SAP’s Approach To Customer Experience Is Transforming CRM

Thousands of CRM practitioners convened in Barcelona this week to attend SAP Customer Experience Live to learn more about the impact of the experience economy, why companies need an integration platform for digital transformation, and how the CRM landscape is transforming beyond a front end application for the sales force.

The Experience Economy

During his keynote presentation, Moritz Zimmermann, Chief Technology Officer, SAP Customer Experience underscored the impact of today’s global economy where consumers can get anything online easily and quickly, with the experience being the key differentiator.

“We live in an experience economy,” said Zimmermann. “Eighty percent of consumers pick a product or service based on experience — it’s not just about it being cheaper or available.”

What is experience and how do you make it great? Zimmermann believes design and usability are the first step. But ultimately, companies must be able to connect customer experience on the front end to a digital supply chain on the back end. Only the integration of those two pieces will ensure a great user experience.

Zimmermann had a recent run in with bad customer experience when he recently wanted to hike in the mountains with his two kids. He purchased a stroller online on Monday before the weekend. The website said it would arrive Wednesday.

“But it didn’t come Wednesday, Thursday or Friday,” said Zimmerman. “The result? I had to carry my eldest child for 90 minutes and my back hurt for three days afterwards.”

Clearly, this bad experience was caused because the company didn’t tap into their supply chain. It’s not enough for sellers to promise a two-day delivery, they need to execute. That’s why companies like Amazon invest in both the digital supply chain and the physical infrastructure (such as warehouses and airplanes) to keep its promises to consumers.

And that’s why SAP has stepped up to the challenge by integrating its front-office solutions with back-office applications. Companies can use front end applications to engage intelligently with customers, while making sure back-end business processes — like procurement, manufacturing and fulfillment — are aligned. Together this intelligent infrastructure means that when someone places an order and is given a delivery date, the right product will arrive on time.

Helping developers meet digital transformation needs

With the availability of SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory, developers can easily integrate applications quickly, reducing rollout time from months to days — at a lower cost. The idea is to enable developers to be more agile and innovative, without impacting their current IT infrastructure, thu allowing businesses to remain competitive.

“In digital transformation, businesses are being disrupted by new players leveraging technology as their competitive weapon,” said Zimmermann. “Automakers now want to sell mobility rather than a car for $50,000.”

Another example: A grocery wholesaler in Germany buys in bulk and sells primarily to small restaurants. Now the wholesaler offers restaurant owners a mobile app which lets them photograph their menu and use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze entrees, and the ingredients required, from a recipe database. It then provides the restaurant with profit margins for each dish. Rather than just selling food, the wholesaler now sells insight into the profitability of restaurateurs’ dishes.

This kind of transformation means all businesses need to think like software companies, which takes incredible speed and agility. SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory helps developers use SAP applications quickly and easily — and embed functionality like machine learning or analytics into them.

Artificial Intelligence Is Hot

Unsurprisingly, AI is the hottest market trend in the CRM applications. SAP has been quietly embedding (now more than 30) AI applications across its Customer Experience portfolio for many years.

For example, companies use SAP machine learning to ensure service tickets are automatically classified and sent to the right expert. Another example is sales deal intelligence, which SAP piloted internally.

“Sales forecasting used to be an art not a science,” says Zimmermann. “Often deal forecasts for a quarter are based on a gut feeling. Now we use AI to see if customers are opening our sales team’s proposal, how quickly, if they responded to email and other factors.”

Stay tuned as we unveil more CRM innovation this week from SAP Customer Experience Live in Barcelona!