In our next choice from SAP Sapphire Now 2021 to share with our community, IgniteSAP has prepared a transcript of the main presentation from the Customer Experience content track called “Drive Better Outcomes With Exceptional Customer Experience”.
In this presentation, we get an overview of the role of CX in the emergence of the world economy from national lockdowns with an interview of Melanie Noronha of The Economist by SAP President of Customer Experience Bob Stutz. Elen Macaskill of the Body Shop speaks with Scott Russell SAP’s Customer Success executive board member about best practice in the interaction between customers and businesses online and in physical stores. Martin Newman leads a discussion on the Burberry fashion brand’s innovative CX strategy, and there are customer success stories from Honeywell and a look into the future of CX with Cisco System’s Robert Madl.
Ignite SAP hopes you enjoy reading this deep dive into Customer Experience at SAP Sapphire Now 2021.
More coverage from Sapphire Now 2021:
[Melissa Chan]
Hi there, we’re live in the SAPPHIRE NOW studio for customer experience. I’m Melissa Chan, your host for the next hour.
[Claire Richards]
And I’m Claire Richards. And I will be taking the pulse of the conversation through social media and sharing it with you here. I do hope you’ll join in. It’s super easy. You can use the hashtag SAPPHIRE NOW. And I’m also monitoring the chat right here on our platform.
Now it’s been a challenging year for all of us, it feels like we’re finally able to see some light at the end of the tunnel.
[Melissa Chan]
Now is the perfect time to take a second look at our businesses and goals and put all of our learning into action. And we’re uniquely positioned now more than ever to serve up fantastic experiences for our customers.
What have we learned during the past 18 months? Well, for starters, more of us are shopping and getting our services online. The latest research confirms business leaders who genuinely care about their customers and their unique needs will keep those customers loyal and not lose them to the competition. It seems like common sense, but there’s more to the story.
SAP partnered with the Economist Intelligence Unit to produce the influential shopper report, which looks at emerging trends. Researchers surveyed consumers of all ages in five countries examining retail spending both pre and mid-pandemic, and they discovered three big takeaways.
First, people started shopping online more to avoid crowds and stay safe, including new segments like baby boomers, who embraced the convenience of digital channels. The questions are which of these trends are likely to continue. Researchers study how we’re spending money. More people are shopping on the web for food and getting it delivered. But close behind. People are also buying apparel and accessories online. Finally, and this was a great discovery. If you want to entice baby boomers to shop online, researchers tell us to offer them a discount or a deal. On the other hand, people younger than 57 years old, believe that webshops already offer the best prices.
We want to ask you to please share your thoughts about your own experiences with changes in buyer behaviour. Please write them down in the chat on your screen. We’re monitoring your responses live and we’ll check back with you throughout the show.
To get a closer look at this intriguing topic SAP’s President of Customer Experience, Bob Stutz recently spoke with The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Melanie Noronha.
[Bob Stutz]
Melanie, thanks for being here. today. We all know that the way we shop has moved more towards digital over the years. And really the pandemic has accelerated the shift. Which aspects of this do you find most surprising? And which habits do you think will stick around even after we go back to post-pandemic life?
[Melanie Noronha]
Thank you, Bob. It’s a pleasure to be here. To answer your question, I guess when we start with what we expected, which was that millennials are dominating online shopping. But what we didn’t expect is that older cohorts such as baby boomers and Gen-X, have actually demonstrated the biggest shift to online spending during the pandemic.
There are some differences within the European markets in our study. That’s the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. But this is the overall trend. Now our research does find that online shopping will decrease from pandemic highs once the restrictions ease and once it’s safer to go back in store. But levels are expected to be higher than pre-pandemic levels.
[Bob Stutz]
Yeah, that’s sort of a you know really resonates with what customers are telling us: people want more personalised products and services, now more than ever before. So, when customers share their data with us, we need to leverage this data to understand our customers better, which is something that we also hear constantly from many of our customers. Can you elaborate on what are the main indicators to obtain that deeper understanding of customer behaviour?
[Melanie Noronha]
I think there are quite a few. It’s important to understand for instance, if customers are turning to online channels for smaller more frequent purchases versus the bulk orders. Understanding a trend like this will be really important for retailers as they develop their inventory management strategies.
Another indicator to watch is the timing of the purchase during the week. So one expert we interviewed told us that in Spain in the early months of the pandemic, consumers were actually buying more every day of the week and less on the weekends. But overall, our research shows that online shopping behaviour is vastly different, not just by age group. but also by product category. And we have all of this data published in the influential shopper data exploration tool, and that’s worth exploring.
[Bob Stutz]
So if I’m a brand that has shifted to support this omnichannel shopping and behaviour, what’s the opportunity for me by doing this?
[Melanie Noronha]
I think this shift to online shopping, especially among older cohorts, presents a unique opportunity for brands and retailers to engage new online customers in ways they never could before. Companies that do not offer a seamless online experience today, risk a greater return to in-store shopping, but therefore losing that critical insight to customer behaviour that online channels offer.
Importantly, the shift to online shopping gives companies the opportunity to provide a holistic brand experience engaging consumers in different ways on that journey for a single purchase. So allowing customers to discover online and then purchase in store, or discover in store and then place the order online.
[Bob Stutz]
Melanie, thanks so much for joining us today. The research that you’ve done is so important to all of our customers. We really value you taking the time to be here with us today. Thank you so much.
[Melissa Chan]
SAP’s President of Customer Experience. Bob Stutz joins me now live. Bob, welcome to the studio. How are you?
