Wrap-Up “Successfully managing Customer and Employee Experiences” SAP MaxAttention Innovation Workshop (Virtual - June 24, 2020)

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Virtual
June 24, 2020

Slides & Recording



On June 24, the virtual SAP MaxAttention Innovation workshop "Successfully managing Customer and Employee Experiences” took place. This wrap-up blog provides an overview about the focus topics of the workshop.

One of the current challenges for many companies is gaining insights into their customers’ and employees’ feelings and experiences in order to adjust their businesses accordingly.

There’s often an astounding disparity between how you think customers feel about your products and services, and how they actually feel. Operational data (O) – like costs, revenues, and sales – show what is happening in your business. But you also need experience data (X) to understand the feelings of the people involved and why things are happening. This also applies to your employees and their personal experiences during their daily work.

In total, 18 customer representatives from 14 companies joined the virtual and interactive workshop on June 24, 2020. The workshop was designed primarily for business and IT professionals, including architects, analytics practitioners and managers, as well as experience management enthusiasts.

Opening & Introduction

As the host of this workshop, Dr. Stephanie Ann Lockemann, Head of Premium Engagements, Services Middle & Eastern Europe at SAP, outlined the importance for companies to understand the personal feelings and experiences of customers and employees in order to act on them. This is particularly important in challenging times like these, mastering -19, when external events and unexpected situations may change our feelings dramatically – for instance from joy and excitement to fear and anxiety.

Companies will need to stay connected with their customers and employees to understand how changes in the environment can change the customer and employee experiences. This will enable them to adjust their businesses accordingly.

How experience management can help companies navigate through uncertain times

This interactive SAP MaxAttention Innovation Workshop started with the business value of experience management. SAP’s Catharina Riedl outlined how SAP Experience Management solutions combine X-data and O-data. It is crucial for companies to better understand how their customers and employees are feeling – and deliver better and more personalized experiences that make them happy with SAP Experience Management solutions.

Below are some of the topics discussed during this session:

• Overview on how experience management can help you in times of COVID-19


• Concrete examples on how to steer through these uncertain times, along the employee, customer, brand and product experience


• Qualtrics solutions offering for customers in times of back to work / business

Concrete examples:

Employees: EXPLORE Are we making it easy for our employees to come back to work, while we’re addressing their evolving concerns? REORIENT What are the emerging patterns of employee activity that we should be prioritizing for improvements? NORMALIZE What listening posts do we need for tracking and improving the new employee work model(s)?

Customers EXPLORE Are we adjusting our offerings appropriately to accelerate customer usage given their current needs and concerns? REORIENT What are the emerging patterns of product usage that we should be prioritizing for improvement? NORMALIZE What listening posts do we need for tracking and improving our portfolio of offerings?

Two parallel breakout sessions allowed interactive exchange in smaller groups with a focus on two important topics:

•         Customer Experience Management


•         Employee Experience Management

Breakout: Customer Experience Management

Markus Riedel, along with François Genon-Catalot as the SAP experts conducting the breakout session, shared insights into the following:

•          Overview & business value


•          Live demo of a customer experience scenario integrating Qualtrics with SAP solutions


•          High-level architecture for customer experience scenarios, including an outlook into SAP’s roadmap  

Overall, pro-active experience management is a differentiator with regards to the experience companies deliver to their customers. Customer experience specific use cases with SAP CX and Qualtrics can be implemented today. There is an SAP customer experience management and Qualtrics integration roadmap, that customers and prospects can get involved in order to share their ideas and feedback.

Breakout: Employee Experience Management

Marko Mandic, and Georg Loderer, the SAP experts managing this breakout session, summarized the topics discussed during their respective breakout session as outlined below:

• Managing employee experiences is imperative because companies that deliver great employee experiences deliver better business results. They realize higher employee productivity, lower turnover, and higher customer satisfaction.


• With powerful experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-data), you gain real-time insight into which behaviors are trending across your organization and the sentiment behind them. You also learn about what’s happening within individual teams, and which levers you need to pull to increase engagement, shape culture, drive development, and create a motivated and productive workforce.


• Employee Experience Management solutions from SAP help you reduce unwanted attrition, retain and develop top performers, drive employee engagement, and increase the productivity of your workforce.

#XOAnalytics: Analytics and Data Management Premium Engagement Service Offerings

Finally, participants gained insights into using the Analytics and Data Management Premium Engagement Service offering in the context of Experience Management: #XOAnalytics: Analytics and Data Management Premium Engagement Service Offering in the context of Experience Management. SAP experts Karthik Thirumalai and Brian Fillery shared insights into the following topics:

• How to combine the power of x-data and o-data to provide actionable insights to different levels of the enterprise with #XOAnalytics


• #XOAnalytics is a journey covering many different stages from idea, capability review, architecture definition, roadmap design and implementation that customers need to answer.


• Analytics & Data Management has an end-to-end PE portfolio to support you as a customer today on your #XOAnalytics Journey for Combined Insights; starting with Exploration style services all the way to prototyping services.

This workshop offered a unique opportunity to share insights with SAP experts and peers about how to turn customers’ and employees’ experiences into a key value.

We are going to continue our series of well-received workshops with the topic of “How innovation powers the Intelligent Enterprise – from ideation to execution”. There will be additional information about the date and agenda shortly, so stay tuned!

If you are interested in more detailed information, there are some interesting SAP podcasts about the Experience Revolution and you are kindly invited to join the XM professionals network. 

Author: Karin Fischenbeck, Strategic Projects and Communications Lead, Premium Engagements, Services Mididle & Eastern Europe, Customer Success, SAP SE

Please find here the slides presented during the workshop. Please find the recording here.

In case you are interested in further SAP Innovation Workshops click here or if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact maxattention@sap.com.

Feel free to share your feedback and thoughts in the comment section below.