Pho­to Cred­it: SAP

If you attend­ed the 2018 SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, you know that C/4 explod­ed onto the scene dur­ing SAP’s keynotes. No, we’re not talk­ing about lit­er­al explo­sives: We mean SAP C/4HANA, SAP’s lat­est end-to-end offer­ing designed to help users deliv­er a seam­less­ly con­nect­ed cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. As it intro­duces this new offer­ing, SAP is mak­ing no secret about its attempt to com­pete with, and even­tu­al­ly over­take, the top play­ers in the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) mar­ket like Salesforce.

While much fan­fare sur­round­ed the announce­ment, with a healthy buzz rival­ing its clos­est rel­a­tive SAP S/4HANA, SAP was a lit­tle light on the details beyond what it described about SAP C/4HANA in its keynotes. To help under­stand what SAP C/4HANA means to the aver­age SAP cus­tomer, we sat down with Moritz Zim­mer­man, the CTO of SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, to get into some details.

Adapt­ing to a Ser­vice-Ori­ent­ed World

“There is a tran­si­tion going on in many indus­tries from prod­ucts to ser­vices,” Zim­mer­man said. ​“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 its usage-based or sub­scrip­tion-based. That auto­mat­i­cal­ly puts the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship at the cen­ter of it.” SAP sees CRM as an untapped mar­ket beyond its core ERP, giv­ing the com­pa­ny a way to reach those who may be wait­ing to make a larg­er invest­ment into SAP S/4HANA.

But serv­ing cus­tomers well means push­ing beyond the tra­di­tion­al silos between sales, mar­ket­ing, ser­vice, and oth­er func­tions. SAP defines SAP C/4HANA as ​“an inte­grat­ed offer­ing designed to mod­ern­ize the sales-only focus of lega­cy CRM solu­tions. Fol­low­ing the com­plet­ed acqui­si­tions of mar­ket lead­ers Hybris, Gigya, and Cal­lidus­Cloud, SAP now ties togeth­er solu­tions to sup­port all front-office func­tions, such as con­sumer data pro­tec­tion, mar­ket­ing, com­merce, sales, and cus­tomer service.”

Shared Mas­ter Data That Dri­ves Innovations

One of the more intrigu­ing ele­ments of the SAP C/4HANA prod­uct mod­el is the pow­er of shared data. Mas­ter data will align across the prod­ucts with­in the SAP C/4HANA suite: SAP Hybris, SAP Cal­lidus­Cloud, and SAP Gigya, among others.

When this entire suite sits on top of the SAP Cloud Plat­form, it can accel­er­ate oth­er SAP inno­va­tions. Accord­ing to Zim­mer­man, ​“You now have the abil­i­ty to pro­vi­sion every­thing as one suite. You’ll see more and more intel­li­gence inject­ed into the suite, lever­ag­ing our [SAP] Ana­lyt­ics Cloud and our SAP Leonar­do assets. You can ben­e­fit from the fact that the more end-to-end data you have, the bet­ter you can do machine learn­ing that feeds off of the qual­i­ty and the rich­ness of the data you have.”

The Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence From Front to Back

The abil­i­ty to con­nect front-office activ­i­ties to back-office activ­i­ties is the holy grail of end-to-end cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Sim­ply hav­ing a great user inter­face when order­ing a prod­uct isn’t enough. The back end has to come through to make sure the order is processed in enough time to meet the demand and deliv­ery expec­ta­tions of the cus­tomer. If either end breaks down, it can ruin the entire expe­ri­ence for the cus­tomer, even if part of the process is func­tion­ing just fine.

SAP’s new mis­sion is to tie those things togeth­er, though his­tor­i­cal­ly the com­pa­ny has played most­ly in back-end envi­ron­ments. When asked what SAP wants its cus­tomers to take away from this announce­ment, Zim­mer­man said, ​“I think the fact that SAP actu­al­ly can do very agile, very mod­ern front-office appli­ca­tions, and has done so for more than half a decade. We stand for great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence appli­ca­tions, not just great ERP software.”

Will SAP C/4HANA Play Nice With Others?

Those who have already invest­ed in SAP Hybris for their marketing/​e‑commerce needs and have deep invest­ments in oth­er solu­tions like Sales­force need not wor­ry, Zim­mer­man said. You don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need to invest exclu­sive­ly in SAP C/4HANA to con­tin­ue tak­ing advan­tage of SAP Hybris or oth­er SAP prod­ucts, though you will only real­ize the full val­ue of these prod­ucts if you adopt the entire suite to take advan­tage of the mas­ter data align­ment built into the new infrastructure.

Where Cus­tomer Sup­port Fits

Anoth­er area that remains unclear in the end-to-end process is cus­tomer sup­port. The new SAP C/4HANA strat­e­gy is built on a lead-to-cash approach, mean­ing that it doesn’t have a lot to say about what hap­pens after invoic­ing and billing. Zim­mer­man remind­ed us that SAP’s ser­vice cloud and the cus­tomer sup­port solu­tions are a part of SAP C/4HANA. Still, SAP rec­og­nizes it is not the cur­rent mar­ket leader in this space. There is still a lot of work to do to opti­mize a true end-to-end experience.

What to Expect From SAP’s CRM Vision

There’s no doubt, SAP has big plans to win over the CRM mar­ket. And it seems like a good strat­e­gy: Pack­age its full suite of front-end prod­ucts in one offer­ing, while weav­ing in inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies like machine learn­ing and Inter­net of Things (IoT) func­tion­al­i­ty, and then opti­miz­ing it all (includ­ing the most crit­i­cal data) for the cloud. This is what it will take to com­pete with Salesforce.

But we’re still inter­est­ed to see how hard it will be for SAP to con­vince cus­tomers to adopt the new SAP Sales Cloud. Remem­ber that for some cus­tomers, this will mean giv­ing up decades of expe­ri­ence and inte­grat­ed data with­in Sales­force. We agree with SAP that the key to build­ing trust in the suite is in how SAP han­dles its own cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence. SAP knows how to craft intrigu­ing ideas. Now we’ll keep watch­ing to see if it deliv­ers on its promises.

Inter­est­ed in how SAP can help you enhance your cus­tomer expe­ri­ence? See the agen­da for the Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Inno­va­tion Forum, our newest event for retail­ers, con­sumer prod­ucts com­pa­nies, and whole­salers look­ing for ways to delight their customers.

You can also read how SAP’s CRM lead­er­ship strat­e­gy is tak­ing shape.