The year 2020 proved to be chal­leng­ing for most busi­ness­es across the world. Even the ones that are end­ing the year on a suc­cess­ful note had to ​“piv­ot” and make changes to busi­ness plans, process­es, and mod­els in order to meet cus­tomer demand. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence took on a whole new mean­ing in 2020 and found its way in the dis­course among the mass­es as well as in the board rooms. SAP made it a focus of its over­all com­pa­ny strat­e­gy, and SAP cus­tomers looked to the CX port­fo­lio for solu­tions that would help them not only sur­vive the year but thrive into the next. 

ASUG sat down with Paula Hansen, SVP and chief rev­enue offi­cer at SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, to learn how the com­pa­ny known for pro­duc­ing enter­prise resource plan­ning soft­ware actu­al­ly served up the world’s largest dig­i­tal com­merce plat­form in 2020. SAP Com­merce Cloud has helped cus­tomers reg­is­ter at least $109 bil­lion of GMV in Novem­ber 2020 which is 7.9 times high­er than Novem­ber 2019. 

“There is a lot of move­ment hap­pen­ing in the world of com­merce today,” Hansen said. ​“And it makes it crit­i­cal to under­stand the impor­tance of the scal­a­bil­i­ty and the resilien­cy of your com­merce providers.” 

We dis­cussed a high-lev­el overview of the SAP CX port­fo­lio and jumped into the capa­bil­i­ties of SAP Com­merce Cloud, which in 2020 man­ages more than $520 bil­lion of GMV — more GMV than any oth­er com­pa­ny on the plan­et. It also man­ages rough­ly 3 bil­lion iden­ti­ties glob­al­ly and more than 7 bil­lion con­sents glob­al­ly, which is remark­able when you put it in the con­text of the world population. 

ASUG: Can you give us a high-lev­el overview of the SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence plat­form? How does it tie back to the Intel­li­gent Enterprise? 

Hansen: Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is an inte­gral part of SAP’s Intel­li­gent Enter­prise port­fo­lio and strat­e­gy, and it is one of the largest growth engines for the company’s cloud strat­e­gy. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence pow­ers seam­less and per­son­al­ized expe­ri­ences everywhere. 

I often think of the SAP CX plat­form and port­fo­lio as sup­port­ing our cus­tomers in the most crit­i­cal goals of their busi­ness. Vir­tu­al­ly every com­pa­ny in every indus­try is try­ing to do three things: acquire cus­tomers, retain cus­tomers, and grow their mar­ket share. And so, when you think of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence port­fo­lio — from mar­ket­ing to sales to ser­vice to com­merce, and the sup­port­ing cus­tomer data — we help them to achieve those goals through cus­tomer under­stand­ing, through hyper-per­son­al­ized omnichan­nel engage­ment, and by help­ing them to deliv­er on their brand promise. 

When you think of it in the con­text of the Intel­li­gent Enter­prise, which is the inter­con­nec­tion of all the busi­ness process­es that our cus­tomers run, cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is a very impor­tant com­po­nent of being able to dri­ve greater insights and more agili­ty with­in an enterprise. 

Think about how busi­ness oper­a­tions real­ly start to become more vis­i­ble to a com­pa­ny. It’s through the col­lec­tion of data and gained insights from every sin­gle cus­tomer touch­point in mar­ket­ing, sales, ser­vice, and com­merce. Those inter­ac­tions are most valu­able when they get access to some of the back-office infor­ma­tion like finan­cial infor­ma­tion for pric­ing, inven­to­ry infor­ma­tion for sup­ply chain, and even HR infor­ma­tion in some cas­es as it relates to cus­tomer ser­vice. That inte­gral com­po­nent of the Intel­li­gent Enter­prise helps to bring excep­tion­al cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. The last ele­ment, of course, is that all the things I just spoke of are oper­a­tional process­es with a rich set of oper­a­tional data across the front end and the back end. But then there’s also the expe­ri­ence infor­ma­tion that is so crit­i­cal to keep­ing a real-time pulse on what your cus­tomers are telling you so that you can con­tin­ue to evolve the busi­ness process­es in the goal of deliv­er­ing excep­tion­al cus­tomer experience.

SAP designed the CX port­fo­lio with the lens that cus­tomers are run­ning an end-to-end busi­ness and deliv­er­ing on an end-to-end cus­tomer jour­ney. But there’s no ques­tion that most com­pa­nies look at that in phas­es or look at that in terms of unique needs by their busi­ness func­tion. All the indi­vid­ual cloud ser­vices — SAP Com­merce Cloud, SAP Cus­tomer Data Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Ser­vice Cloud, and SAP Mar­ket­ing Cloud — oper­ate very well inde­pen­dent­ly as much as they do as a col­lec­tive portfolio. 

