Using the Customer Schema

This lesson explores how the Customer Schema provides a unified view of customer actions and attributes across touchpoints. In addition to covering key components such as Profiles, Activities, Privacy, and Segments, we will also demonstrate their flexibility and extensibility. You'll learn how to configure attributes, manage Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and use the CDP Console to optimize your customer data management.

A Customer Data Platform should reflect a unified, exhaustive, and coherent view of all the customer actions and attributes collected across touchpoints. The Customer Schema supports this through its flexibility and extensibility.

The first and most important part of the Customer Schema is the Profile, which contains both standard and custom profile attributes, for instance first name, last name, e-mail, etc. The schema can be extended to any number of attributes.

The second part of the schema is Activities, which refers to any action or operation the user has performed on a site, App, in a store, and so on. These customer behavior data should be stored in SAP Customer Data Platform. Activity examples include Purchase, Survey, Complaint, etc. Each activity can have multiple attributes.

Also present in the schema is Privacy, a default section that stores the Consents and Communication Subscriptions the user has agreed to. These are usually sent from different application events.

Indicators are calculated values based on configurable rules and attributes from the different Activities. Examples include "SUM of orders" and "AVG NPS".

A Segment is a customer classification or grouping. Classification into Segments happens in real time, based on configurable rules; for instance, the CustomerLoyaltyLevel segment could be used to differentiate users ranked as "Golden" or "Silver".

A Group is an entity used to create sets of Customer Profiles or other Groups, and also to collect Activities associated with it. A Group might represent an organization, family account, club, and so on. A Relationship connects a Group to a Customer Profile or other Groups, which allows you to define how entities are related to each other. Both Groups and Relationships can have extra attributes; for instance, a company (Group) has many (Relationship) employees (Profile), each of whom is acting in a particular role (Relationship attribute).

The customer schema is extensible and configurable from the CDP Console.

A Profile and related Activities contain attributes associated with the customer’s personal information and their activities. This includes both predefined attributes and custom attributes you can extend or configure as needed.

Attributes can be defined as a single value or as an array of values.

You can define, for each Attribute, a Code List (prebuilt list of values), Validation, and Normalization. Some of these are predefined in the system, and we will see how you can manually add your own later in the demo video.

Most attributes can also be identified as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII is any information that can be used to identify an individual. This includes names, Social Security numbers, date of birth, biometric records, and other linked information. Attributes set as PII are encrypted and therefore not searchable. You can allow this customer data to be unencrypted and hence searchable by disabling its PII toggle, but this raises data security and privacy issues.

Some key attributes in the Profile Schema can be defined as "Application Identifiers", indicating they can be used as unique identifiers in the source or destination systems. Examples of Application Identifiers include CIAM ID or CRM ID. In this case, you can also change the Merge Rules settings to determine if you want to discard or merge incoming data when a duplicate value for these identifiers is received during ingestion. If the identifier is an array, you can also set the maximum number of values for it.

In this lesson, you learned how the Customer Schema provides a unified view of a customer’s profile data, activities, privacy settings, activity indicators, as well as what segments and groups they belong to. You also now know that the schema can be extended and configured to meet your needs, and that some of its attributes can be identified as critical when protecting your customers’ privacy, while others can be used to resolve a customer’s identity when ingesting data from different sources.