Okay, so my first question to you is how you see brands stay successful in this climate? And whether you can give an example to that?
[Bob Stutz]
Yeah, I think, you know, look, it’s really tough in this climate, I think brands, they have to make a promise, and they have to deliver on that promise. And, and that really means that delivering completely on that promise, whether it’s you know, availability of merchandise, whether it’s delivery, whether it’s returns, they need to be able to make sure that they’re taking care of their customer.
And this is really critical. And I think, in this day and age, if a brand does not fulfil that promise, what happens is customer will go to a competitor. And if the competitor provides the right service and the right experience, they’ll stay with the competitor.
[Melissa Chan]
And, the research shows that connectivity is super important within a company. How does that improve the customer experience?
[Bob Stutz]
Yeah, I mean, connectivity is really important, right, you need to be able to connect on a personal level with your consumers and customers at the end of the day. And that means not just delivering the right content, but it also means delivering the right experience, because you can deliver the right content, but if the experience that that consumer has, is not a good one, they will go elsewhere.
[Melissa Chan]
Now, the other thing people really care about these days is of course sustainability. Can you talk a little bit about sustainability, and also the importance of data in terms of playing a role in that goal?
[Bob Stutz]
Yeah, and I think, companies that offer sustainable products, or adding sustainable products to, their repertoire in their products that are doing much better. Because, in this day and age, people really care about sustainability. But also, understanding the data is really critical, right. And that means you, you really have to collect the right data to understand your customers and understand what they’re looking for, and really present them with the right offers the right things at the right time and with an experience that they want, because in this day and age, the consumer is in control, not the business anymore.
[Melissa Chan]
Bob Thank you so much for joining us.
Now, it’s clear customer experience is more than just a nice to have. It really is a force multiplier for your business’s growth. Data drives a great customer experience. So researchers wanted to know how are leading brands successfully using customer data. They discovered that 68% of companies pursuing digital transformations are; one creating a single view of their customers across all their data sources, and two, investing in digital platforms that enhance customer experience and business agility.
Here’s the takeaway: Businesses that create and share data insights across their organisations have a winning CX strategy. And with that takeaway in mind, let’s now get a deeper perspective from Geert Leeman, a CEO for SAP Customer Experience.
Geert, welcome to the studio.
Well, let’s just go straight in. And can you just explain to us what customer experience means to you?
[Geert Leeman]
Yeah, definitely, yeah, customer experience is all about making the dreams come true for our customers. And how do we do that? We really try to connect the dots between all of the different processes, as we just heard from Bob, to exceed the customer expectations at every single turn.
And in the old way, we would have really concentrated a lot to tear the silos down between sales and marketing and service departments. And in the new way of looking at customer experience, you’re really putting the customer needs first in everything that we do. And that requires really the build out of a customer-first culture in an organisation.
So let me let me give you a personal example. So I ordered a final record of Moby two months ago for one of my best friends. And her birthday is actually on Saturday today. I’m still waiting on the delivery. And we just heard it from before. Currently, there’s no commitments, it’s lost in transit. I don’t know if it’s going to arrive on time. And we get CX we aim to just do a better job in bringing all of these departments together and putting the customer needs first at every single turn. So then really customer experience is working.
[Melissa Chan]
Oh, no, that’s so stressful. I certainly hope the record makes it in time. But if not, we have this video that you can show to her so that she knows that you had this plan all along. Can you talk a little bit about the customer experience and how it fits into intelligent enterprise?
[Geert Leeman]
Intelligent enterprises is our core back office of the organisation. It is all about efficiency, effectiveness in any organisation. it concentrates around innovation and process intelligence. As we see more and more, customer experience branches out to the entire company. And in order to put CX at the heart of every intelligent enterprise, we need to put the customer experience first.
More and more unknown pressures in the market are starting to play a fundamental role in how we actually react in the front office. Rising logistical cost is just one example. We’ve seen all of the challenges as well in the Suez Canal that have direct impact in how customer NPS is calculated at the end of the day, and within CX, what we are seeing is that CX goes more and more hand in hand with the intelligent enterprise to support businesses, so they can really be ready for the unknown. We need to help the companies to prepare for those unforeseen challenges that are out here and unforeseen pressures in the market to drive the ultimate growth.
[Melissa Chan]
So can you talk a little bit about how SAP CX drives this growth?
[Geert Leeman]
Yeah, and data becomes more and more pivotal, in connecting all of the silos into a single repository. Whatever you checked on the website, or, whatever we liked or disliked online, becomes actually a repository. And companies start to mine the data significantly more, and we’re starting to see correlations between multiple data sets. So me as a Belgian, I like to enjoy once in a while a Stella Artois. So we found out that there’s a strong correlation between Stella Artois, and movies. And this becomes so pivotal, because by mining the data, we start to have way more recommended and targeted offers, which leads to higher conversion rates, which ultimately leads to happier customers. So our focus is really on building this end-to-end seamless experience for our customer that goes beyond the classical sales, and service and marketing departments. And that’s a fantastic opportunity, actually, for all of us in the CX space.
[Melissa Chan]
Well, you know, I’ve never done that but I’m going to moving forward watch movies and always drink Stella Artois. I never thought of that connection and correlation. Thank you viewers for joining us in the studio. This was very interesting.
Okay, so please share how you feel in the live chat. Whether you drink Stella Artois, and watch movies and Geert will join us in a few minutes to take some questions.
Okay, so odds are a lot of you are launching digital transformation projects. How have the last 18 months changed the way you’re thinking about technology and what are you doing about it?
