The concept of CRM may no longer be an adequate moniker to describe and conduct successful customer engagement. The world moves too swiftly now, and it seems to have outpaced the promise of CRM.
Regardless of industry, brands across all verticals must move past the outdated models that predate the rise of social media and digital connectivity. Our new marketing reality requires a customer experience that embraces a heightened sense of real-time engagement, and one that unifies all brand/customer interactions across all channels, both online and in actuality.
SAP, the enterprise application software innovator, is making progress on this front. And the promise of a new solution was put forth during a recent event at Yankee Stadium. The presentation titled, “From Fan to Brand: A Celebration of Customers,” assembled a panel of luminaries who helped SAP formally announce an initiative to go “beyond CRM.”
Among them were Steve McArdle, the NHL’s President of Digital Planning; Mike Lane, New York Yankees CIO of Technology & Broadcasting; Shawn Freeman, Ralph Lauren Digital SVP; Ragy Tomas, Founder and CEO of Spriklr; and more. Collectively, they helped introduce SAP’s new hybris and HANA-based suite of digital commerce and customer engagement tools.
It’s called “The Simplified Front Office” and it promises to help businesses move past legacy cloud-based CRM technologies, stay connected to the constantly evolving needs of customers, and provide “up-to-the-second” customer profiling. Overall, SAP’s mission is to advance the traditional functions of marketing and sales through real-time personalization capabilities that encompass the Web, mobile, ecommerce, customer service, and more. 
To truly understand how the new array of SAP solutions can help improve the customer experience, the speakers gave some startling examples of the steep challenges marketers now face.
“I think we grossly underestimate how much has changed,” said Tomas. “People are connected. They are talking to each other, and they are drowning brand out. The world has changed. It has flipped around. But companies are still just taking the bits and bytes of customer information that they have, and are trying to figure out what to say.”
Tomas’ point was that most brands are still trying to structure and control the conversation, while in reality it is the consumers who are defining and dominating it.
The customers are talking, but the brands simply are not listening. What’s more, the CRM systems currently in place are actually incapable of functioning properly this new reality.
Tomas noted that 99% of all customer data is data that brands create outside of firewalls. Furthermore, that data is it is completely unstructured, which can’t be decoded by most current CRM systems.
“But SAP hybris and HANA provides that integrated platform to understand what people are saying, to decode who is saying what, who is an influence, and the people that are for and against your brand,” Tomas said.
Tomas illustrated some of the challenges facing the B2C industry, but Bruce Petille, Director of Marketing for Insight Enterprises, spoke on behalf of those navigating the B2B landscape.
“The buying cycle for B2B is changing dramatically,” Petille said. “Seventy percent of the buying cycle is now done before anyone ever interacts with a sales rep and 93% of that buying journey starts with Google.”
The goal, therefore, is to engage clients earlier and earlier in the sales funnel, with relevant and educational content that cuts across multiple channels. This marks a profound shift over the way things were done in the past.
“The days of simply marketing somebody from a lead to a sale are over,” Petille continued. “You have to show relevancy in your investment, be able to track those leads all the way through to close of sale, and that’s what we’ve been able to do with cloud-to-customer. By interacting with our clients through SAP’s Front Office, we are able to follow that information to our sales team in real time. And within five or 10 minutes, they are able to pick up the phone and have a conversation with a client on the other side, which ultimately leads to a better customer experience and more closed sales.”
The transformative power of SAP’s Simplified Front Office is impressive, and the complete portfolio promises to improve the entire customer experience through a variety of tools.
The SAP hybris Profile Solution serves as the customer-centric foundation of the system, which analyzes all customer and client interactions, contexts, and behaviors to create dynamic and fluid profiles.
The SAP hybris Customer Experience software delivers a responsive omni-channel content management system to provide, as SAP states, “a real-time visual contextualization of the customer’s experience.”
Finally, the SAP hybris as a Service on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform serves as the Simplified Front Office’s “modular business microservices layer.” This allows brands to create an entire ecosystem to develop and implement low cost applications.
These capabilities were further expanded upon by Shawn Freeman, Digital SVP of Ralph Lauren, who spoke about how SAP is helping the brand unify its customer experience across the digital sphere.
“We believed that to really understand and appreciate our products, customers have to get engaged with the Ralph Lauren lifestyle,” Freeman said. “That has driven everything we do, and how we interact with customers today. So, really, digital is just another manifestation of us trying to create that lifestyle experience.”
This type of branded customer experience once exclusively took place inside the department store, but it is now increasingly moving online. In fact, Ralph Lauren’s website routinely engages more customers than all of its retail stores across North America combined.
The complete digital customer experience is, therefore, at the top of the brand’s priorities.
“So our ability to create that rich experience, and create that engagement that, 10 or 20 years ago, you would have had with an in-store associate, is really important to us,” Freeman continued.
Up until now, however, the ability to create such a rich and contextualized customer experience has been beyond the power of CRM. This high level of engagement is more than just a brand’s website. It is more than just the in-store experience. And it is certainly more than just collecting some basic data points.
Rather, a customer experience that truly goes beyond CRM must completely encompass and unify the entire process from end-to-end. Brands must not only understand customers, but also be able to anticipate what they will want next.
And this is the promise of SAP’s Simplified Front Office.
“Now, with hybris, we are going to be able to create that rich experience for the customer,” Freeman said.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.