendations to my personalization engine.

I'm, I'm not able to get the in store interactions and to my, you know, into my, into my marketing solution to better tailor the message so that I'm not trying to sell the same product that, that I know the customer has purchased in store, or it might be, you know, the fact that the customers just have a really frustrating experience and we're trying to kind of help solve those problems.

But in the meantime, we're still sending them, you know, push notifications of offers, you know, so the, the value of a, the, the, the identification that a CDP might be needed is that they're, I guess, you know, maybe just to set some context, if you look at a CDP for one use case, it's not a good, you know, value proposition, you know, one use case solving point a to point B is not something where you would go out to buy a CDP, you know, or be in the market to look for a CDP.

The CDP really shows its value when you're at the, the 10th use case or the 15th use case across the different teams in your organization, because it's bringing together the data and signals in real time across those different systems of engagement, meaning that overall the experience of your customers are having much more relevant and personalized experiences. So, you know, a CDP might be joined with say, you know, a program around a new marketing platform, or a CDP might be implemented as part of an identity management solution. Cuz identity is one part of the challenge.

So it's, it, it's a, it's a varied kind of response that we see, but there are definitely signals that come up from, from conversations that mean, okay, I think maybe you should start with identity management and then look to CDP, or you are sending very clear signals that there's a challenge around the, you know, the unification of customer data. And that would be CDP for example. Yeah.

That's, that's an interesting point, you know, sort of migrating from identity management, into customer data platforms. What do you think, what kinds of businesses tend to look for CDPs? Is it mostly a large enterprise thing, or do you have use cases where it's very appropriate and, you know, solving real problems for small to medium sized businesses are, or nonprofits as well that maybe collecting information about people and needing to do something with that? Yeah.

I, I mean, I, I think, you know, there, there are some SMBs that would have, you know, maybe one web shop and a marketing platform, and you're probably not looking to, you know, you're probably not looking at that point to, to look to like a CDP. I think where it, where you start to see the value of a CDP is when there's multiple things going on, you know, there might be different, different channels that you operate on, different, different engagement touchpoints with the customer.

You know, you grow to a certain size so that, that, you know, that, that, that it's hard to kind of connect to all those things together, you know, but I think mostly what we are seeing is is those customers that having recently launched a customer data platform, those customers that are coming to us first are really those ones that are changing their mindset to thinking about customer centric processes, rather the business processes, you know, business processes help you get products and services to the door, which is great and it's needed, right.

But the, but the true, the true, the true need, whether that's an SMB business or an enterprise business, is those organizations that are centering around the customer experience and putting the customer at the heart of that process. And to do that, you really need to understand the customer at the points of where you engage. And that's really where we're seeing like those, those, so it could be in different industries. It's just like the maturity and the way that they're thinking about the customer at the heart of that, of that centricity is driving the need for evaluating a CDP.

For example, I dunno, Martin, if you're seeing the same Hundred percent agree, I think the, so it's not a matter of the size, it's rather a matter of the diversity of, of, of, of their business. So if there are different touchpoint and if they have customers, I mean, there are some businesses that only have a very limited number of, of customers. Then obviously you don't need the CDP, but I think it's not just the large enterprises that need the CDP.

It's, it's, it's every kind of business that has a certain span over different touch points. And while you were saying that, Adrian, what came to my mind is that the CDP, while most technology in the past focused on making processes better is really changing.

Also the, the way the organization looks at, at their approach towards customers, because the notion here is integrate all the events and all the customer related into information into one point in real time. And I think that, that we will see also the change in the organization and in the mindset the organization has towards the customer when they start using that, that, that kind of technology. Yep. Thank you. What would you say are some of the relevant use cases for retail?

I, I think that's an interesting area where you definitely see lots of variety in say different kinds of touchpoints as you were alluding to Martin. What, so what are you seeing in terms of other things for retail?

I mean, retail has a huge number of, or huge, huge amount of data being created every day, literally in different touchpoint and, and simply, it's not possible to process that amount of data and, and, and react on that in real time. So there is a natural fit for CDP in, in real time. I think that over time, certain amount of, of, of, of information that is managed around the customer might directly go into a CDP because there is no need to store that long term, somewhere in another system it's efficient to cash it.

So of course, things like the receipts are something that you might want to, to have archived, but behavioral stuff can go originally into the CDP. So, and, and the biggest aspect there is because we have this event integration in the, in the, in the customer data platform, it's from an pure architectural perspective, a very simplified way to connect different channels. While in the past you had to push events somewhere around and, and, and even poll systems, you have it now at one place, and you can inform the different touchpoint about what what's going on in the other space.

