Enabling Customer Insight

Experience matters. To such an extent today that the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can and must be extended to Minimum Viable Experience (MVE), and of course, the endeavour to deliver significantly beyond this baseline too. This means consistently enabling, engaging and personalized experiences for everyone from candidates to employees and managers, right through to customers, suppliers and ecosystem partners. Focusing in on the customer segment, the last 18 months has seen an extensive change in behaviors, expectations, and shifts in priorities. Taking e-commerce as an example, research indicates the pandemic accelerated this trend by around five years and further, that creating emotional connections with consumers has become key in developing brand love (TalkWalker 2021).

Developing both holistic and nuanced understanding of customer needs and behavior is now a key catalyst in fostering competitive advantage, achieved through affording differentiated, relevant and tailored customer experiences. So how can this depth of insight and personalization be actualized, and what are the key challenges?

Multi-channel does not equal omni-channel

The touchpoints that connect organizations and brands with consumers continues to increase, evolve and moreover intersect, with the rise in social commerce communities just one example, fostering in-stream product discovery and purchase. From Twitter to Tic Tok, from chatbots to in-person conversations, and to social media pages and websites with the multiple inboxes, form submissions and additional contact and expression points these bring, every single one of these touchpoints is a critical channel in your customer experience process. To achieve a truly omni-channel experience, all of your touchpoints must not only connect to the customer but equally connect to one another too. And the same applies to the expanding adoption of technology — from the increasing use of conversational AI and chatbots with Natural Language Processing, to speech analytics and sentiment analysis, all touchpoints and next steps in the experience journey must always be seamlessly connected.

The Insight Challenge

Multiple fragmented systems and resulting data silos and lack of data unification can pose a significant challenge to enabling holistic consumer insights, compounded by the time and complexity involved in transforming, processing, managing, securing, and accessing the data. When it comes to CX strategy, new marketing sector research finds lack of customer insights is the biggest challenge to a successful customer experience strategy (54%). In terms of updating strategies, difficulty of linking business outcomes to real customer needs (83%), insufficient technology platforms (77%), and a lack of vision and alignment among leaders, teams, and employees (72%) as cited as key barriers. So, despite growing recognition of the consumer insights and experience imperative, implementation can often be lacking.

Actualizing Insights — 360 Visibility and Active Intelligence

Organizations that can create, process and leverage data proactively to achieve their business objectives, fulfil their corporate purpose, and drive innovation, experience 30% higher operating profit margins than the industry average (Capgemini 2021). As discussed during the CX keynote at SAP’s SAPPHIRENOW 2021, the organizations emerging through the pandemic strongly are those that have demonstrated ‘a relentless focus on the customer’. A fantastic example of this was the response of Top Shop in connecting retail, e-commerce, and digital platforms, alongside rapidly providing new websites and services such as click and connect. Bringing this together was the provision of personalized and seamless CX across its digital presence and physical stores. True hybridity in action, all supported by SAP partnership.

The opportunity cost of not meeting your customer where they are is huge because switching costs are often low. But by eliminating data silos and unifying customer data, it is clear you can increase profitability by driving customer value, retention, revenue and massive growth. Bringing more usable data and active intelligence into the CX environment is key to shift thinking beyond ‘what data is available and where can we access it’ to ‘where can our data be applied’. This can be best approached by viewing a customer 360 initiative as a holistic system of systems, fit for purpose to answer that key question, who is the customer really?

Discovering this involves having the capability to leverage data from every touchpoint in a customer’s journey, underpinned by connected, intelligent technologies. SAP’s comprehensive integration systems and connected platforms afford this across the five pillars of data unification, high data availability, customer insight, back-office pre-integration and adaptive business hierarchies. It allows data from multiple systems to be integrated, transformed and made available for insights, real-time. API’s directly support this, integrating applications and systems methodically, connecting data to applications with reusable API’s.

This can be seen in action with Mercedes’s consumer vision to create a ‘Mercedes Moment’ — a consistent premium and personalized experience for automotive customers, supported by SAP technology, which can be explored in detail here. Additionally, Burberry is leveraging a combination of SAP Data Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud to enable customers to shop ‘the way they want’ without the journey being disrupted, delivering seamless CX. The time is now to bring the best of both the online and physical worlds to customers today.

Concluding, SAP provides a Customer 360 visibility initiative for an accurate, timely, and complete view of customers, helping inform key decisions and automatically triggering actions and business processes, thereby moving beyond passive, static or reactive intelligence; to active and agile intelligence real-time. As a final thought, achieving customer insight 360 also means fulfilling all the above without compromising on privacy. The SAP Customer Data Platform comprehensively ‘collects and connects’ all customer data right across interactions, events, transactions, products purchased and more — but does so around a foundational identity, with deterministic and probabilistic identity resolution rules. This is absolutely vital and as a company, 3 Billion identities and 11 Billion consents are managed by SAP. A single view of the customer is key in delivering outstanding CX but such exceptional customer experiences must also embed privacy and security by design to achieve the multitude of benefits described and retain that most vital currency — customer trust.

About the Author

Dr. Sally Eaves is a highly experienced Chief Technology Officer, Professor in Advanced Technologies and a Global Strategic Advisor on Digital Transformation specializing in the application of emergent technologies, notably AI, FinTech, Blockchain & 5G disciplines, for business transformation and social impact at scale. An international Keynote Speaker and Author, Sally was an inaugural recipient of the Frontier Technology and Social Impact award, presented at the United Nations in 2018 and has been described as the ‘torchbearer for ethical tech’ founding Aspirational Futures to enhance inclusion, diversity and belonging in the technology space and beyond.