SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence (CX) has under­gone a sig­nif­i­cant strat­e­gy shift in recent years, with SAP mov­ing from a pre­vi­ous focus on tra­di­tion­al cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) func­tion­al­i­ty to pur­sue more cloud-cen­tric, indus­try-spe­cif­ic CX. 

As part of that evo­lu­tion, the SAP roadmap for intel­li­gent CX was unveiled at this year’s SAP Sap­phire and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, enhanced by the pow­er of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and data. Few indi­vid­u­als will be more cen­tral to the suc­cess of this new direc­tion than Ritu Bhar­ga­va, Pres­i­dent & Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer, Indus­tries & CX/CRM at SAP. 

Bhar­ga­va, who began her career as a devel­op­er at SAP, returned to the com­pa­ny in 2021; she pre­vi­ous­ly spent a decade each at Sales­force and Ora­cle, and she also began her career as a devel­op­er at SAP. In her cur­rent role, she leads prod­uct, engi­neer­ing, user expe­ri­ence, strat­e­gy, and oper­a­tions for the entire SAP CX portfolio.

In the first half of our wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion, Bhar­ga­va dis­cussed the com­pet­i­tive dynam­ics cur­rent­ly at play in the CX/CRM space, the impor­tance of com­pos­abil­i­ty to a cloud-cen­tric CX, and what points of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion set SAP CX apart. 

This inter­view has been edit­ed and condensed.

ASUG: What defines excel­lence in cus­tomer expe­ri­ence today?

Bhar­ga­va: CX — across com­pa­nies and for users in both B2B and B2C envi­ron­ments — is no longer just about a sin­gle touch point. It starts before an inter­ac­tion, with how infor­ma­tion was social­ized, how it was sent out, how it was received, how it was con­sumed. Then, there’s the inter­ac­tion and what hap­pens next. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence evolves.

For exam­ple, in a ser­vice indus­try, with an agent who answers ser­vice calls, [the user] doesn’t want to have to call to address a ser­vice issue. So, the expe­ri­ence starts with the antic­i­pa­tion of the call and includes every touch­point across the jour­ney. At every touch­point, it should be per­son­al­ized to the cus­tomer and their con­text. Maybe that cus­tomer is a prospect, rather than just a lead. Meet­ing the cus­tomer where they are is the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. Excel­lence involves meet­ing the cus­tomer or con­sumer where they are, in a per­son­al­ized context.

ASUG: What com­pet­i­tive dynam­ics do you see at work in the present-day CX/CRM space?

Bhar­ga­va: At its heart, cloud pro­vides flex­i­bil­i­ty and scal­a­bil­i­ty, cur­ing cus­tomers’ headaches and mak­ing tech­nol­o­gy work for them, whether they’re focused on scale, per­for­mance, exten­si­bil­i­ty, com­pos­abil­i­ty, or flex­i­bil­i­ty across busi­ness mod­els. If a cus­tomer sud­den­ly had to move from a B2B mod­el to a direct-to-con­sumer (D2C) mod­el, flex­i­bil­i­ty is impor­tant. A lot of com­pa­nies couldn’t be that agile, because there’s no way for them to sud­den­ly change their busi­ness mod­el, for exam­ple, to direct­ly ship to every end user. That’s what mov­ing to the cloud is about: how to man­age a busi­ness across not just one loca­tion but in a glob­al envi­ron­ment, and how to achieve the busi­ness mod­el flex­i­bil­i­ty required to man­age the com­plex­i­ties of their processes.

Cus­tomers don’t only care about what they bought. Increas­ing­ly, they’re also con­cerned with the total share of wal­let, what they spend reg­u­lar­ly on a par­tic­u­lar brand. Let’s say a CIO spends $1,000,000 on their trans­for­ma­tion. They obvi­ous­ly care about the share of wal­let, and they need flex­i­bil­i­ty in their share of wal­let to say, ​“How will I man­age this IT spend or the busi­ness out­come that I need to solve for?” That’s the full con­text of a delight­ful cus­tomer expe­ri­ence: it’s the back office, oper­a­tional process­es, the under­stand­ing of how that works with­in the con­text of cus­tomer data, and the abil­i­ty to con­nect it across the entire val­ue chain to achieve busi­ness outcomes. 

