360° customer view

Unifying data assets, building trust and improving customer experience

In today’s volatile, rapidly changing market, we are moving towards a new generation of customer relationships where trust and understanding driven by data are key to winning customers over and strengthening brand images. Today’s customers are in charge of their own data and increasingly aware of their rights, and their privacy consciousness is pushing lawmakers to ensure responsible data usage. As a result of this, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force on 25 May 2018

and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) became effective on 1 January 2020. Customers are willing to trust brands with their data as long as brands are upfront about how they use this data. In other words, brands need to prove that they will keep personal data safe and have the customer’s best interests at heart. Once brands have earned this trust, they can move their attention to creating an exceptional customer experience to set themselves apart from their competitors. So how do data, trust and understanding all come together?

The Challenge

Your expert for questions

Dr. Rüdiger Göbel
Director, PwC Germany
Tel.: +49 151 2214-3480
E-Mail

Treat your customer data as a valuable asset

In many cases, companies do not have a thorough road map for their customer data management strategy, from collection to processing and utilising.

Companies have access to a vast quantity of customer data through multiple channels, systems and applications at all times. But if the data isn’t harmonised, it will simply remain in data silos. This leads to stagnating quality of data, and in turn to poor insights.

Meanwhile, customers are already overwhelmed with new apps and are not particularly willing to sign up to even more sites and services. They have to enter the same information and answer the same questions on consent and preferences over and over again. Subscribing to a newsletter means getting bombarded with hundreds of emails about unrelated products and services.

Have you had similar experiences? Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself:

How well do you understand your customers and their preferences?
How often do your customers check new terms and conditions, agree to your privacy policy or opt-in to marketing?
What’s the registration and login process like for customers on your websites, apps, shops, social media and other channels?
Why do so many customers unsubscribe?
How do you increase subscriptions?
What’s your customer experience like when 1) updating your personal details, 2) requesting a copy of your personal data, and 3) if you want to be forgotten?
How can you reduce manual work by implementing customer self-service? E.g. for sales and service status checking, delivery monitoring, updating personal details, consent and preferences.

Customers used to be more generous in giving away their personal data to trade for a better experience. This attitude to privacy has changed, and customers are now more aware of their rights than ever. Companies that prefer to keep their data practices in the dark may manage to benefit in the short term. In the long run, however, companies will earn customers’ trust by 1) being open about what information they are collecting, 2) giving control to the customer, and 3) using the data in the customer’s own interest. Trust means loyalty, and loyalty means a competitive advantage.

The Solution

Create a road map for managing customer data

Customer data is essential for companies to create a meaningful connection with customers across channels. Customer data management is also crucial, and requires the right technology, process and people.

Customer identity access management (CIAM) is maturing, with advanced tools that collect, store and analyse customer data to help brands increase sales and customer loyalty.

Example B2C use cases using SAP Customer Data Cloud

Use case: the Golden Record
Use case: single sign-on
Use case: GDPR compliance

Use case: the Golden Record

The Golden Record is the ultimate aim of achieving excellent customer experience.

Situation

Customer or consumer data is often fragmented across multiple systems, applications, and touchpoints.
Each market, brand and function has a partial picture of the customers.
Customer data is outdated, inaccurate and duplicated.
End customers feel misunderstood, and are annoyed by the resulting overload of irrelevant marketing material and multiple requests to update their details.

Solution

SAP CDC provides centralised data storage for attributes that are relevant for marketing, sales and service, for both B2B and B2C.
Simple identity and access management enable CDC to reach out to multiple touchpoints.
CDC can easily integrate with other systems via the internet or an API. This enables it to collect up-to-date customer information in one place, and distribute it to downstream systems.

Benefits

There are many advantages to the Golden Record, and the SAP CDC solution makes this goal much easier to achieve than it would be with a self-developed system.
End customers are happier because they feel acknowledged and understood.

Use case: single sign-on

A frictionless customer experience reduces customer churn.

Situation

Companies have multiple customer touchpoints. These touchpoints work in data silos.
When a new app is published, customers have to sign up for a new account. When a customer switches to a new device, they have to enter their username and password.
Customers can’t go back and forth between two brand sites.

Solution

SAP CDC offers single sign-on and social sign-on powered by cookies so that users don’t have to log in again when switching from one app to another.
The intuitive UI builder helps to scale up the login process so that you can easily add new applications with the same look and feel to the registration/login screen.
If your company manages multiple brands, you can choose which brands you want to move to single sign-on to avoid cannibalisation.

Benefits

Single sign-on allows a seamless login experience for customers. The customer journey remains uninterrupted and customers can easily recognise your ‘family’ of brands.

Use case: GDPR compliance

Data protection regulations offer an opportunity to win customer trust.

Situation

Customers are increasingly aware of their data protection rights.
Without a well-thought out policy for handling customer data, companies face the risk of legal action, which can lead to financial loss and brand damage.
GDPR compliance may be very difficult without automated systems. Achieving compliance involves a long process to identify the user and to collect, harmonise, update or delete data across various systems.
This process takes time and effort, and is prone to error.

Solution

SAP CDC is a GDPR compliance solution which helps companies streamline their GDPR compliance process.
CDC can easily be integrated with other systems, speeding up the process of collecting, updating and deleting customer data.

Benefits

Simplified, up-to-date process for ensuring data protection.
Companies can even offer self-service to reduce manual work, errors and legal risk.
A smooth, transparent GDPR compliance process will help gain customer trust, improve brand image and increase customer loyalty.

Our Approach

Select service packages depending on your starting point on the customer data transformation journey

“Technology is just a tool.”

As part of PwC Customer Transformation, we are eager to learn about your challenges and work alongside you to find a solution that best fits your needs. Our experience in managing customer data can help you leverage your current business processes and IT systems, and lay strategic foundations for customer data – which will ultimately improve your customer experience and increase profits.

Our packages

Where are you on your customer data journey? Are you wondering whether your existing systems are adequate? Do you need a CIAM solution? We can offer an initial check-up to start the conversation, explore your capabilities, understand your problems and work with you to find the right solution, considering time, cost and value.

Which business use cases are you planning? From the business perspective, what does your customer journey look like? What’s going well? Where are the problems? We will support you in finding the touchpoints and data that you need your solution to include, and in streamlining your GDPR compliance process. We can also put you in touch with legal specialists from the PwC network to provide extra support.

How does the CIAM solution fit with your existing systems? If you want to implement a CIAM solution within your systems and IT strategy, we will work with you to position that solution within your system environment and define how the solution communicates with other systems.

How do you design a solution? Business use cases and functional requirements are the goals when designing a solution in detail. We will help you dig deep into identifying user stories and selecting the key requirements for proof of concept before scaling up.

How do you build the solution? From strategy to execution: our CIAM experience will help you implement your solution and ensure the best outcomes. Our agile, holistic approach to implementation is our proven success factor, as demonstrated by multiple SAP awards.

How do you get the solution to end users? The success of a solution depends on the rate of user adoption. To achieve high adoption, we will support you in change management and in preparing end users for onboarding with the new solution – market by market, brand by brand.

What else can we do? After adopting the CIAM solution, you might want to make changes to fit your current business. We can help you identify areas for adjustment or improvement and go one step further to identify new use cases.