And I think there are, we are just scratching the surveys of, of the use cases that, that we will see in the next couple of month and years. Yeah. Maybe when we were running the, the, the lighthouse program for, for the CDP, for some of our, you know, our first customers to get their hands on, on them, very well supported by net economy, by the way, we, you know, in, in one, one customer in north MEIA, you know, they, they, they had a large percentage of their business walking in store to buy, you know, products, and then the pandemic hit and everyone went online.

So, you know, from like a large percentage, still going into store to buy products, to all of their business going online, they found incredible strain on their, on their call center services to give effective product updates as well because their digital supply chain was disrupted with the pandemic, right?

So one of their use cases, and it was a retail use case, you know, was, was more exposing the signals of that, of that, of the, of the supply chain into the customers, my account screen, which if you think about it, then, then is a perfect example of why you need identity management while you, you know, Whil, you could then expand out to think about the CDP, the CDP connecting the signals of what's happening in, in that order process, the identity management, knowing who the customer is as they're logging into their mobile app or to their website.

And then the, the, my profile screen with order updates or service ticket updates, or, you know, feedback updates coming from the CDP that really shows like the additive value to just identity management, as well as the other use cases that you could look at. Yeah.

You know, let's Martin, you said something interesting there too, about not needing to retain some of this consumer information. I mean, I could almost foresee, maybe there's a way to design this such that, you know, it aids with privacy, regulatory compliance as well. If you're not stored certain kinds of information, and depending on, you know, how, how businesses themselves are designed, if you've got subsidiaries or whatnot or franchises, you know, you, you maybe put your certain businesses less at risk for holding and processing this information natively, next question.

What, how, what effect, or how does this look for interactions with consumer products? Would you go Adrian?

Yeah, sure. I mean, if you, if you think about like maybe consumer products, you know, the, actually the first interaction that you could have in a consumer products use cases, not, you know, you could have consumers that are out there that have your product and you know, nothing about them. Right.

You know, they could buy, you know, it's like buying a coffee machine from a supermarket, you know, like the first, the first thing that a consumer product company knows that, that someone's got, that solution might be in a, in a service engagement, you know, it might be in a logging onto the support Porwal to get, download the manual or to, you know, to, to feedback how the setup experience was. So, you know, I think there's there's, and, and maybe if you are like a technology company and you are, you are, you are reselling through, you know, your B2B to C customer and or organization.

And so the first thing that you know, is actually all of that discovery, all of that like decision making has been done, and it's actually, the customer has decided to buy it, activate it, and then they start to engage. So, you know, your position might change in that scenario. It might be, how can I help you do what you need to do, but also how can I help suggest associated products and services?

So, you know, I think CDP is, is great for that kind of industry, because no matter where you start, you can start to, to build that profile that then allows you to know what that customer's been doing, even if they don't start with a purchase. Right. So I think there's, there's lots of different use cases that you can help know the customer no matter where they start on that kind of more dynamic kind of starting place when you are looking at consumer products. Okay.

Well, last question. What do you foresee happening in the CDP market, maybe the next 12 to 24 months, both Adrian and Martin on the customer side?

What, what would you like to see happen with CDP platforms? Well, perhaps I go first from what I, what I observe with the, with the market and Adrian, you have much more research background, I guess, on a strategic level. I definitely see that that with literally all customers who, who deal with a larger number of consumers, they, they, they are in need of, of a customer data platform.

There was, there was no possibility to solve the challenges they had in the past, in a, in a sufficient way. And CDP definitely addresses that. So I would guess that the market is enormous and it significantly changes also the way we would build an experience driven architecture for the customers, because that, that's somehow funny when I think about it, but we are talking about customer experience for such a long time. Simply we don't have all the information about the customer at our disposal when we need it, and how should that then work in the right way.

So I think that, that there will be 20, 21 will be the, the year of the customer data platform. And it is not only for the direct and obvious use cases that we see, but it's more a, a new foundation to really serve the, the customers across all channels, how they expect to be served since 20 years, I guess. Okay. Yeah. I know we're, we're, we're near up on time, but I think, yeah, exactly that, you know, beyond CRM, beyond the business process, thinking about the customer process and seeing the SU the amazing use cases that we're gonna see CDP help deliver across CX in, in 20, 21 and beyond.

Yeah, definitely. Great.

Well, thanks to both of you for your time and information today. Interesting topic, I think this is, you know, there is a lot of room for growth in the market. A lot of interesting innovations will be coming our way in the next year or two. So stay tuned. Thanks everyone for attending today. And the recording and slides will be available later. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Thank you.

Thanks, bye. Thanks.