SAP Customer Data

What Is Customer Data?

Customer data is critical for companies to understand purchasing patterns for their e-commerce strategy as well as balancing supply and demand in their supply chain. Technology plays a significant role in gathering, analyzing, and delivering customer data insights that companies rely on for competitive advantage.

Customer Data in the B2B and B2C Landscape

Customer data can come in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) forms. In the digitized world where e-commerce continues to expand, the volume of data grows with it. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage for companies. On the one hand, the level of insight data brings can lead to new product and service innovations. On the other hand, aggregating an immense set of datapoints and pulling value from it can be daunting without an investment in technology.

SAPinsider has a few examples of how companies are approaching those issues to glean the most value and insight from their customer data.

What Is Customer Data?

Customer data is critical for companies to understand purchasing patterns for their e-commerce strategy as well as balancing supply and demand in their supply chain. Technology plays a significant role in gathering, analyzing, and delivering customer data insights that companies rely on for competitive advantage.

Customer Data in the B2B and B2C Landscape

Customer data can come in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) forms. In the digitized world where e-commerce continues to expand, the volume of data grows with it. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage for companies. On the one hand, the level of insight data brings can lead to new product and service innovations. On the other hand, aggregating an immense set of datapoints and pulling value from it can be daunting without an investment in technology.

SAPinsider has a few examples of how companies are approaching those issues to glean the most value and insight from their customer data.

Retailer invests in consumer behavior. Retail is an ever-changing industry where customer mindsets shift and technologies evolve. In this article, Ramesh J. Chougule, AVP, SAP Cloud and Digital Lead at Infosys, describes a retailer that made significant investments in intelligent e-commerce technologies and a shopping services arm, transforming several internal processes. Strategic technology investments helped the company build a shopping service that enhanced the entire value chain. It connected consumers with a seamless experience, from ordering to doorstep delivery. The business experienced growth and became more profitable in a year, even as the pandemic affected its brick-and-mortar locations.

Personas and the shift to fashion retail. Customer preference and personalization means adapting to different consumer mindsets. Nuno Miller, CIO for Sonae Fashion, witnessed this firsthand as significant mindset shifts occurred during the transition from traditional retail to fashion retail. In this article, Miller says an agile operation and ability to innovate are absolute in fashion retail. Personas play a significant role in making that happen. Understanding your customer personas is critical if you’re to succeed as an agile operation capable of developing products to those specific audiences, says Miller.

Wholesaler implements e-commerce. Knowing the products that your customers want when they want them is critical for retail survival. In this article, the wholesaler implemented its e-commerce solution two years earlier than planned, leading to a holistic view of customer demand data. Joe Bruhin, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Breakthru Beverage, says, “We’re able to move fast and adapt to changing demand patterns because of our end-to-end SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Customer Data Cloud solutions, as well as SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) for our ERP, which has helped us tremendously in meeting customer demand.”

Vendors in the SAP customer data space include: AllSight, Westernacher Consulting, Tacit Knowledge, Datasense Solutions, and McKinsol Consulting Inc.