There was a time not so long ago when the indus­tri­al and com­mer­cial world could just focus on deliv­er­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices. Prod­ucts and ser­vices still mat­ter, but what gets you ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion is how those make cus­tomers feel. Today, our rela­tion­ships with brands are not only trans­ac­tion­al. They deter­mine how much we engage with their prod­ucts and ulti­mate­ly how much ​“brand affin­i­ty” we develop. 

Wel­come to the age of cus­tomer experience.

The Expe­ri­ence Factor 

Some­times labelled as user expe­ri­ence (UX), the expe­ri­ence fac­tor is now one of the most impor­tant mar­ket dif­fer­en­tia­tors that dri­ves con­sumers to make brand choices. 

Dion Hinch­cliffe of ZDNet not­ed, ​“Per­haps the top­most pri­or­i­ty of most major dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion efforts is to improve the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, which is the lead­ing dis­crim­i­na­tor today when it comes to suc­cess­ful growth and cus­tomer reten­tion. How­ev­er, orga­ni­za­tions have a long way to go when it comes to scal­ing up their dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence factories.” 

Why Is SAP Mov­ing into Cus­tomer Experience?

That gap in dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is per­haps why SAP is now work­ing to extend the SAP HANA plat­form with a spe­cif­ic cus­tomer expe­ri­ence func­tion. SAP C/4HANA is described as an in-mem­o­ry cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (CX) suite that offers cloud solu­tions for mar­ket­ing, com­merce, sales, ser­vice, and cus­tomer data. It uses intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies like machine learn­ing to pow­er real-time engagements.

Anoth­er ​“P” in the Mar­ket­ing Mix

Mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists like to talk about the ​“mar­ket­ing mix” (also known as the 4Ps). These are a com­bi­na­tion of fac­tors mar­keters use to dri­ve their mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy includ­ing prod­uct, price, pro­mo­tion, and place. The new unof­fi­cial mar­ket­ing mix might now include per­cep­tion (to add a word that con­veys user experience).

So, how do busi­ness­es make and sell expe­ri­ences? How is SAP sup­port­ing this new approach? And what do ASUG Mem­bers need to con­sid­er when build­ing this new strat­e­gy into their cus­tomer-fac­ing technology? 

Run­ning with Adidas

The Ger­man sports goods man­u­fac­tur­er, Adi­das, has the high­est pro­file among key SAP C/4HANA cus­tomers. The com­pa­ny took part in the stage pre­sen­ta­tions in 2018 at SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence to help show­case how SAP C/4HANA has helped it trans­form its approach to cus­tomer expe­ri­ences.

“It’s all about the love of sports, its unique­ness, its lega­cy, and the con­stant dri­ve for inno­va­tion,” said Kai Bien­mueller, IT direc­tor for whole­sale ERP solu­tions at Adi­das Group. 

What Con­sumers Want

The team at Adi­das is using SAP C/4HANA, SAP HANA, and SAP Leonar­do to chan­nel its knowl­edge of mar­ket demands in the high­ly com­pet­i­tive sports retail­ing sec­tor. ​“To bring the best prod­ucts to mar­ket each and every sea­son, the com­pa­ny has to know what con­sumers want and when,” Bien­mueller said. 

He added that omnichan­nel com­merce is a big chal­lenge for Adi­das Group and the entire indus­try. Con­sumers expect brands and retail­ers to offer a seam­less shop­ping and buy­ing expe­ri­ence in-store, online, and on mobile devices. It is that seam­less expe­ri­ence fac­tor that Adi­das Group is using SAP C/4HANA to deliver.

What Con­sumers Want to Avoid

In terms of oth­er work­ing exam­ples, it’s inter­est­ing to see how key SAP part­ners view the moves to dri­ve wider adop­tion of SAP C/4HANA. Dono­van Guin, prac­tice lead for SAP cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at IBM, asked us to think about a prospec­tive cus­tomer receiv­ing an offer via a mar­ket­ing cam­paign, only to strug­gle to find the offer once they land on the e‑commerce site. 

How about when the cus­tomer con­tacts the call cen­ter for help only to have to strug­gle with a cus­tomer ser­vice rep who can’t access the mar­ket­ing sys­tem that gen­er­at­ed the offer? ​“This kind of sce­nario plays out con­stant­ly across the mar­ket in var­i­ous ways,” he wrote in his recent LinkedIn arti­cle, ​“fuel­ing lost oppor­tu­ni­ties, high­er costs, and slow­er growth.”

It is per­haps no sur­prise that SAP acquired Qualtrics in Novem­ber of last year. Qualtrics is known for its expe­ri­ence man­age­ment soft­ware that works to col­lect feed­back at every touch­point of the cus­tomer jour­ney through email, SMS, web­site inter­cepts, offline col­lec­tion, and more. It offers a pre­dic­tive intel­li­gence engine to run sen­ti­ment analy­sis so that firms can auto­mat­i­cal­ly cor­re­late data to find sat­is­fac­tion dri­vers and run advanced sta­tis­ti­cal mod­els with a sin­gle click. 

Mak­ing Mul­ti­chan­nel Expe­ri­ences Work

So, what have we learned? We know that the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is an indi­vid­ual thing. Every per­son will mea­sure his or her own inter­ac­tions with a giv­en brand dif­fer­ent­ly. At the same time, we know that many fac­tors in the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence can be quan­ti­fied and man­aged. Qualtrics has prime exam­ples of these tools at work. 

We know that cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is all about peo­ple get­ting the right prod­uct and ser­vice infor­ma­tion and sup­port at the right time, in a con­sis­tent man­ner across all mul­ti­chan­nel shop­ping or pro­cure­ment touchpoints.

We also know that retail and leisure have, for the most part, been lead­ing the ini­tial charge for cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Oth­er indus­tries such as ener­gy, legal and finan­cial, real estate, and health care (the list goes on) are cer­tain­ly not as far in terms of their jour­ney to focus on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Though these types of indus­tries are bound to be equal­ly affect­ed as busi­ness-to-busi­ness (B2B) cus­tomers con­tin­ue to fol­low the path of busi­ness-to-con­sumer (B2C) customers. 

The Cus­tomer Is Even More Right 

If we look at inter­ac­tions across the B2B and B2C sec­tors, we can’t over­state the impor­tance of cus­tomer experience. 

The cus­tomer expe­ri­ence fac­tor is now, in many cas­es, more impor­tant than price in the cus­tomer deci­sion-mak­ing process. It’s not hard to argue whether it needs to be part of every ASUG member’s future busi­ness plans. 

As Eleanor Roo­sevelt famous­ly said, ​“The pur­pose of life is to live it, to taste expe­ri­ence to the utmost, to reach out eager­ly and with­out fear for new­er and rich­er expe­ri­ence.” Expe­ri­ence mat­ters… and you only learn that through experience.

Catch up on our con­ver­sa­tions on SAP C/4HANA with the leader of one of the five SAP C/4HANA clouds, Chris Hau­ca, to learn what SAP Com­merce Cloud does and what it can do for your busi­ness. ASUG mem­bers can reg­is­ter for an SAP C/4HANA webi­nar and learn and how it can help trans­form cus­tomer experience.