ASUG: What do cus­tomers need to know about CX as they plan their dig­i­tal transformations? 

Hansen: I would argue that com­pa­nies can’t real­ly real­ize dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion with­out cus­tomer expe­ri­ence being an inte­gral part of that trans­for­ma­tion. It’s impor­tant to define what cus­tomer expe­ri­ence means and how it touch­es so many ele­ments of a company’s busi­ness to real­ly make that point. 

You can’t real­ly deliv­er a stand­out cus­tomer expe­ri­ence unless all aspects of your busi­ness are uni­fied in sup­port of your cus­tomers and in sup­port of your com­pa­ny’s brand promise. Of course, you’d have to have com­pelling prod­ucts and solu­tions — your offer. But how you deliv­er on that offer — whether it’s through the sup­ply chain and your abil­i­ty to meet the needs of your cus­tomers; or the way that you evolve your busi­ness mod­el and trans­form the mar­kets that you’re in; or the way that your employ­ees are sup­port­ed, enabled, and moti­vat­ed — it is all part of cus­tomer experience.

It real­ly is about so much more than what peo­ple have thought of in the past, which has in some ways been exclu­sive­ly around this con­cept of cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment. We need to under­stand that cus­tomer expe­ri­ence involves all those dif­fer­ent process­es and how those come togeth­er and present them­selves in sup­port of your cus­tomer. And that’s why we feel strong­ly that if an orga­ni­za­tion is look­ing at dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion with­out cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in mind, they’ve prob­a­bly real­ly missed the ulti­mate goal of dig­i­tal transformation.

ASUG: Is there a par­tic­u­lar solu­tion that cus­tomers chose to start with? If so, why do you think that is? 

Hansen: I think it depends on where they are in their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. In 2020, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion has become the top agen­da item for all our cus­tomers, and COVID-19 has cer­tain­ly accel­er­at­ed that. There is tremen­dous momen­tum in the dig­i­tal com­merce space as it has become the lifeblood for many companies. 

When we look at con­sumer spend­ing, the esti­mates are that rough­ly 12% of the total was from online sales last year. It is expect­ed to increase to 20% this year. Here in the U.S. there’s expect­ed to be $200 bil­lion of sales mov­ing from offline retail stores to online dig­i­tal presence. 

So, there is incred­i­ble momen­tum from cus­tomers toward adopt­ing a com­merce solu­tion that will enable them to not only remain com­pet­i­tive, but also agile and resilient. 

ASUG: Let’s talk about the SAP Com­merce Cloud. Can you give us a high-lev­el overview of the solu­tion and how it has evolved since it was known as SAP Hybris? 

Hansen: SAP Com­merce Cloud — which was for­mer­ly known as SAP Hybris — is a dig­i­tal com­merce solu­tion that enables an easy and seam­less buy­ing process for cus­tomers. SAP has been in this busi­ness for a long time and what that means for our cus­tomers is that the SAP Com­merce Cloud is a bat­tle-test­ed solu­tion with extreme scal­a­bil­i­ty. Today, SAP Com­merce sys­tems are man­ag­ing more than $520 bil­lion of GMV, which is more GMV than any oth­er com­pa­ny on the planet. 

As more cus­tomers embark on dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions, SAP is more and more focused on deliv­er­ing quick time to val­ue. Com­pa­nies want and need to be able to move quick­ly with their com­merce deploy­ments, and we want to pro­vide the plat­form that will help them do that. We’ve done a lot of work around the microser­vices archi­tec­ture and head­less com­merce to real­ly help enable a faster time to value. 

The oth­er piece that we’ve been real­ly focused on is the buy­ing expe­ri­ence and how we bring about capa­bil­i­ties like AI-pow­ered engage­ments, con­text-dri­ven capa­bil­i­ties, and, of course, that inter­con­nec­tion with the back-office sup­ply chain to bring for­ward the vis­i­bil­i­ty cus­tomers need. 

We’re also very focused on exten­si­bil­i­ty with an API-first approach and ensur­ing that there is oppor­tu­ni­ty for com­pa­nies to add capa­bil­i­ty and extend the val­ue of com­merce out into oth­er ecosys­tem solutions.

ASUG: What dif­fer­en­ti­ates the SAP Com­merce Cloud from oth­er com­pa­ra­ble solu­tions, and what is the most impor­tant thing for SAP cus­tomers to know? How, specif­i­cal­ly, does it trans­late to bet­ter cus­tomer expe­ri­ence as well as bet­ter busi­ness user experience? 

Hansen: The first major dif­fer­en­tia­tor for SAP is the abil­i­ty to address mul­ti­ple busi­ness mod­els with a sin­gle plat­form. With the SAP Com­merce Cloud today, you can engage with your cus­tomers in a B2B, a B2C, a B2B2C, or direct-to-con­sumer way all with a sin­gle plat­form. That’s incred­i­bly pow­er­ful when you think about what’s hap­pen­ing in the world today with the pan­dem­ic and com­pa­nies’ needs to be able to quick­ly turn out oth­er routes to market.