The Body Shop is approaching customer experience in a fresh new way. I love this quote from their website. “Life is short and your body is beautiful. You are not a smartphone and you don’t need an upgrade.”
SAP is helping the Body Shop stay focused on helping customers know how special they are. Their global customer director Elen Macaskill recently talked to SAP Executive Board Member responsible for customer success, Scott Russell, about how she’s thinking differently to serve customers even better.
[Scott Russell]
Thank you so much. And thank you, Elen, for joining me today.
There’s a lot of buzz about the Body Shop’s digital success story, you’re the global customer director across over 60 countries in which your brand operates. Tell us about your connection to the company and also your customers.
[Elen Macaskill]
It’s a privilege to work at the body shop. This brand is in my bones. It was my first beauty brand. And in fact, White Musk, which we’ve just relaunched was my first perfume, we’re certified B Corp now. In fact, I think we’re the biggest in Europe. And that means that we publicly committed to the highest levels of social and environmental performance.
Professionally, my job is about defining and designing the omni-channel model for the Body Shop. And that means putting the customer at the heart of everything we do.
[Scott Russell]
Many of us will have seen the traditional retailers closing in the past 12 to 18 months. It’s devastating. And now as a retailer with close to 3000 stores around the world, how has the Body Shop and how have you navigated the pandemic?
[Elen Macaskill]
I’m really clear that we’re not out of the woods yet. But I am so proud of how our company has responded. In fact, I think we found a new level of confidence. And so much of that is down to the incredible passion, commitment, and tenacity of our teams. I want to share with you three concrete examples of what we’ve been doing.
Firstly, to cope with the huge influx of digital orders that we saw, we spun up a new distribution centre in a matter of weeks. We went from 30 to 300, customer care agents, all of whom had to work from home.
Secondly, our amazing store teams around the world found themselves doing new things like video consultations, or powering the live chat on our website. And we trialed new services like call your store and collect.
And finally, and this is the real big one, we accelerated our digital transformation. So we launched 18 new websites across the globe in three months, all whilst delivering the biggest e-commerce sales we’ve seen, and with most of our stores closed. And I think that that was a real calculated risk.
So we really thought that in this year, more than ever, it was important, we gave our customers a fantastic experience online. So we transformed our ecosystem powered by SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Customer Cloud, and SAP Spartacus.
So over the course of those three months, an amazing team stayed up all night to transform the Body Shop.com, market by market. And I’ll tell you, I set my alarm a little bit early every morning. And the first thing I did was get on my mobile phone and check that the launches had gone well, and all of them were seamless. I think taking the decision to do that, whilst most of our stores were closed was really something for our company.
[Scott Russell]
I love that combination of agility, but also resilience, what an incredible pace of change. Now how has SAP technology helped you protect that customer relationship throughout the transformation, but also helping you to nurture memorable customer experiences? I guess what I’m really asking is how have you let your customers know that the Body Shop truly understands them.
[Elen Macaskill]
It all starts with our single customer view. So we join up what our customers are doing across our retail, e-commerce and digital platforms. And I think it’s so important to recognise that customers choosing to give you their data is a sign of the trust they have in your brand. And we have to reward that trust, firstly, by taking the highest levels of protection for their data. And secondly, by giving them a more relevant and engaging experience as a result of holding that data.
So let me give you an example. Imagine there’s a customer in Glasgow, and she’s seen an influencer talking about our fantastic new body butters online. So she goes to our website, and it’s the first time we’ve seen her at the Body Shop and we recognise that she is a new customer that we don’t know. And perhaps she decides “there are a few things here I’d like to buy” so she adds them to her basket and she can check the stock in her local store in case she wants to pop down that day and be confident that it’s there. Or perhaps she decides not to purchase that day. But because we know she’s a new customer. We’re able to offer her the chance to sign up to our newsletter, and then we can welcome her to our loyalty program. And every time then she returns to the Body Shop, whether digitally or in our store, we recognise her, we know a little bit more about her. And we can give her an experience that’s really relevant to her individually.
[Scott Russell]
I can really see how critical it is to build a solid foundation around your customer data. Tell me how your customers responding and engaging with the Body Shop now in ways that they couldn’t do before. How is rolling out the e commerce platforms help your brand build community?
[Elen Macaskill]
I think successful brands today need to be great publishers. Our customers want to engage in great content, and we need to provide that, and that’s really important at the Body Shop, where our purpose to fight for a fairer and more beautiful world means that we want to engage with our customers about so much more than just products.
So we took the opportunity with our e-commerce site to de-couple the experience. So SAP Spartacus powers the experience we give our website and we’ve separated that from the e-commerce engine. And Spartacus allows us to be a lot more agile and nimble and responsive to what customers are looking for, and how they’re behaving on our website. So we can make sure that we’re surfacing great content.
And we can see that the customers who are engaging with our editorial content are for far more likely to make a purchase at the Body Shop.
[Scott Russell]
Really insightful, Elen. And many consumers have permanently changed their buying habits. How is the Body Shop, tailoring your approach moving forward?
[Elen Macaskill]
Well, at the body shop we’re passionate about physical retail. And we definitely don’t believe this is the end for our stores. In fact, there’s a really clear cohort of customers who’ve rushed back to our stores as soon as they’ve reopened.
Physical retail is a chance for us to engage face-to-face with our customers about so much more than products. So we’re investing in retail, we’re rolling out a new store format you can see in our London Oxford Street store behind me today with new features such as our refill project. So we now have refills in this rather lovely aluminium bottle which our customers can keep using hundreds of times and refill it with their favourite products: shampoos, conditioners and shower gels. So we’re really confident in the future of retail, which gives a great experience to our customers. It’s a really important part of our omni-channel model at the Body Shop.
