Defining Customer Explorations

This lesson will guide you through the process of organizing customer data into meaningful groups or collections in the SAP Customer Data Platform. Understanding how to create and use customer explorations is crucial to harness the full potential of customer data analytics in various company strategies, such as marketing. Let’s dive into what customer explorations are and how they can transform your data utilization and analytics.

In SAP Customer Data Platform, a customer exploration is essentially a method of categorizing customers based on specific attributes, activities, or behaviors. Imagine creating a subset of customers who are under 30 years old who have made a purchase in the last month. This is an example customer exploration — a powerful tool that aids marketers in crafting targeted campaigns and generating leads. By applying conditions to various attributes such as customer profiles, indicators and segments, you can gain insight into previously hidden patterns.

Some example customer explorations are shown here along with the number of exploration nodes each contains.

Customer explorations include several dynamic capabilities:

• You can visualize the number of groups or customers in real-time while designing your customer exploration.
• Once defined, customer explorations save all criteria and attributes, preserving the context and conditions used in its creation.
• Flexibility is key; decide later whether to activate a customer exploration as an audience or convert it into a segment, depending on your business goals.

Here is an example customer exploration definition, with a few exploration nodes on the right side in a hierarchical tree structure; each node shows the number of potential customers. You can drag and drop profile attributes, segments, activities and indicator from the left side to the exploration nodes on the right side to fine tune the exploration. You can use an exploration node to create a segment or audience activation from the node's action menu.

Consider the first scenario in the diagram below, where we focus on creating a 'VIP Customer Exploration' – CE1. This involves setting up conditions based on customer profile attributes, indicators and segments: For CE1, customers must have a total order amount exceeding $100,000, visited the store or site more than 20 times, and belong to the 'High Loyalty' segment. This layer of specific criteria ensures that the exploration identifies truly high-value customers, allowing business to develop tailored engagement strategies for them.

The customer exploration feature is all about uncovering valuable customer insights and crafting precise customer segments and audiences for various business operations like service and marketing. By effectively leveraging profile attributes, activities, indicators and segments, you can elevate your operation efforts, targeting exactly those customers whose characteristics align with your strategic goals. Start defining your customer explorations today and turn customer data into actionable insights.