SAP and Customer Experience: One Year After Announcing SAP C/4HANA — A Preview of SAP CX Live 2019

Before the biggest event of the year for SAP Customer Experience, Alex Atzberger reflects on where CRM is going, how customer experience will shape the future of commerce, and what a modern CX suite looks like.

Here’s what he has to say:

With just a week to go until SAPPHIRE and CX Live, I am reminded that it’s been less than a year since we announced SAP C/4HANA! Last year, we threw the gauntlet down to announce a new push for the CRM market by redefining customer experience as the new battleground for business. It was the first time in years that “front office solutions” were at the center of the keynote and show. Since then, we’ve achieved many other milestones, the biggest being the acquisition of Qualtrics to further SAP’s journey to the cloud.

As I prepare for my opening keynote at SAP Customer Experience LIVE, there are three questions that I would like to answer for our customers:

1) The Business Question: How Do I Set up My Business to Win in The Experience Economy?

Companies have recognized that their customers are increasingly deciding where and whom to spend their money with based on the customer experience they receive. In fact, 80 percent of consumers will choose to switch brands due to a poor customer experience. This gap between the experiences customers expect, and the experiences businesses think they deliver is what we call the experience gap. The experience gap leads to companies being disrupted, losing market share, and going out of business. I spend a lot of time talking to other CX leaders, and one thing is clear — the experience gap is top of mind in every C-Suite and boardroom. I look forward to exploring this topic further with CX leaders across B2C and B2B industries at CX live.

2) The Solution Question: What Progress Has Been Made with SAP C/4HANA?

We launched SAP C/4HANA last year with five clouds covering marketing, sales, service, commerce and customer data cloud. While each cloud area has made phenomenal progress over the past year and our customer base has grown substantially, our customers have made it clear to us that functional silos in the front office create siloed customer experiences. This is why we’ve created a roadmap for each criteria that connects the five cloud areas and integrates them to SAP’s digital core. At CX Live, we will go one step further by showing our customers the foundation of a modern CX suite — from deployment to extensibility — across all areas from marketing to service.

3) The Industry Question: Why is Qualtrics so Important and What is the Role of Experience Management?

Steering a business to successfully compete in the Experience Economy requires a different set of solutions and innovations. Most importantly it requires a different and more holistic view of the customer across the enterprise. While only a few months have passed since the acquisition of Qualtrics, we’ve already infused its capabilities across the SAP portfolio. You will hear more on this at CX Live, but by combining X data with O data we can now provide a richer and clearer understanding of the quality of a customer’s experience.

A lot has happened over the past year, but I’ve never believed so strongly that the future is bright for SAP. Join me at CX Live to discuss these questions in detail, and to hear more from our customers who are leading in the Experience Economy!

Ready to engage your customers and learn from the best? Join us in Orlando!