I joined SAP through the acquisition of SeeWhy. A small Cloud based company that had created a very unique algorithm for retargeting customers and tracking their online behaviour. SeeWhy’s behavioral marketing solutions trigger real-time 1-to-1 marketing campaigns using email, advertising across desktop, mobile and social channels, based on individual customer behaviors. 

SAP wanted us to use our algorithm and design them a suit of marketing software that provided real-time customer experience and personalisation for SAP Commerce. I work closely with the two directors of SeeWhy interpenetrating their ideas and creating wires to discuss possible solutions.

CDS captures and analyses contextual and behavioural data across each customer’s commerce journey, fuelling business features for creating individualised customer experiences. This drives conversion, raises order value and increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. Context-Driven Services is a cloud-native system that provides APIs and function-based extension points for customisation.

Providing a relevant experience drives customer satisfaction. Local shops live or die on the quality of their one-to-one relationships. The anonymity of the internet has driven down prices, however the personal touch has gone. Now, the onus is on the customer to decide what is relevant for them.

Context-Driven Services changes that. Combined with SmartEdit, customers are provided with relevant, valuable content at every stage of their shopping journey. With every click the understanding of the customer is reassessed, enabling SmartEdit to show content that is relevant in that exact moment; driving conversion, raising order value and increasing customer satisfaction. In this way, consuming applications benefit from rich, contextually consistent, and relevant representations of customers that evolve over time.

The image below shows how CDS and Smart Edit can place a carousel on a product page like Amazon.

Overview

Get an overview of how Context-Driven Services enhances customer experience.

As the customer scrolls and clicks through the site, each interaction is captured in real time. As well as capturing individual interactions, the system makes broader inferences about the customer, again in real time. Inferences such as calculating the customer’s interest in particular brands or product categories or making inferences to place them in the appropriate spending bracket.

Real time data capture and processing enables the site to provide the customer with the most relevant experience for them. Relevant at that exact moment – using everything that is known about them, right up to their last click.

Key Use Cases

Find out the scenarios you can follow with Context-Driven Services.

Context-Driven Services adds customer identity and deeper customer context to customer-facing applications, like SAP Commerce, so that they provide a more relevant experience for the customer. Sample use cases include:

• Recommendations: Show the most relevant products to visitors at the right point in their shopping journey to help increase the conversion performance of your storefront website and drive product discovery and engagement.
• Personalisation: Use insights on long term consumer behaviour and preferences (brands, products, purchase patterns) to optimise your personalisation strategy.
  • Anonymous customer personalisation: Create a customer profile, which grows with each recurring visit. Leverage this profile to personalise the purchase journey from initial landing page to conversion.
• Segmentation: Add and remove customers to segments in real time, based on their behaviour, to deliver the most relevant personalised experience for the individual at the moment.
• Merchandising Reporting: Observe how carousels, strategies, and product mixes are performing in combination with one another to understand differences in performance.

Key Features

Learn about various features included within Context-Driven Services.

Context-Driven Services offers the following key components:

• Recommendations: Context-Driven Services offers a machine-learning-based Recommendations feature that allows you to promote alternative products to website visitors.
• A/B Testing: Use A/B Testing to compare two product mixes within a Merchandising strategy against each other to determine which one performs better.
• Merchandising Reporting: You can assess the audience coverage and click-through rate for the product mixes and strategies that power the merchandising carousels. For more information, see Merchandising Reporting.
• Merchandising: Promote and advertise goods or services in a way that improves user experience and boosts e-commerce performance.
• Tagging solution: The website (or other channel) is tagged to capture the user interactions. Default tags are provided to support common use cases. See Profile Tag.
• Analytics: Track, measure, and aggregate visitor activity and content engagement across multiple content types, locations and channels in real time. Show aggregated information on a real-time dashboard. Create custom analytics through our real-time query API.
• Customer profiles enrichment: Extensions can be added to define how the user interactions should be handled. Should they be added directly to the profile or should broader inferences be made about the user and stored on their profile (or both). A default set of extensions is provided to support common use cases. For more information, see Extensions.
• Real-time users segmentation: Business users group similar users into segments for coarse-grained personalisation scenarios. Users move dynamically in and out of segments as they interact with the site. See Context-Driven Segmentation.
• Experience personalisation: Using SmartEdit personalisation, the site is tailored to provide relevant content for each customer.
• Evaluation of personalisation effectiveness: Business users examine reports to understand who is using the site, analyse the customer journey, and understand whether their needs are addressed.
• Platform extensibility: Create, maintain, and continually extend customer profiles from a range of data sources. The platform is extensible and leverages a flexible data structure to allow you to capture new data and insights to enrich and extend customer profiles.
• Consent management: Customers are able to manage their data and how it may be used, ensuring their protections under GDPR. A template consent management interface is provided to support common use cases.