Creating CX Flows

CX Flows enable a brand or company to deliver personalized experiences to their customers across all touchpoints at crucial moments in the customer's lifecycle. It enables reacting in real-time customer by-customer basis to changes in individual customer data or processing of it, such as changes in indicators participation on segments, among others.

A CX flow is a real-time, 1:1 relationship between the brand and an individual customer, for example:

• A customer buys something for the first time, entering the "new customer" segment. This triggers the "welcome email" CX flow that sends her a personal email thanking her and offering to subscribe for future updates.
• The product is delivered to the customer's home, and she is invited to fill in a satisfaction survey via a customized link sent to her mobile or email, as per her preference settings.

Each CX flow can be designed as "if-then" logics, using logic blocks, to personalize a customer’s experience, considering their past actions, channel preferences, location, and real-time interactions on all business touchpoints. The logic blocks that build the CX flow may be triggers, actions, decisions, and flow controls.

Triggers are the entry points or conditions that set the context of the CX flow experience. Triggers can be used to reduce the population of the target audience based on the trigger scenario.

The following are examples of CX Flow triggers:

• An application sends an event to the SAP Customer Data Platform (e.g., a service application sends a new ticket).
• A customer or group was created.
• Customer or group attributes were updated.
• An activity indicator changed (e.g., the total value of all purchases).
• An activity was registered for a customer or a group.
• A customer or group is included in/excluded from a segment (e.g., a customer entered the "Gold Customer" segment).

An action is an activation on a downstream system, for example, creating a new ticket in a service system. Actions help deliver contextually personalized experiences to a customer in real-time at various stages of the customer's journey.

So, the destination application action must be configured before setting up the CX flow. Cloud storage applications cannot be used in CX flows.

Decisions split a CX flow based on a simple Yes-No logic so that different paths can be created within the CX flow. For example, if a customer does not have an identifier in the target CRM system, you can include a step to create that identifier while skipping this step for customers who do have a CRM ID.

Flow controls help you set the beginning, end, duration, and frequency of communication with a customer on their journey. For example, you can use flow controls to join different parts of the flow to limit communication and avoid contacting a customer too frequently so as not to appear overly aggressive.

The following flow controls are available:

• Join customers or groups from different CX flow paths into a single path.
• End the customer's or group's CX flow; it's a visual indicator that a CX flow has ended.
• Wait Until Duration, allows you to stall a CX flows path for a period of time or until a specific date and time.

Business Case

As a business requirement, we’d like to send a welcome message to every new customer who has a valid e-mail address and consented to receive e-mails.

Solution Overview

We’re going to setup a new CX Flow that is triggered by a new Customer getting ingested on SAP CDP. We’ll also check if the customer has a primary e-mail and consented to the Receive Emails processing purpose. The outcome action will send a Welcome New Customer message to a Web Service provider using a new Destination and action configured explicitly for this purpose.

Next, we’ll test the CX Flow using the Events Playground from the existing "bookstore profile data ingestion" Event. We’ll simulate a new customer Ingestion going through the Event pipeline steps until the data gets into CDP and triggers the CX Flow.

Finally, we’ll also use an external service to observe the Welcome New Customer message payload being activated or pushed outside the SAP Customer Data Platform.

We'll start with the pre-requirement setup of the Destination and Action before jumping into the CX Flow setup. We’ll wrap up with the ingestion test.