Cus­tomers and their con­sumers don’t real­ly care about how many prod­ucts they bought. They care about the out­come of those prod­ucts, or that soft­ware, and how it is help­ing them. That’s impor­tant. The dynam­ics are chang­ing. SAP is in a unique posi­tion of strength, hav­ing prod­ucts across the entire val­ue chain, from the back office to the front, and hav­ing all of that data and busi­ness con­text. The ques­tion for CX is how we solve for not only one cus­tomer touch­point but all the touch­points across that val­ue chain. 

ASUG: What cur­rent or poten­tial future points of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion do you see as set­ting SAP apart from its com­peti­tors in this space?

Bhar­ga­va: We are known for our enter­prise exper­tise. We know sup­ply chains deeply, and we under­stand the entire­ty of finan­cial oper­a­tions and how all of those pieces work. That’s our essen­tial nuts and bolts, our bread and but­ter. Up to 80% of the world’s busi­ness data goes through SAP tech­nol­o­gy. We have the con­text of that data present, because the biggest cus­tomers in the world are SAP cus­tomers. What do we do with that strength of that indus­try exper­tise, of hav­ing the data and that installed base?

The dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, and how we take it to the next lev­el, is that we lever­age the pow­er of SAP S/4HANA for the front office and the con­nec­tiv­i­ty of that data for a sin­gle cus­tomer pro­file. That breaks silos. A very com­mon ques­tion when you’re check­ing out a prod­uct you buy is, ​“When will this good be deliv­ered to me?” A lot of com­pa­nies can­not answer this basic ques­tion, because sim­ply put they do not know how much inven­to­ry is avail­able and where the prod­uct is sit­ting in the sup­ply chain. 

SAP can answer this ques­tion, because we know that inven­to­ry pipeline. We know where the prod­uct is, we know the sup­ply chain, and we know what the com­pa­ny in ques­tion can do to ful­fill their promise to the cus­tomer. And we know the cus­tomer. It’s extreme­ly powerful.

One oth­er ques­tion is how SAP can bring its indus­try exper­tise into the con­text of how we build our appli­ca­tions. Com­pos­abil­i­ty is also key; we’re no longer focused on point-to-point inte­gra­tions. We have flex­i­bil­i­ty in our plat­form. We built SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Ser­vice Cloud, which can not only work togeth­er but also work with a cus­tomer data plat­form (CDP), SAP Emarsys Cus­tomer Engage­ment, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP), so you don’t have to tight­ly cou­ple those inte­gra­tions and APIs.

Silos can go away with the pow­er of data. Data itself is noth­ing, but data with intel­li­gence, and the pow­er of what it can do for intel­li­gence, is every­thing. Every­one is talk­ing about intel­li­gence right now. We launched our intel­li­gent CX posi­tion­ing ahead of SAP Sap­phire this year, and that is foun­da­tion­al to our prod­uct strat­e­gy. It’s not just indus­try-tai­lored, but it’s also con­nect­ed with the back office, front office, oper­a­tional data, and con­tex­tu­al data. It’s insight­ful, AI- and ML-dri­ven, adap­tive, and com­pos­able. It’s about deliv­er­ing inno­va­tions across the suite of SAP solu­tions, rather than just for SAP Sales Cloud or SAP Ser­vice Cloud.

ASUG: To expand on what was show­cased at SAP Sap­phire, how do you see SAP tru­ly dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing in CX and lead­ing in cer­tain areas? 

Bhar­ga­va: It starts with com­pos­abil­i­ty. Can we embark on a quest for this long-term, per­fect archi­tec­ture that will one day enable per­son­al­iza­tion, scale, and per­for­mance, inte­grat­ing with our part­ner ecosys­tem? Or can we take a com­pos­able, microser­vices-based approach? I have no ambi­tion to re-archi­tect every­thing, but instead lever­age some fan­tas­tic prod­ucts we have and incre­men­tal­ly build pieces where we can inno­vate more com­pos­able inter­faces, rather than rely­ing on tight­ly cou­pled, point-to-point integrations. 

