Good morning, everyone. My name is Patrick Saer previously the CEO at giga, the leading provider of customer identity management. Currently the general manager of the SAP customer data cloud giga was acquired about 12 months ago into SAP. Really appreciate your time. What I wanna talk about is a few things today. First is I've had the privilege of talking to tens, if not hundreds of CIOs, CMOs, CDOs, and what I've seen is a collection of things that they really care about and trends that are impacting their business at really the highest level.
And I think all of these trends, point to the growing importance of what all of us do in this room in terms of identity. And so I wanna just address some of those trends, talk about how those are changing and growing. First second is I wanna talk about why it's so difficult for the folks.
I talked to the CIO CDOs CMOs to address those trends. And I think it's difficult cuz the world's changed a lot over the last three or four years and the way that our infrastructure operates at a technical level, hasn't kept up socially. Number two.
And finally, I wanna provide a framework, a way to think about this going forward of how do we address some of these trends and I'll close there. So why don't I just jump into it now let's talk about some of these trends. So consumers customers out there, they desire personalization and customization, right? We all kind of get that right? If you look at where consumers spend their time, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even the new winners, right?
Uber, Airbnb, all of these provide a customized experience. We're not surprised by that, but what's new is consumers don't want that personalization in any cost, right?
John mentioned it. Consumers are tired of creepy. They're tired of it. They're tired of being tracked without their knowledge. They're tired of data brokers, their data showing up on data broker sites and being sold all over the place, right? They're tired of seeing an ad. They have no idea where that ad came from. They're just growing tired of that. And so this doesn't mean that personalization is important.
Customization is isn't important. Just has to be done the right way. And the right way is thinking about transparency. Thinking about control, thinking about a two way relationship between the consumer and the business. And we know this to be true, right? If you just look at the news cycle each and every day, we see examples of this coming time and time again. And what's interesting is John noted, the regulatory environment is actually following this very closely.
Usually I think you don't see close alignment with what consumers want and often what the regulatory environment asks for.
But if you look at GDPR at its core, it's giving consumers rights, rights to transparency, rights to control over their data. I think it's actually asking for the right things. And so here we are, right? We've got a number of these trends, but again, it doesn't mean that consumers don't want to share data. It doesn't mean that consumers don't think businesses deserve to have data. But what it does mean is they need that transparency and control. This was a survey from Accenture that said, you know, almost all consumers, right?
Three quarters of consumers said they are willing to share data with a brand. If they're given that transparency control, right? So it's a relationship where consumer will provide information in return. They get better products, better marketing, better services, but it has to be done in a certain way.
That's really critical here. Now I would argue we're entering the fourth era of how we build relationships with customers. And this will be familiar to, I think everyone in this room, but just to kind of walk through it, right? We started in the offline era where it was really natural.
It was just the corner store. There was a two way relationship between the vendor or the store owner and me as a consumer. Right? And that just worked right. It had personalization, natively built in kind of consent natively built in. Then we went digital, we went digital. We kind of lacked some of that personal relationship. We had an offline rule, but we were kind of figuring it all out. That's fine. We jumped to personalized era. Right. Whereas digital, but it was all about personalization. And this is where I think we provide a lot of value for consumers, right?
We see the, the growth of social. But I also think this is where we crossed a line. We crossed a line, whereas business stakeholders, we tried to do whatever was possible. And it kind of makes sense, right? You try to collect as much data as you can. You try to track users wherever you can. Right. You just try to do whatever is technically possible. But we went too far. And I think we're entering this fourth era, which actually in some ways incorporates these previous three and goes back to the core tenants where this is about a relationship between a consumer and a business.
This is about trust. This is about a two way exchange where there's transparency, there's control. I will give you a better product if you share with me, but let's do it under a social contract. That's the era we're entering now.
Why is it so hard though?
I mean, that intuitively makes sense to all of us in this room yet. I don't think we're there. I think we'd all agree. We're not there. And I don't think it's because business stakeholders don't want to get there because I talked to so many of them and they do want to get there. But the challenge is the world has changed, has changed quickly, right? If I'm a business stakeholder, I used to just think about digital's web only. And obviously we have mobile now IOT, the list goes on and on right voice, so on and so forth. But it's more than that. The average business has become so complex.
There's not just one website anymore. There's tens of websites, right? Take Nestle 2000 websites and applications, hundreds of business, business units. This is just a tremendous amount of complexity. And then to deliver on a complex customer journey.
These businesses have bought all sorts of marketing tools and sales tools and service tools, all of which leverage data in same some way. So it's become really, really complex. Right? And I used to just again, in that personalization era identification was problem. I would just track you.
It's fine, but that's not okay anymore. It has to be deterministic. You have to allow users to self-identify raise their hand, right? That takes different tools and tactics, privacy compliance. We all know GDPR, but we're just at the beginning of this. And we know that, right?
We, this is gonna become very geographically distributed. I think it's gonna become very granular. So the bottom line is consumers want this personalization, but they want it done wide. Right? They want it with transparency. They want it with control. But because of this world, that shift, it's really hard to get there.
