SAP CEO Bill McDer­mott announced at 2018 SAP­PHIRE NOW the release of SAP C/4HANA, a suite of solu­tions set to dis­rupt and mod­ern­ize the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) market.

In his keynote speech, McDer­mott said, ​“SAP was the last to accept the sta­tus quo of CRM and is now the first to change it.” The suite of solu­tions, which includes five plat­forms that can work indi­vid­u­al­ly or togeth­er, was built with the cus­tomer in mind. ​“We rec­og­nize that every part of a busi­ness needs to be focused on a sin­gle view of the con­sumer,” McDer­mott added. ​“When you con­nect all SAP appli­ca­tions togeth­er in an intel­li­gent cloud suite, the demand chain direct­ly fuels the behav­iors of the sup­ply chain.”

What’s in an Intel­li­gent Cloud Suite?

The SAP C/4HANA port­fo­lio includes SAP Mar­ket­ing Cloud, SAP Com­merce Cloud, SAP Ser­vice Cloud, SAP Cus­tomer Data Cloud, and SAP Sales Cloud. SAP acquired Hybris, a Ger­many-based omnichan­nel com­merce ven­dor, in 2013. And then in 2017, it acquired Gigya, an iden­ti­ty man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy firm, fol­lowed by Cal­lidus­Cloud, a sales per­for­mance man­age­ment tools ven­dor in 2018, and final­ly Coresys­tems, a field ser­vice man­age­ment plat­form ven­dor in 2018.

The entire suite runs on SAP HANA, an in-mem­o­ry data­base, and can be paired with SAP S/4HANA, SAP’s core ERP suite. Togeth­er, the two are meant to con­nect front-office activ­i­ties with back-office activ­i­ties, pro­vid­ing an intel­li­gent end-to-end expe­ri­ence for busi­ness­es and for their customers.

Chan­nel­ing the Cus­tomer Experience

We cov­ered what you should expect from SAP C/4HANA in June of this year. That’s when Moritz Zim­mer­man, CTO of SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence told us, ​“There is a tran­si­tion going on in many indus­tries from prod­ucts to ser­vices. You’re not sell­ing prod­ucts at a one-off price any­more, but actu­al­ly cre­at­ing a busi­ness mod­el where you have a recur­ring rev­enue stream. Maybe it’s usage-based or sub­scrip­tion-based. That auto­mat­i­cal­ly puts the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship at the cen­ter of it.” 

Putting an empha­sis on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is key for busi­ness­es to remain com­pet­i­tive, and to con­nect with their cus­tomers in a more mean­ing­ful way.

That’s exact­ly what the San Jose Sharks did when the team man­age­ment reimag­ined how to pro­vide a bet­ter over­all expe­ri­ence for fans, while also increas­ing rev­enue by opti­miz­ing con­ces­sion stand sells. Jonathan Bech­er, the team’s pres­i­dent, talks about his plans to use a chat­bot to not only inter­act with cus­tomers before and dur­ing a game, but also to use pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics for future inter­ac­tions, lead­ing to increased sales.

How to Con­nect to the Cus­tomer’s World

Since the SAP C/4HANA announce­ment ear­li­er this year, SAP has put an empha­sis on its cus­tomer expe­ri­ence mes­sag­ing. It’s all about let­ting your cus­tomers decide what you, as an orga­ni­za­tion, do with their data and how you can engage bet­ter to deliv­er per­son­al­ized and con­ve­nient expe­ri­ences. It’s about build­ing cus­tomer rela­tion­ships based on trust. As described in ​“Your Path to SAP C/4HANA,” cus­tomers no longer view rela­tion­ships in terms of busi­ness-to-busi­ness (B2B) or busi­ness-to-con­sumer (B2C) stan­dards. Instead, we are liv­ing in what SAP calls a ​“Me2B” world where cus­tomers dri­ve all of those rela­tion­ships, whether they are buy­ing for their com­pa­ny or for themselves. 

To help under­stand needs and pref­er­ences, busi­ness­es must have a sin­gle view of the cus­tomer. ​“In gen­er­al,” said Patrick Saly­er, CEO of Gigya, ​“busi­ness­es are real­ly just try­ing to deliv­er the right mes­sage to right per­son at the right time. All those ini­tia­tives lead to one thing, which is a direct rela­tion­ship with the cus­tomer. That’s what we do at SAP Cus­tomer Data Cloud. We help build these direct rela­tion­ships in a trust­ed way.”

