Ritu Bhar­ga­va is one tech­nol­o­gy leader exam­ple of the adage you can go home again. Yet in her case, this sec­ond pro­fes­sion­al path at SAP is very dif­fer­ent from the first. 

Bhar­ga­va began her career as a devel­op­er at SAP. She’s now Pres­i­dent & Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer, lead­ing SAP prod­uct, engi­neer­ing, strat­e­gy, user expe­ri­ence, and oper­a­tions for the Cus­tomer Experience/​Customer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CX/CRM) port­fo­lio. In between she spent a decade each at Sales­force and at Ora­cle, expe­ri­ences she said con­tribute to her opti­mism and con­fi­dence ​“about the direc­tion SAP CX is headed.”

Bhar­ga­va took time out from a hec­tic sched­ule — a cal­en­dar that recent­ly includ­ed an ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange ses­sion — to answer ques­tions about that direc­tion, SAP CX/CRM tech­nolo­gies and solu­tions, and cus­tomer pri­or­i­ties and challenges.

This is an edit­ed ver­sion of an e‑mail interview.

Ques­tion: How do you define cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in 2022? Is there an offi­cial SAP def­i­n­i­tion and position?

Answer: The last few years of the pan­dem­ic com­plete­ly shift­ed our way of life, and we all had to adapt to new ways of oper­at­ing. Now that we are slow­ly return­ing to in-per­son expe­ri­ences, expec­ta­tions con­tin­ue to evolve.

To me, the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (CX) is based on the sum of every inter­ac­tion and con­nec­tion we have with brands. It might be con­sid­er­ing prod­ucts or ser­vices, buy­ing, using, return­ing, reusing or even many of those stages at the same time. The CX is the sum of every brand con­nec­tion; it’s one that delights customers.

At SAP, we help busi­ness­es pow­er those inter­ac­tions in end-to-end busi­ness process­es across chan­nels. This allows those com­pa­nies to deeply under­stand and inter­act with each cus­tomer with the most impact and rel­e­vance while offer­ing a tai­lored engagement. 

Q: What are the key char­ac­ter­is­tics of excel­lence in cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, from SAP’s point of view? From the cus­tomers?

A: We want to treat the cus­tomer not just as a num­ber, but as an indi­vid­ual with all their spe­cif­ic needs in mind. We believe that each com­pa­ny should cen­ter their strate­gies, process­es, and tech­nol­o­gy to be deeply cus­tomer-cen­tric so we can offer rel­e­vance and per­son­al­iza­tion across all channels.

To do this, we must under­stand each cus­tomer across the entire­ty of their life­cy­cle, using all of the sig­nals that a com­pa­ny knows about them — from their engage­ment chan­nels to the back-office busi­ness processes.

Each cus­tomer deserves to be in con­trol of the rela­tion­ship and treat­ed with respect which builds trust with the com­pa­ny, and busi­ness­es need to share their aspi­ra­tions for a more sus­tain­able future with the choic­es of the customer.

Q: How has SAP seen CX evolve in recent years in its NA/America’s cus­tomer base? Where are they on their jour­neys? What have been the challenges? 

A: In the recent years, we wit­nessed an unprece­dent­ed accel­er­a­tion into dig­i­tal first orga­ni­za­tions. This accel­er­a­tion high­light­ed oper­a­tional, orga­ni­za­tion­al, and tech­no­log­i­cal silos. No mat­ter the indus­try, these silos hin­der the expe­ri­ence, since cus­tomers don’t care about how you orga­nize inter­nal­ly, but their pri­or­i­ty is about the out­come of each interaction.

To us, the elu­sive cus­tomer-360 is a goal where the goal­posts con­tin­u­ous­ly move, and orga­ni­za­tions can’t lever­age the data they have or col­lect more.

This isn’t just true for con­sumers, but also cus­tomers in a busi­ness-to-busi­ness rela­tion­ship. Those buy­ers are doing more of the dis­cov­ery and research them­selves and buy­ing through self-ser­vice chan­nels like ecom­merce stores. How­ev­er, at the right time they need sup­port and strate­gic advice from the sales team. This is a shift from pure­ly being sold to and requires anoth­er lev­el of under­stand­ing, but ulti­mate­ly will grow cus­tomer life­time val­ue and cus­tomer loyalty. 