I would also high­light SAP Com­merce Cloud’s abil­i­ty to enable mean­ing­ful engage­ment. When com­pa­nies build the com­mu­ni­ty and the expe­ri­ence with­in their com­merce plat­form, they need to think about being able to engage with their cus­tomers in a mean­ing­ful and per­son­al­ized way. That’s where the com­po­nents of our new­ly launched SAP Cus­tomer Data Plat­form, as well as the recent acqui­si­tion of Emarsys, come togeth­er to enrich that com­merce expe­ri­ence. While it’s incred­i­bly impor­tant that SAP Com­merce Cloud is a scal­able, agile, and fea­ture-rich capa­bil­i­ty on its own, it’s also extreme­ly pow­er­ful when you think about how you sur­round it with the cus­tomer data capa­bil­i­ties that we have and the real-time engage­ment capa­bil­i­ties that we have with the rest of the portfolio. 

ASUG: How does SAP Com­merce Cloud inte­grate with oth­er SAP and non-SAP solutions? 

Hansen: SAP Com­merce Cloud has pre-built inte­gra­tions with SAP S/4HANA, all the solu­tions with the SAP CX port­fo­lio, as well as oth­er SAP applications. 

We have decou­pled the front-end store­front and the back end with a head­less com­merce archi­tec­ture, which makes it easy for exten­sions and updates, as well as a quick­er time to val­ue for our cus­tomers. We’ve also made it eas­i­er to inno­vate with server­less microser­vices that run on a cloud-native platform. 

More specif­i­cal­ly, we have 30 dif­fer­ent inte­gra­tion exten­sion packs that pro­vide a tai­lor-made solu­tion for cus­tomers to con­nect oth­er SAP prod­ucts — whether it’s billing and invoic­ing, CPQ capa­bil­i­ties, ser­vice and sup­port, order and avail­abil­i­ty, mas­ter data and ana­lyt­ics, or sub­scrip­tions and enti­tle­ments — to SAP Com­merce Cloud. There are also 86 exten­sions that inte­grate SAP Com­merce Cloud with a range of sev­er­al oth­er back­end sys­tems in the SAP Intel­li­gent Enter­prise port­fo­lio to help with the syn­chro­niza­tion of the data between the front end and the back end.

As far as third-par­ty appli­ca­tions, we’re very com­mit­ted to an open ecosys­tem and an exten­si­bil­i­ty frame­work. We have our SAP App Cen­ter where part­ners have devel­oped solu­tions that can be inte­grat­ed with SAP Com­merce Cloud, and we will con­tin­ue to make that avail­able to help with the broad­er ecosys­tem and the exten­si­bil­i­ty of SAP Com­merce Cloud.

ASUG: What are some areas that require more work with the solu­tion and how SAP address­ing them? 

Hansen: One of the key focus areas for us is to con­tin­ue to dri­ve time to val­ue, espe­cial­ly as more cus­tomers con­tin­ue to move quick­er. We have quite a bit of focus on that in terms of how we’re evolv­ing the archi­tec­ture, and so that’s one key component. 

Theirs is also always an inter­est in user expe­ri­ence and con­tin­u­ing to sim­pli­fy user expe­ri­ence, as well as an inter­est in con­tin­u­ing to advance the AI and ML capa­bil­i­ty for more automa­tion, more self-ser­vice, guid­ed rec­om­men­da­tions, pric­ing, mer­chan­dis­ing, etc. That’s always on our road map and some­thing that we’re think­ing about as we look to evolve the portfolio.

ASUG: What were the key take­aways with the SAP Com­merce Cloud solu­tion in 2020 and how did COVID-19 play a role? 

Hansen: One of the things we’ve seen are new busi­ness and con­sump­tion mod­els crop up because of COVID-19. Com­pa­nies have had to meet demand and change to mod­els such as ​“buy online and pick up in store,” ​“click to col­lect,” and ​“direct to con­sumer.” The take­away is that orga­ni­za­tions need to rethink their path to mar­ket and how they must evolve those to con­tin­ue to ser­vice their customers. 