Okay. And I would argue, we need to kind of reframe the way that we look at this issue in this sort of personalized era, it was all about let's collect all this data. Let's get as much data as we can.
Big data, big data. We need all the data, but this is a reframing today. We need to think about individual rights, right rights that we give consumers, right? To know what data you have on them, right? To delete data, right? To export data, right rights, to provide information and, and to provide preferences in return, they get better products, better services, better marketing. This is a reframing. This is a rethinking to the way that we digitally connect with our customers and consumers, right? So this is the shift. This is a shift that's happening now, here we are. Right.
So we've talked a little bit about consumers, demand, customization, personalization, but not any cost.
It's about transparency control, but it's hard to deliver on. So let me present a framework, a way to start thinking about this as stakeholders in this industry. And what I'll do is I'll use this customer journey that many of us have seen, right? From awareness to consideration, to conversion, to retention, to advocacy. And I would argue, we need to think about privacy all along this continuum. We need to think about customer experience along this continuum.
And we can break this thing down into three different sort of ways to think about it. First is how do we allow users to self-identify to raise their hand and say, I want a relationship with the brand as a starting point, make that as easy as possible, provide a great customer experience to do that. Number one, number two is how do we give clarity to the customer of how their data's being used, allow them to provide consent and then manage their preferences in a very clear way.
And then finally, how do we actually use this information to build a rich profile that's permission based and drive better marketing, better service, right? Better sales. That's the question. So let's kind of take this one by one and excuse me, I'll get a little more tactical here, but I think you can think going back to that customer journey, right from awareness to advocacy, I think you can, at the, at the forefront, think about progressively understanding that customer. We heard that term from John progressive profiling. This is where I'm gonna bring that up a little bit.
This is the starting point of allowing users. Again, step one to self-identify first they're anonymous, an anonymous user. The businesses I've talked to is worth about one fifth of someone that has self-identified or they've actually provided an email address or a phone number. So that value proposition to a business is they can get a user to raise their hand is incredibly, incredibly valuable.
So that's really step one. And we think about this as light registration. So maybe not a newsletter sign up the first time you hit the site.
But maybe when you're looking at a piece of an article related to something you really love like sports, you ask that user to sign up for a newsletter, just give you an email address. It's so lightweight, right? That's such an easy thing to think about. Traditionally, something like a light registration where you just manage an email address has actually been managed by different platforms like email service providers. And hasn't been part of the core identity infrastructure.
And that's really problematic when you think about the customer journey and starting to manage things like privacy customer profiles. So this has to be part of the core identity infrastructure that, that a business offers. And when I talk to, to business stakeholders, I think anywhere in your customer journey, that you can provide value by giving, by getting an email address.
That's when you want to think about this. So you should layer this throughout the, the customer experience.
And then of course, as the journey moves forward and you can provide more value for the customer asking for that full registration. And I, everyone in this room understands this here. So I don't have to spend too much time, but you know, I think we've thought a lot about how do you provide a great experience? One that's very mobile friendly. One that leverages new authentication mechanisms are not so new. Like social login, third party identity providers, face ID one that's secure. So think about risk based authentication, two factor authentication.
Minimizing what data you ask for during this step. I mean, so critical, right? Think about an eCommerce context. So all of this has to be thought through, but again, this doesn't have to be the first place you get to know a customer consumer, the light registration can be the first place.
And then you upgrade that user later, typically where there's a light registration or a newsletter signup, it's not connected to the registration. It's a really frustrating experience for a customer. It's really frustrating cause they already gave information to the brand.
These things should be connected and orchestrated together. Now, from there, you've identified the customer that customer's worth more to you as a brand. It's a two-way relationship. You haven't asked for so much data up front, but that user goes through the site experience. That customer goes through the site experience and where you can provide value. You can ask for value.
So that's where that data exchange and things like progressive profiling come in, and this is both a technology, but more important that it's actually like a tactical strategy that we found that we can really help businesses with, to think about which, which are, which are points of collection that you can actually ask for some information.
Okay. So there we are. We've thought about this progressive journey, right across awareness, consideration, conversion, retention advocacy.
We need to think about the customer experience across this, trying to get users to self-identify the ROI on this is going from a certain amount of users that, that register authenticate or provide an email address or phone number to try to increase that number. And if you can do that again, each one of those users usually worth five X, someone that doesn't self identify, it's all about cross sell upsell. Now let's layer in the second component.
John referenced this a bit in his, in his presentation this morning, but let's think about the privacy component of this, right, doing this the right way, asking for consent and preferences of the customer and consumer. This has to be built in along this entire journey. And this is where, what I've seen that businesses are just not prepared to handle the sort of complexity, the detail which consumers expect and actually the regulation demands.
So what I'm talking about here is one is being able to handle the consent or the terms of service acceptance across all the touch points, which a business might be accepting users to register a login, take someone like Nestle 2000 websites and applications, right? If you actually want to have a single view of those of those customers and the profiles, you actually need to manage consent in a unified fashion in a unified way. That takes a ton of orchestration and lawyers are updating terms of service every every three to six months.
