SAP Launches CDP Industry Accelerator to Help Utilities Deliver Better Customer Experiences

[kai_lemke]

SAP has released a new Industry Accelerator for its SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP) solution, designed to help utilities companies drive more effective customer engagements. The SAP CDP Utilities Accelerator was made generally available on April 15th, 2024.

The accelerator packages pre-built capabilities tailored for common utilities use cases to allow faster deployment of the SAP CDP solution. It includes pre-configured data models, segments, machine learning models (roadmap) and connectivity to SAP's S/4HANA Utilities solution out-of-the-box.

The Industry Accelerators bring the company's decades of industry expertise to accelerate CDP adoption and provide an industry-specific flavor. The utilities accelerator caters mainly to B2C scenarios, revealing capabilities not exposed without this accelerator.

The accelerator helps utilities companies to leverage CDP insights to improve customer retention and cross-selling. For example, if CDP detects a customer's contract is nearing expiration and they had previously inquired about green energy options, the utilities company could proactively offer that customer a discounted renewable energy plan before the contract ends.

This shows the end-to-end flow of how CDP works for utilities, ingesting data from different customer-facing sources like S/4HANA Utilities, unifying it to a holistic customer view (Customer 360), analyzing it, and activating it for engagements.

Key components of the CDP Utilities Accelerator include:

• Configuration wizards to enable utility use cases by answering business questions
• Pre-built data model for utilities entities like contracts, premises and installations
• Out-of-the-box segments for upcoming contract expirations, supplier switches, etc.
• Connectors to ingest data from SAP S/4HANA Utilities into the CDP
• Machine learning for customer behavior prediction (roadmap)

To reduce the time you spend to get value out of the utilities accelerator importing and configuring an industry accelerator involves a simplified wizard-guided process.

The accelerator leverages SAP Integration Suite to streamline data flows from SAP S/4HANA Utilities, converting and mapping utilities data into CDP's format. Customers can use the accelerator's segments and predictions (roadmap) to for example trigger marketing campaigns and renew contracts with targeted offers.

With increasing competition, utilities companies need more individualized customer engagement. The CDP Utilities Accelerator aims to provide the data foundation and industry-specific insights to deliver relevant, timely offers at scale.

Further Resources:

• CDP Utilities Accelerator Documentation
• SAP Integration Suite Package: CDP for Utilities Integration with S/4HANA

This launch further expands SAP's verticalized CDP offerings, following the CDP Retail Accelerator released earlier in 2024. More CDP industry accelerators are planned for the future.