[Scott Russell]
Clearly staying focused on purpose and putting your customer at the centre of everything has helped the Body Shop make a huge strategic pivot. And I guess we see tremendous growth. We are both excited and privileged that SAP has been partnering with you on this journey. And we’re really looking forward to what comes next. So thank you so much for your insights. And we wish you, and the teams at the Body Shop continued success. Now back to my colleagues in the studio.
[Melissa Chan]
We’re eager to hear how your business puts its customers at the heart of everything you do. SAP’s Geert Leeman is back to live to back live to answer some of your questions. Claire-
[Claire Richards]
Thanks so much, Melissa. We will be checking in with Geert. But first let’s take a look at our social media wall and see what you all have been saying online.
[There follows a brief discussion of the Sapphire Now social media messaging board…][Claire Richards]
Now though I am going to turn our attention over to SAP’s a Geert Leeman for more. Welcome back to you and your wind turbines. It’s great to see you there again.
So it’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s a good chance in the second half of this year, more and more people are going to be going back into physical stores. So how can brands get ready for this shift?
[Geert Leeman]
I think we’ve really learned a lot during the pandemic over the last couple of months. And I think the balance will really be to bring some of the online world back into the stores. And we just heard the story of the Body Shop on how they’re actually transforming their physical retail operations and trying to bring some of those elements as well back into the stores. So I think as we said the hyper-personalisation being relevant, getting that knowledge into the brick and mortar world is going to be pivotal for many of the retailers going forward.
And at the same time, I think we’re also learning more and more of some of the experiences and the more personalised touch, which we can provide in the in the retail operations, and bringing that more into the online world. So I’m really seeing over the next couple of quarters, both of those coming closer and closer together, in order to drive actually the best of both worlds into one seamless experience for the customers.
[Claire Richards]
Fantastic SAP’s Geert Leeman. Thank you so much for that insight. I’m going to turn it back over to you now, Melissa.
[Melissa Chan]
Thanks so much, Claire. So if you’re a sports fan, you’re probably excited about getting back into stadiums, right? I know that personally, I’ve missed the fun of cheering on my team. But even though we’re part of the crowd, we still want to stand out and that means having inside information on our favourite players, and that’s how the Kontinental Hockey League is scoring extra points with fans: giving them an experience that really makes them feel like they’re part of the game.
[Brief presentation on how the Continental Hockey League is using SAP]
This is the Kontinental Hockey League. This is KHL. Established in 2008, targeting millions of fans in Russia, Europe and Asia. With a groundbreaking digital strategy KHL transformed from few insights to an effective way of involving their fans. And this allows their hockey clubs to grow commercially.
“Together with SAP, we launched our digital transformation that allowed us to create a new single database which collects data from all our digital resources such as mobile applications, website, e-commerce, and all others.
With the help of SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Marketing Cloud, we get new insights into our fans and their preferences. And all of these runs on SAP HANA which allows us to work with a huge amount of data in real time.
Experts from SAP service and support allowed us to launch the project in a very short period of time Since we were live, we were able to add 3 million fan records to the database, and that allowed us to make 28 million interactions during the previous season. The fans are much more satisfied now. And that is important for us.
We are now able to automate digital activities and see the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns. That allowed us to grow our database of the fans for more than 60% for the clubs.
SAP helps our hockey clubs to attract new fans and grow their business.”
[Melissa Chan]
262% increase in fan database: that’s pretty crazy. Now there, that’s concrete proof that fans and customers want to be closer to the brands that they love and trust.
Joining me now is Martin Newman known as the consumer champion. Martin is a globally renowned speaker, author and advisor on customer-centric transformation and consumer experience. Martin, welcome to the studio.
Can you give us some more examples of unique customer experiences that brands in other industries are serving up?
[Martin Newman]
Sure, well, the first thing I was going to say is sometimes it’s just about how our brand connects Melissa, the goal has to be, you know, what you are describing there has to be turning customers into fans. And I don’t think you need to be a sports team to achieve that.
And, what little hair I have left I get cut by my local barbers, North London, and they have over 240,000 followers on Instagram, 240,000! And there’s only four of them. There’s four Greek-Cypriot barbers. They cut great hair. They share lots of content on Instagram and they go round the world training and they get treated like rock stars, when they come out on stage, they’re now creating a range of products. It’s just a great example of how their tiny business can really leverage customer experience and content to create a global brand.
[Melissa Chan]
That’s really interesting because often we think of big businesses that can do good customer experience. We forget the small businesses. What are you seeing in other industries?
[Martin Newman]
Sure. Well, I think what you what if you look at the disruptive brands, brands like Uber, for example, you know, what was it like ordering a taxi a few years ago? You had to pull up there you have to go online, find the number call the call the taxi company, we tell you be there in 10 minutes, you might be going on a hot date, you might have an interview, a business interview, important work meeting, feeling a bit stressed because you don’t know if it’s going to turn up on time.
Discover more: SAP jobs in Germany
So essentially, you’re not really empowered as a consumer: You don’t know how long it’s going to take to get to ,you how long it’s going to take to wait to get to where you want to get to, and how much it’s going to cost. Along Came Uber who worked out how to use technology to change all of that and put the power in the hands of the customer.
Looking at other sectors and other disruptive brands like Air BnB, Monzo Bank, Amazon delivery, JustEat: all of them understand that putting the customer first means empowering them. If you do that you’ll be successful.
