We’ve gone from believing that the customer is always right to believing that customer service is dead. In fact, the fastest way for a company to lose a customer today is to provide bad customer service. Consumers today have higher expectations for a seamless experience, plus they have a louder voice that can quickly amplify through social media

As a company, how do you keep track of customer expectations while delivering the customer service that matches them? SAP introduced SAP Service Cloud as the platform that provides a consistent and unified customer experience across all channels all the time. And it’s part of the SAP C/4HANA suite.

ASUG News interviewed the SAP C/4HANA cloud leaders to learn more about each platform and how they work together to help build a better customer experience. We’ve discovered that SAP Commerce Cloud provides customers with a complete digital brand experience, SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Marketing Cloud give the sales and marketing teams the tools they need to know their customers and what to offer them, and SAP Customer Data Cloud helps a company manage its customer data.

In the last part of this series, we sat down with Georg Glantschnig to unpack the SAP Service Cloud and learn how it rounds out the customer experience journey.

ASUG News: Could you walk us through how a company would use SAP Service Cloud?

Georg: Companies are shifting from a product focus to a service focus. And additionally, customer service has become a fundamental part of the customer experience. If you think about it, you may gain a customer’s interest because they want your product, but you can very easily lose that customer if they’re not happy with the service they receive before, during, or after they make that purchase.

There is now a shift where customer service becomes almost like a product. It defines a brand and it defines the loyalty of that brand’s customer. It measures whether they come back, or if they recommend that brand to others.

Customers today expect an effortless experience where their problems are solved at first point of contact. SAP Service Cloud allows companies to provide that unified experience. It helps companies understand the customer’s voice so they can identify what customers need and how to better provide it. It enables companies to empower, train, and motivate their service team so they can deliver this great experience. It allows companies to provide self-service options to their customers, and finally, it allows companies to take action to meet those their customers’ needs by connecting the back office, to customer service processes, to the front office.

ASUG News: How can it help drive better customer experiences and turn around bad experiences for unhappy customers?

Georg: Let’s start with understanding your customer’s voice. SAP Service Cloud solutions come with an integral experience management platform, which allows companies to get valuable feedback from their customers. For example, if you have a customer respond via a survey letting you know, “this didn’t meet my expectations,” that feedback directly loops into the service process and creates an opportunity to engage with that customer and change their next experience.

Another way to drive better customer experience is by using the machine learning capabilities within SAP Service Cloud to identify patterns in complaints. This kind of information allows you to be proactive instead of reactive. If, for example, the issue stems from a software update and you know this because other customers have already reported the same issue, you can be proactive and contact all customers who have purchased the product and let them know, “you need to do these three things to avoid a potential issue.”

Machine learning also can help your service team provide a better customer experience. First, it allows a company to automate and eliminate repetitive tasks so that agents can focus more on providing quality customer interactions. Second, it can help empower and educate your service agents by providing them with recommendations and answers for your customer’s concerns based on insights and analytics within the solution. Lastly, machine learning can help spot trends so that your service team is more intentional in its planning.

Another focus for SAP Service Cloud is enhancing customer engagements through the learning platform. By helping companies continuously train their service teams, either in the field or in a call center, they are making sure that everyone is up-to-date with the necessary skills needed for the role and for the industry.

The last thing I’ll talk about is self-service. This is an important pillar of SAP Service Cloud because it allows a company to address customer needs ²⁴⁄₇. Whether it’s through intuitive and user-friendly self-service interfaces or conversational artificial intelligence chatbots, self-service is key in providing round-the-clock self-sufficient solutions for the customer. While this is great for off-hours, if a customer still needs to be transferred to a live representative, agents will be primed with that customer’s engagement history derived from their interactions through these solutions as they are all part of one user interface.

ASUG News: Can you describe what you mean by “core moments”? How can these make a difference for organizations?

Georg: The core moment is when a customer has that effortless experience with a brand and receives more than they were expecting. So, for example, my personal experience with a core moment was with watching a movie via Amazon Prime. I selected a movie and watched it in its entirety without any issues. But soon after, I received an email from Amazon informing that I was receiving a 50% refund because the movie wasn’t available in high definition as I had requested. I thought, “wow, I wasn’t even expecting that.” But it left me with a good feeling about the brand.

Those kinds of moments drive loyalty. Loyalty means repeat customers, and repeat customers mean more money spent with your company.

ASUG News: How much of SAP Service Cloud has evolved from acquired products?

Georg: The core SAP Service Cloud customer service processes were organically developed by SAP in combination with Coresystems for field service management. Additionally, we are leveraging certain acquired assets such as Recast.ai for chatbots, Litmos for learning, and of course the Qualtrics experience management platform.

It’s a separate offering, organically developed by SAP. The only acquisition that we folded into SAP Service Cloud was Coresystems, which focused on field service management.

ASUG News: How does SAP Service Cloud fit within SAP C/4HANA?

Georg: It is one of five pillars — which all offer touch points for companies to provide a better experience for their customers — of the SAP C/4HANA suite. SAP Service Cloud is a core pillar in that it intertwines with all the other cloud platforms because customer service is continuous engagement.

Let’s go through all of them. With SAP Sales Cloud, which offers sales teams the tools they need to deliver the best customer experience, a customer’s feedback can be very valuable. With SAP Marketing Cloud, as soon as you make a connection with a customer, let’s say to upsell them, it is a customer service touch point. You want to know if that customer has had any service tickets that need to be addressed before you try to sell them something else.

SAP Service Cloud integrates with SAP Commerce Cloud, providing service tools such as email, chat, phone, or video chat with a full overview of the customer’s order history. And with SAP Customer Data Cloud, your relationship in collecting customer data and permissions is essential to providing good customer service.

Customer service touches all of these, everything that the customer interacts with.

ASUG News: How can the SAP Service Cloud work with other SAP offerings to help organizations become intelligent enterprises?

Georg: By integrating service capabilities with enterprise solutions from SAP, you allow your systems to communicate more intelligently, leading to better outcomes. With SAP, you can connect the back office to the front office, providing this end-to-end experience of great customer service. No matter which solution you are using, whether it’s SAP SuccessFactors, or SAP Ariba, or SAP S/4HANA Finance, or SAP Concur, you will need a customer service — internal or external — touch point.

With SAP Service Cloud, you can optimize your service execution across all solutions and have the real-time data you need to provide a better customer experience.

This wraps up our series on the SAP C/4HANA cloud platform GMs. Here’s a recap:

Learn more about what to expect from SAP C/4HANA and the chatbot that helps train passengers in Paris.

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