SAPPHIRE NOW 2021 - Top CX announcements

The importance of customer experience in determining market success is unprecedented. ?In the wake of the pandemic, we witnessed a rapid shift in customer behavior, making CX critical.??It quickly became clear that it is no longer enough to have the best product (or service) on offer; today, the key to success is offering a great customer experience in addition to a great product or service.

This insight resonated at #SAPPHIRENOW2021, where speakers and industry leaders spoke at length laying emphasis on customer experience and how an excellent CX is the key to achieving a robust YoY growth.

SAP reminded us that customers’ needs come first.?So, connecting with customers and meeting their expectations and going beyond them is key.?Indeed, CX is central to the intelligent enterprise that focuses on innovation, process, and data mining to enhance effectiveness and efficiency. The CX strategy and platform should support the business so it’s ready for the unknown – ready for disruptions

Sustainability and Intelligent Business are key

The major theme for SAPPHIRE NOW’s CX tracks was sustainability and intelligent business that is networked and interconnected – “No business does business alone”. Most CX sessions focused on the importance of exceptional CX and how businesses can deliver a great customer experience that is personalized, quick to adapt, and trustworthy (secure and private), which are key expectations of the informed customer. CX leaders from companies including Zekelman Industries, Honeywell, Cisco Systems, and The Body Shop discussed how they were able to deliver an adaptive and highly personalized customer experience to drive growth even during the pandemic.

Key market trends: Shift to online shopping across all demographics

The sessions highlighted the seismic shift to online channels that has occurred over the past year. Of note are the following trends:

·?????Increase in share of online channels, with food and apparel in great demand

·?????Discounts and deals are very popular

·?????Older populations, who were generally considered slow on adopting the internet, have demonstrated the biggest shift to online shopping

·?????Current numbers in online shopping may decrease from pandemic highs, but are still expected to remain much higher than pre-pandemic levels

·?????Customers now turn to online channels even for smaller and more frequent purchases

·?????Omni-channel shopping behavior has also changed significantly:

o??Recent shift has opened huge opportunities for businesses

o??Better and deeper insights to customer preferences and behavior through online channels by analyzing customer behavior

o??Features like research online and buy in store, order online pick up from store, etc. are expected to become more popular in the near future.

Speakers also highlighted the need for brands to live up to their promise - to ensure they meet the needs of their customers. In this regard, it is important to listen to the customers and understand their expectations, and SAP Qualtrics is very effective in capturing customer feedback in real time. Expectations of the right merchandise, delivery time, communication, etc.

·?????Personalization is very critical. It’s about collecting the right data, using it efficiently to present the right content and providing an experience that is personalized

·?????Customer experience is a force multiplier and the way to enhance customer experience is by creating a single view of customers across all data sources by leveraging the capabilities of SAP Customer Data Cloud.

Data + AI for transformative CX

The importance of data in CX cannot be overemphasized. Data with AI and machine learning is a very potent combination that enables better CX. It is important to mine data from different points in customer journey and correlating to get better insight for personalized targeting and better conversion rates. Businesses need to be very vigilant on data security and privacy issues.

·?????Most people are apprehensive of the risks of exposing their personal data due to security risks, while at the same time, most customers also prefer a more personalized experience based on their personal data -underlining the importance of data security to gain customer’s trust

·?????Important to ensure that when gathering data, your intended use of this information is perceived as fair to the customer. Products and services should not breach a customer’s privacy. Customers expect their privacy to be respected while being offered a more personalized experience

·?????Customer’s consent is very important. Businesses should gain a complete, unified view of customer and use technology to protect the data and privacy to strike the right balance

·?????Value exchange – customers are willing to give up some personal information if they see they get some value in return.

SAP Upscale Commerce for Retail

For those who missed SAP’s early announcement, SAP dedicated time to explaining the key features of SAP Upscale Commerce. SAP has relaunched this native SaaS platform (which was originally launched 3 years ago without much fanfare) to strategically position it to attract more online brand startups and mid-market users. It competes with other quickly deployable ecommerce SaaS platforms in this segment (like Shopify for instance). SAP Upscale Commerce gives enterprise merchant users more options and flexibility by allowing underlying code to be customized to tailor fit businesses requirements.

I think SAP rightly concluded that it was not enough to offer a single product like SAP Commerce Cloud to fit all business sizes and geographies. Moreover, of late, small and mid-market businesses were finding it difficult to justify a large capital investment against a delayed ROI for enabling an intelligent online channel. SAP Upscale Commerce could be more attractive to small and mid-market companies desiring to go online quickly with AI-enabled customer experience.

Some highlights of SAP Upscale Commerce include:

·?????It’s a no-code (or very less code) solution, primarily focused on the Retail sector. SAP also announced that they will soon release the B2B version as well

·?????It provides a 360-degree view of customers to the business, enabling them to react quickly and make proactive decisions

·?????It has built-in AI to make it very adaptive and agile to deliver a great and very personalized customer experience

·?????It uses a micro-service based Headless API architecture, allowing a ‘head-less’ implementation with other CX tools like Adobe EM, Drupal etc. or even a ‘head-on’ implementation with SAP Spartacus

·?????Tight integration with SAP ERP for a real time information flow.

Customer stories – Success with SAP CX solutions

The best insights came from the SAP customers who shared their experiences around customer centric solutions they have implemented recently. These included:

Zekelman Industries

Mr. Ketul Patel, Director of Finance and Sales Applications at Zekelman Industries, described their Digital CX transformation journey and how various teams collaborated closely to make this transformation a success.

Zekelman adopted a Business driven digital CX transformation - taking a top-down approach which was supported and sponsored by top leaders. They partnered with HCL to implement innovative features in Z-Commerce (Zekelman's B2B Commerce platform on SAP Commerce) that helped in enabling and empowering their partners

·?????Access to key information to enable them to make smart business decisions

·?????Real time stock, order tracking, pricing, etc.

·?????Driving efficiency in customer facing processes by enabling self service

·?????Staying ahead of completion with enhanced digital customer experience

Zekelman partnered with HCL Technologies, to implement their B2B commerce platform in an iterative approach, taking up one business at a time with quick release cycles. They leveraged out of box solutions as much as possible and went for customizations only where necessary. You can view the recording of the session here.

Some other notable insights came from SAP customers like:

Brakes – who spoke about how they were able to quickly reinvent their business model to include direct to customers supply within a very short period of 7 days by leveraging the capabilities of SAP Commerce Cloud.

Allbirds – shared their experience with setting up global IT infrastructure on SAP S4HANA and SAP CX suite which enabled them to easily add online channel to their physical store business model.

Body Shop – A similar discussion on how they were able to launch 18 new websites rapidly during the pandemic in a short period of 3 months.

Looking forward to discussing some of the key initiatives and trends with our customers. While the return to physical stores after pandemic is inevitable, businesses need to be prepared for this shift. It is important to merge the human aspects of experience into the digital channels.