[Melissa Chan]
Now, I understand that there is another example that you have regarding Burberry, is that correct?
[Martin Newman]
…Yeah, I mean the standouts, I think recognise what it means to be truly customer-centric. And, you know, Burberry is a brand I have personally experienced all of I had the privilege of being their first Head of Online, Europe, going way back to sort of 2005 but they are very much a digital first customer, first business knowing for delivering fabulous customer service, but they’re also a digital pioneer.
And I recently talked to Burberry’s customer IT director, Peter Goggin. About his cutting edge division and also SAP’s Head of Marketing for EMEA, Kerstin Koeder and I think we’re going to see some pictures of that in a second…
[Martin Newman]
When it comes to technology, innovation Burberry is a brand is absolutely on fire from leveraging digital in store, with digital mirrors, to driving significant engagement online with their “see now, buy now” live from their fashion show. I think it’s absolutely fantastic. And I should know I worked at Burberry way back in 2006 when I was the first head of online in Europe.
Fast forward to today and we got a wonderful Peter Goggin with us, who’s the “IT Director for the Customer”, that in itself tells a story: an IT director specifically for the customer!
Peter, Burberry did an unexpected and quite wonderful thing this year, running your fashion show on Twitch on the gaming platform. That seems like a brilliant way to bring the digital experience and digital customers to life. Could you tell us a bit about the thinking behind decision to use twitch? And what did it entail?
[Peter Goggin]
Hello, Martin. Thanks. Um, yeah, running our Spring/Summer 2021 fashion show from Twitch gave Burberry the opportunity to reach a new audience. It’s a new platform. And we were very keen to explore this platform. How we can use it in a different way.
Our customers had the opportunity to experience the show from multiple camera angles, and they can control their experience in a much more engaging and immersive way than they’ve ever been able to do in any of our shows. And the response was great, and the engagement was fantastic. And this actually led to us doing subsequent feature shows and events on Twitch.
[Martin Newman]
I know that James said millennials must be at the heart of your planning: really important customer segments, say for you as a brand. How is Burberry addressing the needs of these massively important customer segments? And what sort of goals do you have for getting even more engagement with them now than in the future?
[Peter Goggin]
So we’re in a very different place than we were 18 months ago. And so as an industry, we need to adapt to the changing habits and needs of our consumers. We need to make sure consumers and customers can shop how they want to shop and not be confined to the channel or even the opening hours of a shop, without that journey being disruptive, diluted or deviating from what we Burberry represent as a brand. And central to that, as you pointed out is having a single view of that customer. It can serve all of those channels.
[Martin Newman]
Brilliant. And what I want to do now is just bring in SAP’s Head of Marketing in EMEA Kerstin Koeder. Kersten, what are you hearing from other customers? And what compliance and security challenges do SAP help to navigate in order for brands like Burberry to provide a single view of the customer? Can you tell us a bit about that?
[Kerstin Koeder]
I mainly hear three different challenges if it comes to data privacy and data protection regulations.
First, it’s the general mistrust of consumers to give enterprises their data because they don’t know how they are stored, how they work with the data.
The second issue is that you need to provide the consumer control over your data. And that’s also something we can help with. And thirdly, it’s the comprehensive governance you need to have exactly the single view of the customer Peter was just talking about. Because we all know if you have data in silos, you cannot provide a great customer experience.
Peter, I would love to know how do you manage the different data-privacy regulations across the globe? And how do you rely on SAP software to get the trust from your customers and how to get around all the regulation topics?
[Peter Goggin]
Yeah, as you know, Burberry is a global brand selling in over 30 different countries. And we like to work closely with partners in all regions, including SAP.
We have been on a journey together and I now feel like we have a solid foundation on which to build further success. And to manage that single view of the customer we use a combination of Customer Data Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud to accomplish what we believe is a unique and single view of customers across all the different channels.
[Martin Newman]
Thank you, Peter. Well, from what I can see, and the 15 years or so since I like Burberry, it’s just great to see all the amazing first to markets new initiatives that you have as a brand and clearly as the IT Director for the Customer, you’re responsible for a lot of those and what’s going to come in the future. So we’re all excited to see what comes down the pipe. Keep up the good work. That’s been great feedback. Thank you so much to Burberry’s Peter Goggin, the IT Director for the Customer, and SAP’s Kerstin Koeder for joining me.
[Melissa Chan]
So, Martin, from that interview, what was your biggest takeaway?
[Martin Newman]
Well, Melissa, for me, by far, it was the fact that Peter has the job title of IT Director for Customer. Fantastic! All of a sudden, technology’s there as the empowerment and in order to deliver the experience that the customer is looking for. I just love that. And it really tells you everything you need to know about Burberry as a business, and its focus on being truly customer-centric.
And I think my second takeaway is that they understand that technology obviously can be a real differentiator when it comes to customer experience. But they always start by thinking about how they might empower their customers to engage with them on their terms.
And a great example of that, I think, is their “See Now, Buy Now” live from their fashion show, and the integration with a gaming platform Twitch, where customers have control over how they viewed the show. Great examples of leveraging technology to really empower customers to have a better experience with the brand.
[Melissa Chan]
Martin, I want to bring in Claire and see if there are any reactions and questions on social media.
[There follows another brief discussion of the Sapphire Now social media messaging board…][Claire Richards]
…Well, Martin lovely to see you, you’re looking like you’re sitting up very straight for somebody who would rather be reclining with his slippers on the desk. And thank you so much for joining us again. My question for you is: we’ve already heard some of your great insights. But what would your top piece of advice be for business leaders as we go into the second half of this year?
