Saving Lives One Customer Experience at a Time: American Cancer Society Modernizes Website

The American Cancer Society fights cancer around the world through research, patient support, prevention and treatment information, and other services. Since 1991 the organization has contributed to a 26 percent drop in cancer death rates and helped save over 2.3 million lives.

As the largest non-profit in the United States dedicated to ending cancer and helping people with the disease, the American Cancer Society is often the first place visited by people who need support, or want to help via donations or volunteerism. The organization responded to 1.34 million calls and chats and its website received 106 million page visits, according to its 2017 annual report.

With so many people coming to the Society’s website, “we needed to get one single, 360-degree profile of those people that could be shared across the organization,” says Paulette Carter, Senior Director of Customer Experiences and Integration.

She realized that with a refresh of the website design to improve customer experience underway, it was the right time to make it easier for website visitors to log on with a single sign-on.

She also wanted to make sure that behind the scenes, the organization could easily create profiles for those visitors indicating their interests, which activities they participated in, and how they came to the website. These profiles could then be shared across the Society so employees could better determine how to engage with and help them.

Says Carter, “We needed an enterprise solution for customer authentication and identity management that could scale to accommodate our millions of users, and we knew traditional IAM (Identity and Access Management) was not the answer. We made a conscious business decision to move to the SAP Customer Data Cloud because of its ease of use.”

SAP Customer Data Cloud (part of the SAP C/4HANA CRM suite), provides single sign-on functionality for constituents, allowing them to register seamlessly using their preferred social network accounts. SAP Customer Identity (part of the SAP Customer Data Cloud) then consolidates information about registrants and creates unified, comprehensive identities that are shared across the Society’s programs and domains. The charity uses the solutions on its main website and Relay for Life walkathon website, which supports the organization’s primary fundraising activity.

Since implementing the new system, more than 2.5 million new users have registered with the Society. Of those, about 360,000 have logged in using social credentials, enabling the organization to collect data from these third-party accounts, including users’ demographics, relationships, and more. Carter’s team has been able to develop “Constituent 360” — a single source of truth about community members across the organization — which has helped uncover opportunities to increase the number of users.

Looking ahead, Carter says that American Cancer Society wants to deliver personalized content and information to people, while protecting their personal data. With the customer identity system based on SAP C/4HANA, the organization will be able to provide relevant information to people — whether they are patients, volunteers or donors.

But for now, ACS is focused improving website visitors’ experience. “With 2.7 million volunteers and donors, we depend on SAP Customer Data Cloud as the critical front-end registration piece to our sites,” says Carter. “Our visitors are fighting cancer: they shouldn’t struggle with site sign-on.”