I can share an exam­ple of a retail­er that did this suc­cess­ful­ly. Casey’s, which is a Mid­west­ern con­ve­nience store chain, had to quick­ly adapt through the pan­dem­ic. The tra­di­tion­al busi­ness mod­el was to sell pre­pared foods such as piz­za and sand­wich­es along with dif­fer­ent gro­cery items. But because peo­ple weren’t com­ing into the store as fre­quent­ly, they had to think about how they were going to engage with their cus­tomers in a more dig­i­tal way while keep­ing a focus on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. They part­nered with SAP Com­merce Cloud and the SAP Cus­tomer Data Cloud to bring to the mar­ket a mobile app for their online orders. The goal was to increase the aver­age order val­ue per cus­tomer and increase the amount of traf­fic that they were dri­ving online. They had more than 3 mil­lion down­loads of their mobile app and are see­ing rough­ly 65% of their dig­i­tal rev­enue com­ing from this mobile app with­in a six-month peri­od. They’ve also seen an increase in their aver­age order val­ue per customer. 

Research shows that peo­ple want many of the con­ve­niences and expe­ri­ences to con­tin­ue well beyond the pan­dem­ic. We ful­ly expect that com­merce every­where is going to con­tin­ue to be a very high­ly sought-after busi­ness capa­bil­i­ty. Sim­i­lar­ly, we know that sales and ser­vice mod­els that have moved to remote mod­els because of the pan­dem­ic will be sought after by those employ­ees that want the flex­i­bil­i­ty to work from home. The oth­er piece that has come out of this pan­dem­ic for busi­ness­es is to con­tin­ue to pro­vide that con­nec­tiv­i­ty, and that means hyper per­son­al­iza­tion. It means that when we’re inter­act­ing with a brand that we feel that con­nec­tion, and we feel like they under­stand our needs and that they’re evolv­ing to meet those needs. I believe all of this will con­tin­ue and accel­er­ate well beyond the pandemic. 

ASUG: What are the three things you think con­tributed to SAP Com­merce Cloud being the biggest dig­i­tal com­merce solu­tion in 2020? 

Hansen: The first is just the inter­con­nec­tion with the sup­ply and the demand. I think peo­ple under­stand the sig­nif­i­cance of hav­ing the direct con­nec­tion into the back office to be able to deliv­er on the com­mit­ments that they make to their cus­tomers at the time of commerce. 

The sec­ond is the busi­ness mod­el flex­i­bil­i­ty that SAP Com­merce Cloud pro­vides to be able to sup­port var­i­ous types of busi­ness mod­els across the sin­gle platform. 

And the third is the focus that we’ve real­ly built into the SAP Com­merce Cloud around con­text-dri­ven capa­bil­i­ties, real­ly help­ing to bring for­ward the knowl­edge of what a cus­tomer wants and be able to respond to that dur­ing the buy­ing experience.

ASUG: What are the trends you pre­dict in the com­merce space com­ing into 2021 and how will they align with SAP’s key pri­or­i­ties in the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence space? 

Hansen: It’s very clear that SAP’s CEO Chris­t­ian Klein, as well as the entire exec­u­tive board, see cus­tomer expe­ri­ence as a crit­i­cal part of the com­pa­ny strat­e­gy. As we look to 2021, we are com­mit­ted to not only mak­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence a pri­or­i­ty for SAP, but one that we will con­tin­ue invest­ing in. There are three key pri­or­i­ties we will tackle.

The first is focused on per­son­al­ized shop­ping expe­ri­ences that are fric­tion­less from search all the way to the trans­ac­tions. They need to be mind­ful of how the cus­tomer wants the prod­uct, when they want the prod­uct, where they want the prod­uct, and real­ly help­ing with that com­merce-every­where expe­ri­ence. It is crit­i­cal to have that inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty to the back office to real­ize the val­ue of a con­nect­ed sup­ply chain. 

The sec­ond focus area is pro­vid­ing data-dri­ven expe­ri­ences. It’s about hav­ing a real-time, 360-degree view of your cus­tomer that con­nects offline to online, and that pro­vides for an omnichan­nel expe­ri­ence. It real­ly takes that cus­tomer expe­ri­ence to the next lev­el, because now you are hyper-per­son­al­iz­ing the way that you’re engag­ing with your cus­tomer, while still build­ing into that the pri­va­cy capa­bil­i­ties with con­sent man­age­ment and iden­ti­ty management. 

The third focus area will be on how to enable com­pa­nies to engage with their cus­tomers at scale and through dif­fer­ent chan­nels, while lever­ag­ing all the insight they gained through pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences and through the SAP Cus­tomer Data Platform. 

That’s what cus­tomers are look­ing for and that’s how we look at it as we go into 2021. 

ASUG mem­bers can reg­is­ter for the on-demand web­cast, ​“SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment Strat­e­gy and Road Map.” You can also learn more about the SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence strat­e­gy with an exclu­sive one-on-one with Adri­an Nash, head of strat­e­gy for Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence at SAP. 

Also, keep your orga­ni­za­tion pro­gress­ing and stay cur­rent on our offer­ings by mak­ing sure that your ASUG pro­file is cur­rent, so you can receive the con­tent most rel­e­vant to you.