Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2 September 2021 – Rapid digital transformation in 2020 has resulted in a hybrid customer engagement model that is changing how brands shape, manage and deliver superior customer experiences (CX). Throw in the loss of the third-party cookie and marketers must double down on the data they do have: their own first-party data. SAS’ unique real-time customer data platform (CDP) capabilities help brands meet these challenges, deriving real intelligence from first-party data and acting with the speed and agility necessary to meet customer expectations in a new world of self-guided, self-directed co-operative experiences.
“If your data infrastructure isn't fast and flexible enough to keep up with your customers as they hop from one marketing channel to the next and one departmental interaction to the next, you will never deliver an end-to-end customer experience,” said Gerry Murray, Research Director, Marketing and Sales Technology at IDC. “It takes an enterprise ecosystem to aggregate, analyze and activate customer data in real time. SAS delivers powerful capabilities in all three areas to empower data-driven innovation across the business.”
In the study Experience 2030: Pulse Report conducted by Futurum Research and sponsored by SAS, 73% of brands believe that the future of CX is in real-time data collection and analysis. Futurum Research calls this “the need for speed” – speed to detection of consumer-initiated online events, speed to analysis of behavior and speed to intelligent reactions. The SAS CDP helps brands collect, analyze and activate first-party data in real time, instantly embedding insights into customer-facing systems to create value in consumer engagement and business models.
“Traditional CDPs fill a gap in the marketers toolkit, enabling the ingestion of data from multiple sources; managing customer identities; creating audience segments and provisioning data and insights to the martech stack. But that is not enough in today’s world where customer engagement is constantly evolving and marketers need to change on a dime to keep up with expectations,” said Lisa Loftis, Principal Product Marketer for CDPs at SAS. “Losing the data provided by the third-party cookie places an even higher emphasis on these real-time CDP capabilities – what we call beyond CDP. Because despite the fact that Google has pushed back their plans to phase out third-party cookies until 2023 – these will be going away. And the sooner the planning starts for this, the better off companies will be.”
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Companies are already using SAS to move beyond traditional CDP platforms to seamlessly collect, enhance, extend and activate customer data in real time. SAS receives consistently excellent ratings from customers and analysts in areas as diverse as managing real-time interactions, facilitating digital decisions, and providing sophisticated real-time analytics. SAS was recently recognized as a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs and The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q4 2020.
How SAS CDP capabilities are different from the rest:
Data Ingestion and Identity Management. SAS has an extensive data collection technology – one that feeds an open and cloud-based, customer-centric data hub. It is an enterprise-scale solution for collecting 360-degree customer views across digital channels, offline channels and third-party properties. Unlike many web data collection applications, which provide only aggregated information, SAS can provide granular contextualized customer-level information on user behavior (pages, screens and field interactions); capture and send events in real time; and stitch together online and offline information into a single unified profile that can be updated dynamically in real time as user behavior changes. This real-time view of customers enables marketers to pinpoint digital activity and respond immediately with contextually relevant optimized offers.
Segmentation and Data Provisioning. SAS goes beyond the simple segmentation capabilities found in many CDPs to provide advanced models, clustering and campaign targeting. “Do it for me” options can also provide guided analytics and segment discovery for marketers who are not necessarily data scientists. Segments can be dynamically updated with digital activity in real time and algorithmic, multitouch attribution lets marketers understand how customers are journeying across all contact points so that you can use your customer data and insights to shape omnichannel journeys. Predictive models, forecasting, goal-seeking routines, guided analytics, journey analytics and decisioning beyond marketing round out the AI and decisioning capabilities in the SAS CDP.
Streaming Data and a Unique Hybrid Data Architecture. Never miss an opportunity with SAS’ streaming data platform that provides a real-time, two-way interaction between digital properties and on-premises applications. This eliminates the digital lag time – when something happens on the web and the CDP doesn’t discover it for hours to days. This also powers the real-time dynamic updates of our customer identities and segments. The hybrid data architecture allows marketers to keep their data where they want it and enables them to join online and offline data while also providing a rigorous digital guardianship as personally identifiable information (PII) data is not stored in the cloud.
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