[Martin Newman]
Well, I think that when I talk to a lot of business leaders, I always hear them talking about the cost to serve customers. And I think when you take an approach of looking at the cost, and not looking at the lifetime value of the profitability of customers, you can make the wrong decisions. You can under-invest in resources and people in systems and technology to deliver the right experience. So I would say look at customers as a profit centre, look at customer lifetime-value first, and work back from there and then work out what do you need to do to be to maximise the opportunity for customers, and then you’ll be as commercially successful as you might be over the over the rest of this year.
[Claire Richards]
Fantastic advice. Okay, Martin, we’re gonna be coming back to you again later for more, but now I’ll turn it back over to you, Melissa.
[Melissa Chan]
Thanks so much, Claire. Just ahead, learn how one brand doubled its profits despite the pandemic. But first, here’s something to think about. Gartner wanted to know how a great customer experience impacts loyalty, and their researchers discovered that customer experience is the most important factor in earning customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined.
Before we go any further though, I want to thank our Platinum sponsors, Cognizant and Cisco for helping to make Sapphire Now a truly memorable event. Don’t forget to visit our partner showcase at SapphireNow.com.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
Thank you. I’m so happy to be speaking with Jack Miller, SAP Global Markets leader at Cognizant and Reena Gupta, Senior Director, Digital Commercial Experience leader at Honeywell.
Hi, Jack. Hi Reena. My first question is for Jack. In today’s world, companies that thrive are the ones that adapt quickly. What would a company need to transform into an intelligent enterprise? How can Cognizant help?
[Jack Miller]
It’s a question a lot of our companies and our clients are talking about today. And I know we’re excited today to talk about, specifically with regards to Honeywell.
I think first and foremost, every company is thinking about customer experience. And that customer experience really needs to equate to the same experience we have from a mobile standpoint on our iPhones and iPads as a consumer app. So we need to have that same level of interaction with our enterprise customers and for them with their b2b or b2c customers that we’re used to having off hours and on the weekends.
So how do we engineer that? So one of the ways we do that at Cognizant is that we engineer that through a human-centric design approach, and this means that we come out looking first at the customer journey map. And then we work that back into a company’s digital systems on the back end to then say how can we promote that out to the customer, so that whether they’re a b2b or b2c company, they can either buy more items or go online and look at a catalogue, have better recommendations within that catalogue, during that buying experience, because really what we now expect is that our work world, and our personal consumer world, really look and feel very similar.
And to do that, from Cognizant’s standpoint, we approach it both from our human-centric design approach. And from also companies that we own today like Idea Couture, which if you’re an SAP company you are familiar with because Idea Couture built Design Thinking for SAP, which we’re thrilled is a Cognizant organisation today. So you could say really, in the end, we start with the consumer in mind with our clients and then build the journey map back from there.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
That sounds great. Thanks Jack, Reena, when it comes to Honeywell’s customer experience platform, what are some of the business drivers you are implementing?
[Reena Gupta]
At Honeywell, we are on a transformation journey. We are innovating on how we engage with our customers. So we’re investing in omni-channels that allows us to serve our customers in this uncertain time.
So during this journey, we actually take a step back. We looked at our customer engagements and defined a persona-based experience, which is resulting in a higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Honeywell is obsessed about serving their customers. So we have simplified our e-commerce portal. We have a single product across all business units, which is obviously enabling efficiencies for our strategic business groups. So for now, based on these drivers, if you think about a cart, and an order, a customer can see it as pre-populated with product and order details. So we have less cart abandonment.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
Thanks, Rena. I’d love to hear how did you go about planning to achieve these drivers? What was the journey like?
[Reena Gupta]
We knew we had to start with business and a customer-centric view, focusing on first the customer experience, and then the understanding the deeper needs of our customers. So our approach is also an integrated one that focuses on people process, digital technology, data, and then the outcomes. And for these programmes we had a buy in from the group CIOs who owned and watched the health of the programmes.
So as part of this journey, we created a partnership on our it delivery team partnering with Cognizant, specifically around the e-commerce solutions. Together, Honeywell and Cognizant develop some of the best practices in scalability and experience to ensure that the programme is successful.
As an example, the teams work together to architect a scalable solution that were relevant and are in line with Honeywell security and standards which you know, are one of the highest in the segment.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
Well, that sounds incredible. My final question for you, Rena, what are the expected or already achieved goals?
[Reena Gupta]
We have been able to launch the e-commerce MVP for Honeywell buildings technology and safety products last year, and I’m pleased to share that we’ve already accomplished more than 1 million in revenue.
The success has been so phenomenal in this COVID time that Honeywell has decided to stay specially focus on this customer experience platform for the next two years.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
It’s been so wonderful learning from the both of you today. Thanks Jack. Thanks Reena.
[Melissa Chan]
Welcome back to the customer experience chat Channel Live at SAPPHIRE NOW. So here’s a question for you. Do your kids eat chicken nuggets? About 1/3 of the entire planet’s chicken nuggets touched a technology system from our next guest. Thinking about happy hour about half of the world’s entire beer supply is brewed using the same customer’s system.
Germany based Gea is one of the world’s largest technology suppliers, and is known for its farm food and pharmaceutical expertise. For example, Gea also is responsible for making sure that about 25% of the planet’s blood supply stays fresh.
But this nearly 150 year old company also focuses on how to make all of its processes more sustainable. SAP’s Christian Suelzer introduces us to Gea’s Head of Customer Relationship Management and Commercial Excellence, Patrick Schwarz and Gea Senior Director, IT Service Delivery, Sales and Service Marcus Renger.
