In the last couple of years, SAP has invested heavily into best of class marketing products, but so far, Public Sector has often ignored marketing campaign capabilities. Traditionally Public Sector organisations have seen marketing instruments as something that is close to corporates selling products and services. While governments offer many services, directly selling them as products to citizens is rather rare. It is high time to change this perception and realize the huge value these functions can offer to government organizations. Simply see SAPs hybris marketing platform as a framework to achieve agile citizen communication and you will realise that the functionality shall be a basic corner stone of every digital government roadmap.
While the examples are endless, let us start with some simple use cases:
- Start a campaign for a new grant program
- Understand why customers do not properly use a certain web-enable self-service and react (for example online payments transactions are abolished by an increasing number of taxpayers)
- Roll-out and educate customers concerning a new legislation or policy
- Test new debt management interventions
- Reach taxpayers in a region of disasters in order to offer tax concessions
As you want to achieve laser-sharp focused communication, all of these use cases start with a simple question: Who is my target group?
There is a multitude of possibilities:
Use cases 1 and 3 might simply use customer attributes such as size, industry and region in order to build a focus group. Use case 2 might need a powerful, integrated self-service platform, such as SAPs hybris citizen portal, in order to find out that citizens have clicked certain areas of your website or abolished guided procedures. Use case 5 might select customers by GIS redlining an area of flooding while use case 4 might require a mixture of customer, behavior and debt attributes.
In the past segmenting of customers was usually a cumbersome, complicated process where data was transferred from operational systems to analytics systems. Segmentation was achieved in the analytics system and often the campaigns were then run in a CRM-like system. Today SAPs in-memory HANA technology allows users to segment vast volumes directly on their operational data. Via a modern graphical user interfaces the system will immediately inform the user about the size and segments of the target group. Adjustments are handled real-time in a matter of seconds. Integrated, intelligent predictive analysis supports this process in order to learn from existing campaign execution results.
Once target groups are established the campaign content and channel must be defined. Here the system supports any digital outreach mechanism.
Examples are:
- a simple SMS guiding to a URL
- call lists, follow-up activities
- personalized web content in the hybris citizen portal
- a more complicate email combined with a feedback form
It is possible to combine multiple channels and rules can be set-up in order to use alternatives based on customer behavior during the campaign execution. For example, it is possible to reach customers who have not read an email or have not entered a URL of an email. These customers will then be targeted with a different, alternative channel.
Monitoring of the behavior during the campaign execution and the KPI-measurement of the campaign success are important in order to allow constant improvement in order to reach the goal of the campaign. For the use cases above constant measurement of number of grant applications, improvement of the WebChannel usage, positive education feedback forms, increased debt collection yield and outreach to flood victims is required.
The following campaign cycle is a generic campaign pattern, which can be adjusted to any government outreach campaign:
For example in a debt management context (use case 4), the sources from the input channels and the campaign execution activities are adjusted as depicted below:
For all the described use cases (e.g. legislation changes, disasters, change of citizen behaviour), speed and agility from campaign planning/setup to campaign execution is of absolute paramount. SAP next generation marketing platform offers a top of class user interface which enables ease of use to set up, execute and monitor campaigns by the business rather than the IT-departments.
It is time to end the use and development of legacy-build, outdated, citizen outreach point solutions and leverage SAPs next generation hybris marketing platform. For more detailed product information, please go to