Objective
In the SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP), segments play a crucial role in classifying customers based on their attributes and behaviors. Segments allow you to group customers by demographic attributes, behavioral activities, and other indicators of customer interactions. Once established, these segments are represented as attributes in the customer profile, enhancing the ability to tailor marketing efforts and customer interactions.
Audiences will be covered in Unit 6 (Managing Engagement and Activation), while CX Flows and CX Journeys will be covered in Unit 7 (Designing Journeys and Flows).
Segments are constructed using rule sets applied to customer profiles and indicators with logical operators. These rule sets use 'include/exclude' conditions combined with 'and/or' operators:
Consider whether you wish to enable or disable case-sensitive matching when defining conditions.
Segments in SAP Customer Data Platform are like groups created to categorize customers. Each segment has values, used to classify customers. Think of it as a way of sorting customers into different "buckets" based on certain characteristics. For example, the "Loyalty Club" segment’s values might be prospective (someone who might become a customer), customer (a regular buyer), and VIP customer (a high - spending, loyal customer). These values are determined by the customer's total spend.
The order of these values is crucial.
When a customer's profile is updated in the SAP Customer Data Platform, the system goes through the segment values in order. It first checks if the customer meets the criteria for the first classification value. If they do, they are assigned to that value. If not, it moves on to the second value, and so on. To illustrate this, consider the flowchart in the Managing Segment Evaluations section.
Segments undergo real-time evaluations:
This ensures segment classifications reflect the most current customer data.
To see a customer's segments, navigate to the Customers dashboard, search for the customer, open their profile card, and check the Segments Membership in the Details tab.
This structured use of segments within SAP CDP lets organizations efficiently manage customer data, targeting them with tailored business strategies and optimizing customer journeys based on detailed segmentation rules.
Now let’s look at an example scenario where we have defined four segments based on the customer’s behavior or activities in a web shop.
On the left side, you’ll see some profile entity attributes and a few indicators for aggregating the customer purchase order activities. Based on the profile entity and indicators, we can define a few segments to group the customers into different categories for further engagement or activation.
The first segment, high loyalty, is quite straightforward. We can use an Annual Total Spend indicator as a condition to include customers into this classification value.
The second segment is defined by the channel the customers are placing orders on. We can use the Online channel order count and Offline channel order count indicator to define this segment.
The third and fourth segments are defined in a similar way, where we can count the number of social media posts and customer service calls.
Once the indicators and segments are defined, and as various application events are ingested into the CDP, indicator values will be populated with values aggregated from real time, incoming event data. Then, segments will be able to pull the indicator values and classify the customers into different values or groups.
In this lesson, you learned about the key benefits of segments, how to create and configure them, and how segment values can be reordered. You also saw how segment evaluation can be managed.