And according to GDPR, you actually have to re-sent those users and know which terms of service did that particular user accept, right? That's actually a really tough thing to do, but then it goes beyond that. It's not just about consenting to terms of service. It's also about getting that user to opt into which information you can actually use to drive personalization and customization, and then thinking about which channels can I market to that customer consumer on how frequently can I market to that customer consumer on and keep in mind these businesses, aren't one channel.
They don't just have one website we're talking about. Every website has multiple touchpoints and there could be 2000 websites, right? You start to get the complexity and how this needs to be managed holistically, but also clearly for a customer across these different touchpoints. So that's really step two.
Now, finally, what is all of this leading to, well first, right? We allow users to self-identify across this journey. Second is we get that consent preference management, right? We get the permission to access this information, provide that transparency and control.
Finally, it's about unifying this view of the profile information, orchestrating that information to drive better products, better marketing, better services. And here's an interesting fact. So the businesses that we work with have us typically have a minimum of 15 different downstream applications that need to leverage this information often. It's hundreds, right? Think about that. It's it's just, and that number's growing all the time and it's not just the profile information.
This is important. It's the consent information and the preference information as well.
So large businesses, obviously they're using all these different applications. Like I know one large CPG that has seven different email service providers. Now they want to have a unified view of the customer. They wanna manage preference and consent in one place cuz they have to because of GDPR compliance yet that consent information has to get syndicated to that downstream application that wants to use the data. And guess what, if that downstream application actually learned something where that user removed consent that has to get orchestrated back to the central profile.
So think about the customer service example, someone calls customer service and says, I don't want you to email me anymore. Well guess what that has to get sent to the central system that then has to get sent to the email service provider.
It's a huge infrastructure problem. And most businesses are not prepared to do that today. This is an identity problem, right? This is an identity problem. So you start to see how exciting this is for everyone in this room. Like the future of driving, great customer experiences across customer journeys are entirely dependent on getting this right.
So I go back to the, to the first sort of framework that I presented, right? So we've got this customer journey again. I sort of urge us to think about this in three ways, right? Providing a great way to identify customers, get that preference and consent information. And then finally leverage that information to provide this better experience. That's how we want to think about it. And just to close the loop with SAP and gig yet SAP offers what we call the customer data cloud and the foundation of the customer data cloud is on giga.
Although we've expanded quite a bit in the last 12 months, cuz we think this problem is actually bigger and broader than I think specifically an authentication problem. We think about this much more broadly where we actually offer three different offerings. First is customer identity, which is that helping customers consumers to self identify in a way that provides a great customer experience through registration login, customer consent.
That's really about helping businesses become GDPR compliant, provide that consent management preference management, give consumers transparency and control customer profile, right or storing and managing that permission based customer information, that consent information, orchestrating it to those 15 to hundreds of downstream applications. So what I'll leave you with is, you know, I think what's really exciting to me. I'll go back to kind of how I started when I talked to just so many business stakeholders. So many CIOs, so, so many CMOs, even CEOs, they care about customer experience.
They care about privacy deeply, right? They, they care about these things we're talking about in this room. The industry, when I say the industry, the world will not get this right. Unless we get identity, right. Specifically customer identity, we get preference in consent management. Right? Right. And at the end of the day, it's orchestrating that information to provide better marketing, better services, better products.
So my expectation is this industry's gonna grow or like in the third or fourth inning, I encourage us all today and tomorrow to really think about the business value we're providing. Cause I think that's fundamentally what will help this industry get bigger and, and get the importance it deserves. So with that, I'll close and thank you very much.
Well, we have time for one question. Oh sure. Anybody have a question.
What is will be SAP's direction in this area now that you've acquired giga, will you fold it together or will they maintain their separate surface offerings?
Sure.
Yeah. So just to give you a sense, they've, they've kept us together. So I'm the general manager of a business unit that essentially giga plus we're growing quite a bit and the ambitions are the same ambitions actually giga has an in as an independent company.
I mean, I think SAP believes deeply, especially cuz European roots in this idea of trust and this idea of a consent driven data model is the future. It's actually like the future of CRM. It's the future of customer experience. They also know that identity consent management preference management does not work if you keep it in the silo within SAP and SAP is not just within our business, but more broadly is committed to openness. So as an example, we have lots of integrations with Salesforce and that's not gonna change.
Didn't change the day after the acquisition hasn't changed a year after and it won't change. I would expect five years after. So that commitment certainly still there to answer your question.
I'll
I'll okay. Yeah. I'll be AF I'll be here after. Yes. Sorry.
So do you see smart devices or even laptops be configured for card present transactions.
You got, you got smart card readers already in laptops. You got NFC.
They give you enable smart device.
That, that way you have a progression transaction, you've got to confirmation of who you can. The
Person. Yeah.
I, I personally can't speak to that exact use case and it's something we can follow up after and connect you with our, our product leaders. But I will say that from our perspective, we're really seeking to be kind of a platform and agnostic to the different authentication mechanisms and we wanna support them all.
So, but in terms of the trends that we see, I'll, I'll certainly connect you with our team and kinda let you know we're seeing, okay,
Good.