From Trust to Loyalty

Trust in any rela­tion­ship is the foun­da­tion, but how you build on that is what mat­ters. Con­nect­ing your process­es to the cus­tomer jour­ney and then deliv­er­ing on your brand promis­es to your cus­tomers is the next step.

Main­tain­ing trust starts with cus­tomer ser­vice, which seems to be a lost art form these days. ​“Cus­tomer ser­vice is a fun­da­men­tal part of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence,” said Georg Glantschnig, GM at SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, Ser­vice Cloud. ​“Cus­tomer ser­vice becomes like a prod­uct. It defines a brand and its cus­tomers’ loy­al­ty. With SAP Ser­vice Cloud, our over­all vision is to help busi­ness­es pro­vide their cus­tomers an effort­less experience.”

Rela­tion­ship-Build­ing Nev­er Ends

Once a busi­ness estab­lish­es trust and loy­al­ty, main­tain­ing and man­ag­ing that rela­tion­ship should be just as effort­less for the sales and mar­ket­ing teams with­in an orga­ni­za­tion. Giles House, GM of SAP Sales Cloud, believes that with SAP C/4HANA, you’ve basi­cal­ly got a full suite to engage with your cus­tomers, but keep­ing track of those inter­ac­tions, ​“is absolute­ly crit­i­cal for suc­cess. SAP Sales Cloud brings order by giv­ing sales­peo­ple the tools they need to track and man­age across all channels.” 

As for the mar­ket­ing teams, the SAP Mar­ket­ing Cloud pro­vides a plat­form for four main actions: mar­ket­ing plan­ning and strat­e­gy man­age­ment; cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing orches­tra­tion, mea­sure­ment and opti­miza­tion, and cus­tomer data man­age­ment. ​“Also, the SAP Mar­ket­ing Cloud,” added Nicholas Cumins, gen­er­al man­ag­er of SAP Mar­ket­ing Cloud, ​“is the only plat­form right now that is for both B2B and B2C mar­ket­ing solutions.”

Meet­ing Cus­tomers Wher­ev­er They Are

SAP’s ​“Me2B” vision comes with its own rules, and that means cus­tomers want options. The SAP Com­merce Cloud solu­tion gives a busi­ness the abil­i­ty to not just sell things dig­i­tal­ly, but to also pro­vide a com­plete dig­i­tal brand expe­ri­ence for their busi­ness­es. ​“The thing that’s impor­tant here,” said Chris Hau­ca, head of strat­e­gy and GTM at SAP Enter­prise Com­merce, ​“is being able to extend and tai­lor to your busi­ness, but then also be able to cre­ate the link­ages to oth­er prod­ucts that help build the dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence or ful­fill the com­mit­ments and promis­es you’re mak­ing to your customers.”

What’s Next on the Path to Cus­tomer Satisfaction?

SAP recent­ly added to its arse­nal of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence offer­ings with its acqui­si­tion of Qualtrics. McDer­mott not­ed that SAP has exper­tise in cap­tur­ing oper­a­tional data. Qualtrics, a sur­vey com­pa­ny, will bring exper­tise in cap­tur­ing expe­ri­ence data.

Where oper­a­tional data can tell a com­pa­ny what’s going on, expe­ri­ence data can tell it why it’s hap­pen­ing. Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith not­ed, ​“It allows you to get human sen­ti­ment in the moment. The abil­i­ty to com­bine these and have one sin­gle view will trans­form the way we even think about CRM as we know it.”

Although SAP has giv­en no offi­cial word on whether Qualtrics will be part of the SAP C/4HANA suite, it seems like­ly that it will play a role in the over­all goal of pro­vid­ing busi­ness­es one plat­form to design and man­age their cus­tomer expe­ri­ence journeys.

Take a Trip to the Cus­tomer Clouds

We had a chance to sit down with all the SAP C/4HANA Cloud lead­ers and ask them about each plat­form. Keep an eye out for those arti­cles in the next few months, as we dig deep­er into what each cloud plat­form does and how it can fit into your cus­tomer expe­ri­ence strategy.