[Christian Suelzer]
Welcome Patrick and Marcus from here.
So, well, I want to start directly with my first question, I think, who are your customers at Gea?
[Patrick Schwarz]
The majority of our customers are b2b companies across food, beverage, dairy industries, with products like plant based beverages, yoghurt or milk. But another industry that is very much in the spotlight worldwide at the moment is the pharma industry. And it is also part of our portfolio, where we actually help our customers, for example, to produce vaccines or better said the various ingredients of them.
And on the other side, we work with customers like farmers and their cows, in the area of milking. In a b2b2c constellation.
[Christian Suelzer]
Really interesting customers, and especially in this COVID time, also really important ones for all of us. So what challenges did you have to solve for your customer relationships?
[Patrick Schwarz]
We at Gea, we are the market leader in many of our industries, and therefore, the expectations to Gea are obviously high. And to meet them, we had to provide the unique Gea selling and service experience along all customer touch-points. And with a variety of businesses and customers, as we just heard, we really needed a holistic and state of the art solution to do that. And that’s why we turn to you to SAP to support us in creating the platforms and the universe that we need, right?
As many companies before there. We started with the basics and focused on harmonising and standardising our internal processes. And once that was finished, we turned outside and focused on the touch-point with our customers.
[Christian Suelzer]
Marcus, I think the next question is good for you. What was the turning point where decided to move from a forward with SAP customer experience solutions?
[Marcus Renger]
Our customers, they want to have one touch-point at the end. And we have to to manage one touch-point as one in our organisation. And you can see that on our homepage. So the customer logs in on our homepage. And you can, the customer provides all the all the interests, and it ends up then directly in our Marketing Cloud.
And our marketing colleagues can based on the interest mentioned by the customer, schedule or invite to events, online meetings in the end, and after the event was conducted our marketing colleagues can hand over the most valuable customers directly into our Sales Cloud. And these CX colleagues can work directly on that, because they know all the interests.
They know, for example, which event the customer participated in, and within the CPQ, the sales colleagues can prepare an individual and trended offer to our customer.
[Christian Suelzer]
Well Marcus, this is fully integrated and sounds like really an end-to-end story. Thank you very much. So what can you do now that you could not do before?
[Marcus Renger]
Yeah, here I would like to bring another aspect in. It’s the field service management.
So we introduced a new field service process a couple of months ago. And yes, we can now focus on field service automation. But another aspect is, we can bring a new sales source into the game with our field service management.
So for example, the field service engineer on the customer side can identify a new lead and bring that lead directly to the responsible sales colleague in the sales organisation.
[Christian Suelzer]
Thank you, Marcus. This brings me to the last point Patrick: What new and unique ways have you developed to connect and to communicate to your customers?
[Patrick Schwarz]
I have to say we’ve already made great progress by bringing our whole Gea user community into one platform and use one holistic set of methods to interact with our customers, and thereby we can cover now many customer interactions already end-to-end in the cloud. And now adding Qualtrics enabled us to bring qualitative data into the game as well.
So we can do surveys now for example, after a field service has been conducted, and this will enable us to learn even more from the customer and tailor our relationships to their needs.
And looking forward I believe that we will extend this to touch-points not covered yet, especially in self services and portals to really then deliver a truly holistic experience.
[Christian Suelzer]
It was really interesting for me to hear from Gea: what are your outcomes, what are you focused on and that you are implemented a really end-to-end story. So take care guys, and back to the studio.
[Melissa Chan]
Gea’s story proves that connecting and communicating with customers is a necessity in today’s marketplace. But in order to do that you need to know who your customers are and how they want to communicate with you. That means you need to understand the story data is telling you at scale to engage with people as individuals, not just numbers.
Companies like Gea need to manage millions of identities and consent records. Can you guess the overall number of customer identities and consent records that are managed by SAP customer data solutions? It’s a huge number. Companies achieve greatest success when they understand the stories their data tells.
Russian retail giant Gloria Jeans is a perfect example. Despite the pandemic, the Russian company doubled its first quarter profits year over year, they credit their success to customer centricity.
[Short presentation on Gloria Jeans and their use of SAP products]
We all know that genes are responsible for how you look. No not genes, jeans!
In English, it can be a challenge. Another challenge was transforming Gloria Jeans, a massive business with a complex model and complicated supply chain into a seamless customer-centric digital rock star.
For the very few of you who still don’t know, Gloria Jeans is a brand of high class and affordable fashion for the whole family. And they brought SAP into their family to help them with their transformation. And did it work? Let’s ask Dimitri.
“GLORIA jeans has transformed its business to deliver innovative experiences and take a leading position as a customer centric company.” Sounds like it did. Now. How did they do it? Gloria Jeans focused on how the customer buys with SAP Commerce Cloud, what the customer hears with SAP Marketing Cloud, and understood what the customer wants with SAP Analytics Cloud.
Sure, there were ups and downs, sales went up, conversion rate went up, prediction accuracy went up, which sounds particularly cool. And downs, less time and cost to implement changes, reduced operational costs, and perhaps most important of all, a 30% increase in customer satisfaction. All meaning that Gloria Jeans now have the customer in their jeans. When it comes to fashion, you look to the best, and the best run SAP.
[Melissa Chan]
Just like you we really value outside-in perspective. So we want to check back with Martin Newman live. But, Claire over to you-
[Claire Richards]
Yes, we will be tuning back in with Martin. But first let’s do one last check in with our social media wall to see what people liked most about today’s session.
