SAP Hybris Profile
in a nutshell
in a nutshell
Executive Summary
SAP Hybris Profile is an open platform that enables the creation, maintenance, and continuous extension of a shared customer profile across applications.
Each consuming application benefits from a rich, continuously-evolving flexible schema-less profile, yielding a more complete picture of the customer over time.
The profile can be extended and enriched by SAP Hybris Profile, or by other applications, which are integrated into SAP Hybris Profile. This includes applications from SAP, from other vendors and partners, and 3rd party data providers
SAP Hybris Profile also makes it easy to engage with your customers with transparency and respect, with strong and flexible consent management functionality.
Buiness Goal
Every brand wants their customers to have “Magic Moments” – those experiences that make their customers go “Wow”: "Wow, this brand has really understood what I'm looking for"; "Wow, that’s just what I was thinking of, a perfect next step”, and so forth. To get to this "Wow" effect, companies need to be:
Contextual
This includes knowing who the customer is, what they have done in the past, and their future propensities. This also extends to the customer's environment.
Consistent
Consistency across all channels and touchpoints - mobile, brick-and-mortar, etc. - provides a predictable and comfortable customer experience.
Relevant
This requires a clear, real-time understanding about what is relevant to each customer at any moment.
When executed correctly, these factors provide an exceptional customer experience across all channels and offer new business opportunities such as personal marketing, personal commerce, personal selling and personal service.
SAP Hybris Profile is the key enabler for creating "Magic Moments": SAP Hybris Profile captures interactions, contexts and behaviors to create and continually evolve customer profiles and to foster one-to-one engagement.
Customer Profile Overview
SAP Hybris Profile is an open platform for securely holding customer profiles, capturing context from many sources, enriching and evolving the profiles in real time, and triggering execution in customer facing touchpoints. It is also a rich set of functionality and integrations on top of that platform, starting with Commerce, Marketing, Loyalty, with many more coming soon.
SAP Hybris Profile provides businesses with contextual, consistent, and relevant customer profiles that are updated in real-time from a range of data sources. This profile can then be used the marketing, commerce, sales and service applications to engage with customers in a contextual, consistent and relevant way.
A customer profile is a collection of attributes, conclusions, classifications, and predictions about a customer, derived from customer interactions with the company and from 3rd-party sources. A customer profile can then be assessed and enriched from multiple vantage points: demographics, intent, buying history, product and brand affinities, personal details, purchasing channels, and locations.
In the first release of Hybris Profile, profile attributes will primarily concerned with:
- Commerce and Marketing related scenarios
- Product and Category Affinities
- Online Purchase history
- Browsing history
- Browsing behavior, including basic behavioral attributes
- Technical attributes and classifications, e.g. device- and browser-specific attributes
In the subsequent releases of Hybris Profile, more attributes, conclusions and predictions will be added by the Profile development teams and by external partners.
Data Flow Overview of the SAP Hybris Profile platform
SAP Hybris Profile does not exist in a vacuum: profile data is derived from many sources, and can be used by commerce, marketing, sales, and service systems within your business. Here we review the above diagram from the bottom up:
Context is any data which describes consumers and their environments, and is collected from multiple sources and across multiple touchpoints.
Real-Time Event and Context Processing, Profile Enrichment
- Context Processing normalizes context data across input channels.
- Profile Enrichment applies analytics in order to generate higher-level insights, derive customer affinities based on multiple inputs, and otherwise intelligently interpret the data.
- The Customer Profile Graph is a database optimized to store profile data, and relationships among data, in a highly flexible and extensible manner.
Additional features
- Identities are data elements representing identifying customer attributes, and are matched and merged across different channels and devices.
- Classifications provide dynamic groupings of profile attributes.
- Affinities for product and categories are derived for each customer.
- Real-Time Event Triggering: Updates to a customer profile can disseminate high-value business events trigger engagement applications, to proactively deliver meaningful customer experiences.
- Commerce and Marketing applications leverage profile data and insights to foster one-to-one engagement with the customers. These applications can also deliver data to SAP Hybris Profile, thus enriching customer profiles. Service, Sales and Billing application integration will follow the initial release.