Orga­ni­za­tions that are will­ing to trans­form into more sus­tain­able and intel­li­gent enter­pris­es and sup­port the sus­tain­able choic­es of the cus­tomer will be more resilient in the future.

CX is a con­tin­u­ous evo­lu­tion, think­ing that each jour­ney has a start and end is fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong. If you’re not mov­ing for­ward, you’re los­ing the infi­nite race to a loy­al cus­tomer base.

Q: What CX tech­nolo­gies, ser­vices and capa­bil­i­ties has SAP unveiled in the last year to advance CX among its cus­tomers?

A: Cus­tomer Data Plat­form is one of our most recent tech­nolo­gies that will help break oper­a­tional silos and deliv­er con­sis­tent con­tex­tu­al expe­ri­ences. It lever­ages the rich Con­sent and Iden­ti­ty fea­tures and tech­nol­o­gy that came with the Gigya acqui­si­tion. We show­cased this at Sap­phire ear­li­er this year and it will only get more fea­ture rich from here on.

We mod­ern­ized the SAP Ser­vice Cloud that pro­vides our cus­tomers with agili­ty to adapt to evolv­ing busi­ness process­es. The tech­nol­o­gy is mod­ern, API first, cloud native, with snap­py user expe­ri­ence. It pro­vides the foun­da­tion to build robust out-of-the-box inte­gra­tions with­in SAP and exter­nal­ly with our part­ner ecosys­tem. We are also focus­ing more on busi­ness process­es than on fea­tures and func­tions, so our CX port­fo­lio is offered with the industry’s best practices.

Q: What has adop­tion of these tech­nolo­gies and ser­vices looked like?

A: The con­stant­ly chang­ing land­scape dur­ing the pan­dem­ic forced every­one to adopt, and quick­ly. Cus­tomers were forced, and not incen­tivized into the rise of quick com­merce, and become experts overnight.

New mega­trends emerged in in the pan­dem­ic, like con­ve­nience, val­ue propo­si­tion, and renewed mar­ket­ing efforts. For the first time ever, the offer­ings were fol­low­ing the cus­tomer, and not the oth­er way around. For this type of high lev­el of adop­tion, busi­ness­es had to be rel­e­vant, con­ve­nient, avail­able, and flexible.

To us, adop­tion looks like increased agili­ty, avail­abil­i­ty, cus­tomer under­stand­ing, and proac­tive and con­tex­tu­al interactions. 

Q: What is new/​fresh/​innovative in CX — spe­cif­ic examples?

A: There are so many new and fresh inno­va­tions hap­pen­ing here at SAP. For exam­ple, we are cur­rent­ly bring­ing the sus­tain­abil­i­ty invest­ments of the com­pa­ny and align­ing the cus­tomer choice with the front end. This is going to come with the announce­ment of invest­ment in cir­cu­lar econ­o­my in our Com­merce Cloud Solution. 

We are also look­ing to extend engage­ment chan­nels to anoth­er dimen­sion with web 3.0 invest­ments in NFTs and Meta­verse pilots. SAP is going beyond the typ­i­cal earn and burn strate­gies to expe­ri­en­tial loy­al­ty strate­gies as part of our invest­ment in next gen­er­a­tion loy­al­ty solutions. 

These are parts of how we will con­tin­ue the evo­lu­tion of the CX port­fo­lio to cloud native, com­pos­able solu­tions that con­nect the front and back office into a sin­gle suite.

Q: How should a cus­tomer assess the ROI of CX solutions?

A: This is a very inter­est­ing ques­tion because it has sev­er­al answers based on the indus­try you look at. For retail­ers, you can assess the cus­tomer reten­tion, churn risk, and con­ver­sion from sin­gle trans­ac­tion to sub­scribers. From the prod­uct per­spec­tive it would be the longevi­ty of the prod­uct, sales, and ser­vice expe­ri­ence, and sav­ing on the trade pro­mo­tions. Waste can be reduced, and there­fore save on revenue.