Inter­nal­ly, that is chang­ing in two ways. The first is to opti­mize a best-of-suite approach for our prod­ucts, so the pow­er of our prod­ucts can come togeth­er, rather than leav­ing areas for our cus­tomers to fix. And the sec­ond is the com­pos­abil­i­ty of our fea­tures, mov­ing away from point-to-point inte­gra­tions and cre­at­ing head­less, com­pos­able archi­tec­tures that we not only build but also open to part­ner­ships. We can part­ner with com­pa­nies that pro­vide very spe­cif­ic niche fea­tures that we’re not going to invest in. 

BTP is the plat­form, across all our solu­tions, where we’re build­ing to avoid dupli­cat­ing our efforts. If we were try­ing to do many things, we would have set­tled for being good enough, as opposed to doing few­er things and doing them excep­tion­al­ly. Focus is the name of the game and it’s how you start break­ing siloes down and inno­vat­ing at the same time.

ASUG: Would you describe this as a part­ner-led process or more partner-leveraged?

Bhar­ga­va: We think of it as part­ner-lever­aged and indus­try-led. The nuance there is that we ask, ​“How can SAP CX become the best solu­tion for retail, auto­mo­tive, util­i­ties, or con­sumer prod­ucts?” rather than ask­ing, ​“Will this part­ner help us become the best CX for those indus­tries?” For some indus­tries, where we’re piv­ot­ing to be the best CX solu­tion out-of-the-box, that’s where it all starts com­ing to life. We might have two or three capa­bil­i­ties miss­ing, but a part­ner can tack­le those capa­bil­i­ties for us. 

The com­pos­abil­i­ty should allow us to pro­vide holis­tic, end-to-end offer­ings with­out telling [cus­tomers] to go some­where else, because we want them to stay in the SAP ecosys­tem. We see the whole oppor­tu­ni­ty map of a solu­tion that way. I cen­ter our solu­tions around three pil­lars: ​“Is it going to help us be inno­v­a­tive? Is it going to help us have more adop­tion? Or is it going to help us grow?” 

ASUG: How have CX and CRM evolved over the past few years for SAP’s Amer­i­c­as cus­tomer base? Where are cus­tomers on their jour­neys, and what chal­lenges are they encountering?

Bhar­ga­va: The fric­tion points for our cus­tomers gen­er­al­ly con­cern whether we’re pro­vid­ing them with suf­fi­cient flex­i­bil­i­ty and meet­ing them where they are. They ask for the dig­i­tal con­ve­nience of being able to do trans­ac­tions any­where — in per­son or through a mobile phone. Sup­ply chain dis­rup­tion, more than ever before, has inter­fered with great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. If I have placed an order, and then I get a can­cel­la­tion, it’s frus­trat­ing. But what if, before I placed an order, I could be alert­ed that the lead time, real­is­ti­cal­ly, was three months from the point of sale. It’s about set­ting expec­ta­tions and then exceed­ing them, because every time a cus­tomer’s expec­ta­tion is bro­ken, it leads to a very frag­ment­ed and poor cus­tomer experience.

Fur­ther­more, cus­tomers want com­pa­nies to be val­ues-dri­ven — to be sus­tain­able and do good, with car­bon-neu­tral prod­ucts and track-and-trace capa­bil­i­ties — and under­stand what that will do for their busi­ness. Can being val­ues-dri­ven make them more trust­wor­thy, and can it help them ful­fill my promis­es? Will it make them grow? The inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty of val­ues and out­comes, dri­ven by trust, is important.

Increas­ing­ly, com­pa­nies also know where you are and who you are; they have infor­ma­tion about your house­hold and your spend­ing pow­er. What do you do with that, and how do you use it? You don’t want a per­son­al­ized e‑mail that says, ​“We know you just recent­ly went on vaca­tion, and that you had so much fun with your fam­i­ly, and because you bought this prod­uct, we want to rec­om­mend this to you,” because that would freak you out. That’s where the whole notion of respon­si­ble, eth­i­cal AI comes in, along with con­sent and pri­va­cy. How do you solve that busi­ness prob­lem while also dri­ving toward the right val­ues and outcomes?

In next week’s edi­tion of First Five, our con­ver­sa­tion with Ritu Bhar­ga­va con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of the realigned indus­try-focused approach to SAP CX, plus SAP Dig­i­tal Assis­tant and SAP Recom­merce. You can sub­scribe to First Five here.