Getting to Know the Customer Profile

The SAP Customer Data Platform ingests and unifies many different types of data from multiple sources, including 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd party data, anonymous visitor data, and even offline data, also collected from different sources.

1^st party data is usually the most accurate, so it can be trusted and used to interact with service channel or in-store customers, while 3^rd party data is mostly probabilistic customer information and should therefore only be used in non-deterministic scenarios like advertising, personalization, and marketing.

In a typical scenario, customers register accounts in the commerce system with their email ID and are assigned commerce IDs, such as a customer UID in SAP Commerce Cloud. If the commerce system is integrated with the backend CRM system or a CIAM system like SAP Customer Data Cloud, a master data ID or CIAM ID will also be assigned to the customer account. Since customer accounts in commerce systems are usually validated using email or SMS, customer account information, such as customer identifier, profile attributes, and consents, is highly accurate and associated with a high level of confidence.

Since service interactions are usually highly contextual, they can have, in addition to identifiers collected from the commerce system, other service-specific identifiers, for instance a customer loyalty ID in the loyalty system. Customer service events are also part of the customer profile information and might also be used to further segment customers.

On the other hand, 2^nd party systems like online survey applications only give you a very limited set of identifiers, like the customer email ID, and the data collected from those systems are usually not accurate or up to date and thus has a very low level of trust. You can therefore only use it in non-deterministic channels like marketing, personalization and 3^rd party systems, since the use of inaccurate or even incorrect customer information in those channels is not catastrophic. However, if you use customer information in a more deterministic channel, such as service and in-store, you are taking a huge risk of not only negatively impacting customer experience, but also potentially offending your customers.

3^rd party data can be ingested from external systems, such as social networks and other data aggregators, but remember to observe data regulations and affirmative customer consent before ingesting, merging and processing that information to obtain the insights needed to provide a richer customer experience.

By default, the SAP Customer Platform only provides you with the Unified Profile view out-of-the-box. In this scenario, you can store both low-confidence and high-confidence customer Profile data using the Unified Profile view.

Optionally, if you decide to separate low-confidence and high-confidence Profile data, you can opt to add the Contextual Profile view to your Business Unit. In this scenario, you can store low-confidence customer Profile data in the Unified Profile view and use the Contextual Profile view for storing high-confidence Profile data.

In this learning journey, we will use only the Unified Profile view.

In this lesson, you learned about the kind of data that is ingested and unified by the Customer Data Platform. You now understand how 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd party data differ in terms of accuracy and level of trust, and how best to make use of this data. And finally, you understand how to segregate data based on your confidence in it using Contextual and Unified Profile Views.