Q: Who ​“buys” CX, and who ​“leads” CX at orga­ni­za­tions? How has that changed?

A: The CX port­fo­lio offers solu­tions for Com­merce, Cus­tomer Data, Mar­ket­ing, Sales, and Ser­vice orga­ni­za­tions. Each solu­tion tends to have a buy­ing cen­ter and lead with­in the orga­ni­za­tions. For exam­ple, for Sales Cloud it might be the chief rev­enue offi­cer (CRO) and the rev­enue oper­a­tions team that runs the solution.

The ide­al per­son would be the chief expe­ri­ence offi­cer (CXO) – ear­ly-stage devel­op­ment of posi­tion – in addi­tion to chief infor­ma­tion offi­cers (CIOs), prob­a­bly chief mar­ket­ing offi­cers (CMOs) and chief data offi­cers (CDOs), as they tend to have a broad­er, non-siloed view of the world for holis­tic end-to-end experiences. 

Q: Is CX sci­ence, art, or both?

A: CX is a sci­ence that requires art and finesse to make it valu­able. The art of CX comes from empa­thy and the rest of the jour­ney is tech­nol­o­gy. The cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is a con­tin­u­ous evo­lu­tion where you con­stant­ly have to iter­ate, lis­ten, learn and pre­dict how you can improve every inter­ac­tion with a customer.

Q: What do orga­ni­za­tions need to con­sid­er in project plans to improve CX?

A: To have a suc­cess­ful project imple­men­ta­tion you must have cross depart­men­tal align­ment in the com­pa­ny. CX can­not be siloed — tech­nol­o­gy is fun­da­men­tal sup­port but if you have no align­ment, it will not go any­where. In addi­tion, if you have an imple­men­ta­tion part­ner, you need to ensure that there is a com­mon under­stand­ing of suc­cess criteria. 

Q: How does SAP sup­port CX improve­ment, change man­age­ment, and skill/​knowledge evo­lu­tion for customers? 

A: SAP sup­ports this by offer­ing cloud solu­tions — our core is get­ting con­stant­ly updat­ed as is the busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy plat­form to adjust to the customer’s needs. We have been open about our roadmap and pro­vide reg­u­lar updates.

We also have part­nered with cus­tomers on three pri­ma­ry sources: cus­tomer feed­back, mar­ket­ing trends and thought lead­er­ship. These pri­ma­ry sources have been inno­v­a­tive, deeply rel­e­vant to the cur­rent trends, and far exceed­ing our competition.

Q: What are your best pieces of advice for ASUG mem­bers con­sid­er­ing CX solutions?

A: We can’t look at the CX solu­tions as a buck­et of func­tions. Instead, we should look at them as busi­ness process­es to address. Also, we shouldn’t lim­it our­selves to the indi­vid­ual func­tions of an appli­ca­tion because this can cre­ate silos that will need addi­tion­al effort for inte­gra­tion to the rest of the ecosystem.

Q: ASUG has a mis­sion: help orga­ni­za­tions and indi­vid­u­als achieve the best val­ue from their tech­nol­o­gy invest­ments? How does your orga­ni­za­tion do that in CX?

A: Our vision at SAP is to use intel­li­gent data dri­ven insights as the foun­da­tion of every engage­ment, and to empow­er the trans­for­ma­tion to cus­tomer cen­tric, growth com­pa­nies built on trust and excep­tion­al loy­al­ty. And this also aligns with ASUG’s mis­sion: we help com­pa­nies meet their busi­ness objec­tives by build­ing more loy­al cus­tomers with increased life­time value.

Q: What else would you like to con­vey to the ASUG membership?

A: I want to briefly touch on future proof­ing. A typ­i­cal mis­take is that peo­ple look at today’s demands and trends, but they for­get how dynam­ic they are. Silos used to be the way orga­ni­za­tions were struc­tured, but in light of the shift­ing land­scape of micro­eco­nom­ics and geo-polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty, you have to be for­ward think­ing in order to stay rel­e­vant. Busi­ness process­es need to be adjust­ed accord­ing­ly but it needs to be a com­pro­mise and adjust your tech­nol­o­gy and process­es to go hand in hand.