The Complete Guide to Personalization with SAP Customer Experience

In the digital world today, ecommerce software entails something more than just the ‘inventory-order-billing-shipment’ cycle. Customer-centricity sets the tone for digital transformation and drives the evolution of all platforms: ERPs, CRMs, DMPs, you name it.

SAP is the one to illustrate this evolution. The 47-year-old German software company couldn’t stand aside in this rapidly changing market but attempted to shake off its legacy-system status by embracing agility and looking in the direction of SaaS applications.

First, in 2015 SAP announced its next-generation ERP, S/4HANA, built on top of its in-memory HANA database, and moved it to the cloud. Then, in 2018 SAP reinvented its CRM software suite, and SAP Hybris got rebranded as SAP Customer Experience aka C/4HANA. It’s a collection of four cloud-based solutions for marketing, sales, customer service, and commerce with one shared data model and a centralized UI. All the clouds are underpinned by SAP’s AI Leonardo. Does the package ring a bell? Yes, this is a bold move against Salesforce, the established market leader in this domain.

Rivalry aside, customers come first. SAP admitted that they moved from 360-degree sales automation to 360-degree customer view with personalization at the core. It means that the entire supply chain in the SAP ecosystem now serves the only purpose of providing stellar customer experience.

SAP’s strategic acquisitions also point to its far-reaching personalization efforts. For example, SAP acquired SaaS company Qualtrics in pursuit of bringing together experience data and SAP’s historic operational data. This combo is deemed to become a perfect foundation for fail-proof personalization.

Why is customer experience personalization such a hot a topic right now? Well, when companies think that relationship with the customer ends once the order is completed, it can lead to miserable results. Statistics are telling:

With 77% of the world’s transactions involving a SAP product and a number of strong players in the field of ecommerce development, the platform should be able to provide the richest and fullest data sets on customers. Let’s see how SAP Customer Experience deals with personalization in reality.

The SAP C/4HANA products have a single data model and a shared extension framework called SAP Cloud Platform. SAP Cloud Platform is a full-fledged ecosystem where you can create rich customer profiles by consolidating data via pre-integrated apps as well as external sources using ETL, APIs, and webhooks.

With all your data in a single location, you get a powerful tool for segmenting your audience, orchestrating customer journeys, and delivering relevant customer experience. As for customers, a single platform makes their journeys frictionless due to self-service integration, single sign-ons, and delegated administration. On top of this, your activities on the platform will automatically comply with the GDPR and other regulations without the need to run huge data privacy initiatives.

SAP Commerce Cloud delivers holistic and personalized ecommerce experience across all devices and go-to-market models, be it B2C, B2B2C, or B2B. It’s a single digital platform with components built natively off the same foundation. This way, you don’t need to create and maintain integrations between your commerce platforms, which reduces overall costs.

What’s more, you can consolidate all your sales channels, suppliers, partners, and product data at one location and then fuse your database with SAP Marketing Cloud to enable customer data aggregation. Voila—you get a great foundation for providing seamless interaction with customers and handling big streams of orders and users in real time.

The platform accompanies end-to-end commerce processes. For example, you can use plug-and-play integration to deliver a scalable shopping cart and checkout with payment services and tax management. At the same time, you can enable endless-aisle order fulfillment with capabilities to buy anywhere, with returns simplified by means of self-service.

When using Commerce Cloud, you also have access to built-in AI. It provides real-time insights for tailoring content (like offers or recommendations) or building remarketing tactics to minimize cart abandonment.

It’s important that the platform can be managed without developers’ help. You can create, edit, and personalize content or storefront design with a WYSIWYG editor using ready-made templates.

SAP Service Cloud gives service reps an opportunity to help customers wherever those are by extending support to all channels. The service team gains a single view of the customer and their past interactions, which is an imperative for a consistent experience. The platform also gives service teams access to essential backend data, such as orders, warranties, and contracts. Service reps can use the data to instantly see what complementary or substitute products will suit customers or when is a perfect moment for a discount or a reward.

In its turn, AI helps to optimize ticket assignment and diagnose recurring issues, which minimizes response time. You can also leverage bots and natural language processing technologies that can transfer conversations further to live agents without losing the context.

The system also gives customers access to a number of self-service options for troubleshooting, tracking requests, and getting remote assistance.

Although the major challenges of the SAP C/4HANA suite are not directly associated with personalization, you still need to consider these prior to buying the license.

Historically, in order to get a quote for SAP’s specific product or suite, you had to reach out to the vendor directly, receive your quote, and then get bound by lengthy and rigid license agreements. However, once SAP started making steps toward SaaS applications, the company realized they needed to change their pricing policy and make it more transparent.

For some products, the pricing became more or less visible:

However, there’s still a lot of catching up to do compared to SaaS rivals like Salesforce or Workday:

SAP’s decision to go to the cloud is a smart move and a brave attempt to outmaneuver the competitors. Though there are some questions to its integrity when it comes to pricing, the Customer Experience suite, or C/4HANA (where C stands for Customer), is the best response to customer-centered trends. The suite has a robust set of personalization features, powered by machine learning and offering a single, extremely versatile platform that’s able to deliver almost 1-on-1 customer experiences.