Components of SAP Hybris Profile platform
- Real-Time Event Stream Processor
Performs real-time analysis of streaming data. Examples of types of analysis include filtering, transformation, and aggregation. - Message Broker/PubSub
Decouples the transfer of messages among the various components of SAP Hybris Profile. - Enricher Micro Services
Micro-services that persist data in the graph, possibly altering or extending it before doing so. An Enricher can interpret sets of data points to yield new data to persist. - Real-time Event triggering
Exposed as the "Catapult Service", this component notifies other applications in real-time through the Message Broker/PubSub. Triggers include: a customer abandons a cart; a customer reaches a certain loyalty point level. Any update of a customer's profile can trigger a notification event. - Profile Graph Database
The database that stores profile data as nodes, relationships (a.k.a. "edges"), and properties, and that allows for queries. For example, the graph can represent a customer's shoe order as follows:
"Identity" node with properties "Email=name@domain.com" and "Name=Tom"
"Order" node with properties "Category=Shoes" and "Price=$10"
Edge named "HAS", pointing from the "Identity" node to the "Order" node
These three data elements together indicate that the specified Identity HAS the specified Order. A semantic query for "Identity nodes with HAS edges pointing to Order nodes" would return the above data set.
- Encryption, Data Privacy and Consent Management
Customers control access to their Profile data. For example, customers explicitly grant or revoke permission to read/write their physical address data.
How a Profile is stored in SAP Hybris Profile
Hybris Profile uses a graph database to store the customer profile, sessions, interactions, predictions, etc. Graph databases consist of nodes and relations (a.k.a. "edges") among nodes.
- A node represents, for example, a single session, a customer identity, or a product.
- Edges between the nodes indicate, for example, an activity such as “User A has_viewed Product X”, “User B belongs_to Segment Y”, etc.
Data Privacy and Consent Management
Hybris Profile provides the infrastructure necessary to track and manage profile data. Since responsible data management is the key to trust, a guarantee of data privacy is paramount. To ensure that profile data is never available publicly, each piece of data is encrypted upon storage with a key unique to the customer and to that type of data. Thus, for any profile data to be accessed internally or externally it must first be decrypted. This ensures a maximum level of data security.
Profile data can only be collected, stored, and decrypted for use if the customer has granted consent for that data. Optionally, a brand can decide to give customers the rights to change their consent setting for specific types of data collection and data analysis at any time. Revoking consent has the following effects:
- No more data of that type is collected about this customer. This restriction applies as soon as consent is revoked.
- Existing data of that type, and all associated data, can no longer be decrypted for use and becomes inaccessible.
For instance, if a customer revokes consent to calculate Product Affinity, Hybris Profile will no longer calculate the affinity for products and the associated data in the customer’s profile will no longer be decryptable for use.
Consent can be revoked at various levels of granularity, and for various categories and types of data. Consent can affect both the data that Hybris Profile collects, and the conclusions that Hybris Profile draws from that data. For example, the customer can revoke consent for the Hybris Profile system to track their buying history (thus barring data collection) and to assess their age (thus barring a meta-analysis of the data).
Each brand can decide if and how they provide customers with a means to view their profile data, to enable their development and management of their profile. This active engagement will help build customer trust and loyalty.
There are many creative ways that profile data can be presented to a customer. Displays can be customized to best serve each industry and business model. For example: A brick-and-mortar store may want to emphasize geographic location; a clothing store may want to focus on color schemes; an online outlet could emphasize product-buying history and patterns, brand affinity, or feature preferences. Below are samples of possible ways to display profile data to a customer:
Partner Integration & Extensibility
As a SAP Hybris Profile Partner, you can extend the Hybris Profile system with custom-developed extensions. These extensions can capture profile data from additional sources, enrich that data, and leverage the data to engage customers with context and consistency.
You’ll be able to subscribe to services on the YaaS market, and adapt to arising market opportunities at speed.
Capturing Profile Data
Hybris Profile can collect and derive a wide variety of data. However, if you find that Hybris Profile is missing an entry point for some specific context, you can extend Profile and add that entry point. For example, if you want to add a customer's Instagram data to Hybris Profile, you can write and submit a "context adapter" service to collect this data.
Enriching Profile Data
You can develop customized "enricher" micro-services that analyze data to find new patterns and draw new conclusions. For example, an enricher could analyze product-view history and conclude that a customer has an affinity for button-down dress shirts with stripes. This analysis may be used by other applications to enhance customer service - for example, to send the customer online coupons for certain types of shirts.
As with context adapters, enrichers can be offered for sale on the YaaS market.
Leveraging Profile Data
Hybris Profile can react to profile changes by notifying connected applications and users. For example: If a customer purchases a dress shirt and a travel case at a brick-and-mortar store in New York City, this new data can combine with pre-existing data about the customer's buying history to indicate that this customer is a businessperson who travels frequently. Such inferences can influence how services are provided to the customer, for example by providing product recommendations geared towards travel-related items.
You can customize Hybris Profile to intelligently react to profile changes: a customized service could combine the information about a new shirt purchase with conclusions about customer intent, and then inform the marketing system. As a result, a coupon for discounts on business-travel attire, with relevant product recommendations, could be emailed to the customer.