[Clair Richards leads a brief discussion on the social media interactions]…Now, I do want to turn it back over to you, Martin with just one last question before we go: theres a tonne of information that we’ve covered today. We’ve been through so many things. So for our viewers who are watching from home who want just a few takeaways, what would you say are the most important points that somebody should remember from today?
[Martin Newman]
Sure. Well, from my perspective it is going to be always starting with a customer and working out how do you leverage technology to empower them, to give them the experience they are looking for. How do you also leverage technology to empower your own people?
So if you’re going to go on the journey of being a truly customer-centric business, you actually have to start with your colleagues and work out, how do you enable them to do their jobs more efficiently, serve customers more efficiently? And how do you empower customers to have the experience that they were looking for?
Discover more: SAP jobs in the UK
The second point would be about how do you turn customers into fans, and it is do-able. And I gave you the example of a small barber shop before barbers North London, 240,000 followers on Instagram. I know big brands don’t have anything like that level of engagement. So it’s very much do-able, but it’s only do-able if you think of customers as a profit centre and not as a cost centre. That changes how you behave. It changes how you view customers and their lifetime value.
And finally, I just love the Burberry example of creating the role of an IT director dedicated for customers. So you’ve got to have that in your business, somebody who’s there to basically drive the transformation, to drive the technological transformation, to be more customer-centric. Those would be my three big takeaways Claire.
[Claire Richards]
Okay, so it all starts at home before you can create the best customer experience.
Martin thank you so much for joining us at SAPPHIRE NOW. Melissa, I’ll turn it back over to you.
[Melissa Chan]
Thank you so much Claire.
As we consider the role each of us plays in this great ecosystem, I want to express our gratitude to all the SAPPHIRE NOW sponsors, and remind you once more to visit our partners showcase at Sapphire now.com.
We’ll be right back after this partner message.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
Thank you. I’m happy to be joined by Robert Madl, Global Partner Executive at Cisco. Hi, Robert. So my first question, can you please explain to our Sapphire audience what you mean by putting business performance first?
[Robert Madl]
It’s clear that the world has changed forever by any metric. Last year, we were facing trade wars, terrorists, geopolitical challenges. But looking back now that really felt situational. While this dynamic now it feels so systemic. It has changed how we work, how we live, the role of businesses and the needs and expectations of consumers around the globe.
For businesses, it has put more focus and energy on digital transformation and the need to deliver digital-first services. And although every company in every industry had their own unique set of challenges, there was one unifying thought: what can be delivered digitally, must be delivered digitally.
Applications used to be an extension of the business. Now they are the business. Applications are how services are delivered. It’s how companies build relationship between the brands and their customers.
But on the other hand, applications have become an increasingly distributed, dynamic, complex, and really beyond the scale of human management. Therefore, security, networking and infrastructure must evolve, and take advantage of automation to keep pace with the accelerating speed. And that is really what the partnership between SAP and Cisco is focused on.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
An incredible answer, and lots of exciting things to touch on. I wonder if you can give me an example of what this looks like.
[Robert Madl]
Well, of course, imagine an online retailer. So something we use quite often these days.
online business, basically, it’s a set of highly automated business processes.
Let’s take a standard process that we encounter quite often in the SAP world, which is called order to cash. That is everything that needs to happen in the background, when you hit the checkout button. Our app dynamics recipe solution provides full-stack visibility into that business process. That means you have a dashboard that visualises the steps of that process. And those are dependent on underlying SAP and non-SAP systems that are chained together, like warehouse management, finance, but also your external payment provider and email system.
And what Economics does, it automatically defines a baseline for the performance. And it immediately notifies you when there’s a problem, like slow performance of an external payment provider. Or when you might be running into a performance bottleneck in the future: think about increased web traffic at Black Friday. But it also helps you optimise the application itself, as it tells you the performance impact of every single line of our code on the overall business process.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
That’s incredible. And especially the exciting opportunity with optimisation. You mentioned that it tells you where you might hit a problem. But what do you do with that information?
[Robert Madl]
Well, we don’t stop at detecting issues, we help you resolve them. So based on that telemetric data that you get out of app-dynamics Cisco Intersight workload optimiser gives you recommendations and lets you take automated action. It delivers basically automated infrastructure resource allocation based on the performance of your systems. But on-premises in a hybrid environment, or in cloud native architectures. That solution ensures your system always has the resources it needs to perform flawlessly and cost effectively protecting both your revenue and the customer experience.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
Incredible. So, to automatically allocate resources, you need to have smart resources at hand. Can you tell me how that would work in my own data centre?
We don’t stop at the software layer. So Cisco Intersight can intelligently scale your on-premises IP infrastructure, especially if your data centre is built on Cisco UCS and NetApp or Pure Storage Technology, you can automatically assign the right capacity for the workload from a small virtual machine up to a full blown eight socket bare metal system. But if you want to learn more about that, I’m happy to invite you to join one or two sessions, either on full-stack visibility with App dynamics, or Cisco data centre technology.
[Abadesi Onsunsada]
Oh, gosh, yeah, I will definitely be there. Thank you so much for sharing all this incredible insight into Cisco Systems. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
[Melissa Chan]
At the end of the day, what’s the value of a fantastic customer experience? How do you put a price tag on happiness and loyalty on one-to-one genuine relationships with your customers? You can’t but at least we now have the insights and the tools to reach those goals.
We hope this has whet your appetite for more customer stories and thought leadership and to learn how to get the most out of your SAP investment. Thank you for watching.
