SAP just announced their next-generation front office suite, SAP C/4HANA. If you’re interested in learning more about these changes, we encourage you to reach out and contact us.
For now, I’d like to take the opportunity to give some insight into this compelling event in SAP’s history as a company. This represents a champion product to fill a gap in the market for a modern CRM designed for the modern consumer. The legacy CRMs in the market today are disjointed and antiquated, leading to a lack of control over personal data for customers. Old CRMs stood for Customer Relationship Management, where the relationship was managed by the company. Now, customers want to manage themselves, by managing their own preferences, and by being unwilling to give up their privacy and security for personalization.
Today, SAP’s announcement signals its commitment to putting the customer at the center of everything. The hallmark of a great commerce experience is the feeling that the customer is in control – and they should be. When customers feel they control their own experience, they are more likely to trust the company they are buying from. By centralizing the customer data, connecting that data to the various components of your business, and giving customers control over that data, you enable yourself to operate in a truly omnichannel fashion. This gives both the customer and the company the power to interact seamlessly, across every touchpoint. I will follow up this blog post shortly with a focus on SAP Customer Data Cloud, but for now, I’d like to focus on the 4 main touchpoint areas SAP C/4HANA covers:
1 | SAP Sales Cloud
Focusing on relationship-oriented sales, this will be a place for your sales processes to live and be fully leveraged by your sales organization. Built on Callidus Cloud, this tool will enable your sales organization with tools including quotes and contracts, sales and corporate learning enablement, and general sales optimization from beginning to end. With the power of 1 source of customer data, on SAP Customer Data Cloud, sales reps feel confident that the information they need is available and correct, and that they have consent to use it. There is no more searching for data in different programs – it is all there, under one roof.
2 | SAP Marketing Cloud
Described as “permission driven InMoment marketing”, this marketing tool will tie in with your sales objectives to advertise to your market, at the right time, in the right places, but with evolving permissions. The more a customer interacts with your brand, the more advanced permissions become, allowing you to build customized profiles with information the customer makes a cognizant choice to share – with consent.
3 | SAP Commerce Cloud
As a contextualized and personalized live customer experience, the commerce tool of SAP’s suite creates a commerce experience that builds familiarity with your customers over several interactions. If you have multiple brands, it allows for those separate sites to offer customers the same level of personalization and preferences across the board and feeds all the data from those multiple touchpoints back into the same centralized data tool. This means that as a customer purchases more and more, your relationship becomes further complex, leading to more brand loyalty as the customer feels more comfortable with your platform.
4 | SAP Service Cloud
A component that should particularly interest B2B users, SAP Service Cloud brings the service organization into your customer care mix so that you can provide the best end-to-end experience, from the first interaction to ongoing support for your most complex products and services, to being able to anticipate the service needs of your customers. Being able to engage customers through the service channel with the same quality and care they expect from your other channels is made possible through the SAP Customer Data Cloud. It supports your commerce offering by building customer loyalty – when customers experience high-quality care and service after purchasing, they’re more likely to repurchase from your company.
Commerce is a huge component of a great customer experience, and Pivotree knows that. That’s why we’ve made commerce the greatest focus in our 20-year history. However, we also know that providing a seamless, omnichannel, end-to-end experience across every touchpoint, not just commerce, is the best way to build customer loyalty. This is why we’re so confident that SAP’s next-generation front office suite, SAP C/4HANA, will be a formidable platform for those companies that want the best-run systems, so they can provide the highest quality customer journeys.
Are you interested in learning more about providing your customers with high-quality sales, marketing, commerce, and service?