The tech industry can throw a lot of acronyms at you. CDC….CDP….? What are they and what’s the difference? We understand the need for clarity, thus, this article will break down each and their benefits.
The Cloud and The Platform
SAP CDC (Customer Data Cloud) is a solution that handles identity and consent management in the front office. Sitting on the mobile app or website, CDC lets the user register or create an account, manage his identity, preferences, and consent. A customer is able to easily register for services, authenticate themselves, and verify preference with this end-user focused solution.
SAP CDP (Customer Data Platform) is a separate product or platform that lives on the back end. So it’s not facing the consumer. Sales teams and marketers benefit from the way CDP consolidates, ingests, and unifies data that comes in from an array of sources. CDP bridges online and offline data to help you understand your customers and deliver relevant, trusted, and personalized engagements. It allows you to elevate customer experiences across marketing, commerce, sales, and service.
CDC identity and consent data is just another source of data that feeds into CDP. Some customers might have CDC as their identity system. Some might have another consent or identity management system. Either system is fine for CDP. All you need to know is that you have reliable first party data and reliable consent data to input into CDP. If it’s coming from CDC or another identity or consent provider, no problem. Technically speaking, these are two separate solutions. CDP is a solution by itself. There are synergies and integration between the two, but the systems are not dependent on each other. So you can have one without the other, and vice versa.
Best Use Cases for CDC and CDP
If you look at the holy grail of omnichannel personalization, it’s a journey that must begin with two initial steps. A CDP’s foundation is unified data from other sources, and reliable first party data for consent and preferences. This allows you to collect data across multiple touch points, and additionally creates personalization. Therefore, customer consent is imperative.
The ideal scenario is to capture as much as possible from first party data. This data can come from CDC, CRM, MDM – or any data where you have consent and first party data that is reliable. Add to that any other data you might want to push into CDP. It can be anonymous data that can grow into known data activities and events happening anywhere in the landscape.
To summarize, SAP CDC is an identity management platform. It includes customized registration, social login, and user profile and preference management. CDC can be used as input to SAP CDP – because it collects, organizes, and centralizes customer data. It uses this data build a comprehensive 360-degree customer profile. This thorough profile is then made available to service, marketing, sales, and commerce teams. Finally, we hope this article conveyed that using CDC and CDP in conjunction creates a hyper-personalized customer experience.