It’s all About the Experience

Our economy is increasingly driven by experience. We are used to frictionless experiences – just think of Apple or Amazon –, and we expect that from all the brands we interact with. Especially with COVID-19 disrupting the world as we know it, all companies have been challenged with the need to reinvent the experience for their customers – to make it personalized, seamless, and outstanding.

More than ever, consumers are in the driver’s seat. They want the latest and greatest technologies and experience to shop anytime, anywhere, get highly personalized offers or chat with a virtual assistant instead of waiting in a queue for the next available service agent. They favor brands that listen, understand and anticipate their needs and deliver on their promises – on any device. And choice has never been greater.

Fact is: If you aren’t providing what consumers want, they will leave you for a competitor. Indeed, a Forrester study shows that companies that lead in customer experience outperform those who don’t by nearly 80 percent. 

Creating meaningful experiences is more than just managing the relationship. Everything your company does impacts the customer experience: your services and solutions, the resiliency of your supply chain, the quality of your manufacturing, to name only a few. So you cannot think about customer experience without thinking about your business holistically.

Traditional CRM systems are focused only on one part of the customer experience. They don’t provide you with the full picture because they cannot process data in real-time across any touchpoint or deliver a personalized response at the pace customers expect.

But to deliver a compelling customer experience, you need holistic visibility and connected processes across your value chain end to end. You need a 360-degree view of your consumer, bringing together all sources of customer data within your organization and connecting intelligent Customer Experience solutions with your Supply Chain and Finance. Because how annoying is it if the delivery of your article takes ages because of unexpected shortages in stock or getting an invoice even though you already paid?

SAP Customer Experience can help you to collect insights from your customers, employees, products, and brands at every touch point. We deliver individualized campaigns and frictionless experiences – we deliver commerce anywhere. We predict and resolve issues so you can retain happy customers and deliver the perfect customer experience. And we are the only provider that can connect your front office to the supporting functions.

I’ve always believed business success can be made easier by focusing on a limited number of critical areas. Playing to our strengths and complementing our rich Customer Experience portfolio, I am pleased that we entered into an agreement to acquire Emarsys. The leading omnichannel customer engagement platform provider enables businesses to engage more effectively and more personally with their customers, across all channels.

By enhancing our Customer Experience portfolio with Emarsys, our customers will be able to deliver hyper-personalized, omnichannel engagements in real-time, ensuring every engagement is relevant and impactful. With Emarsys technology, SAP Customer Experience solutions can bring together consumer needs and preferences with core systems like ERP and CRM. As a result, companies can approach consumers with relevant and highly personalized messages on their channel of choice.

We allow you to provide amazing experiences by understanding the customer journey at every touchpoint. We can map the value chain end-to-end, enabling companies to respond in real-time to changing demand. We enable you to meet global data privacy requirements and build customer trust by offering transparency and personal data control. And with the addition of Emarsys, we offer our customers yet another differentiating capability for their growth. In short: We are truly reinventing how businesses connect with their customers and offer them amazing experiences.

Make sure you join us during this year’s SAP Customer Experience Live on October 14 and 15 and learn more about how SAP is doubling down on customer experience – looking forward to seeing you!