Over the last few years, there has been a shift from a supply-driven to demand-driven economy, which is why we have heard a lot more about the
experience economy. Customers are faced with an abundance of product choices using a variety of channels (in person, online, on the phone, on social media). And, while factors such as product, price, and marketing message are important to a company’s brand – the biggest differentiator is overall
customer experience.
I work with the SAP Road Maps team, where our focus is to support our customer’s journey toward the
Intelligent Enterprise with guidance on how SAP’s product portfolio will evolve, and the recommended solutions needed to implement their IT adoptions plans. First, we provide the
SAP Transformation Navigator, which guides customers on how to plan their move to SAP S/4HANA by assessing their current IT landscape, business strategy, and industry trends, and creating a comprehensive report of custom recommendations and road map. Second, we deliver best-in-class
road maps, which highlight recent and planned innovations and provide perspective on how solutions will progress over time. Our aim is to provide transparency and foster trust, delivering great customer experience.
To Succeed in the Experience Economy, we need Customer Experience Management
Experience management is the basic premise that
every human experience matters. Experience management provides immediate feedback about how people perceive a company’s brand and products to improve employee and customer satisfaction. The four interconnected pillars of experience management are customers, employees, brand, and product.
By implementing an experience management platform as part of business operations,
a company can measure and improve customer interactions, develop and build the right products, develop a great work culture, and build an iconic brand.
SAP’s Move Towards the Experience Economy
Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, emphasizes:
“There are millions of complaints every day about disappointing customer experiences. This is called the experience gap. Businesses used to have time to sort this out, but in today’s unforgiving world, the damage is immediate, disruption is imminent. This has shifted the challenge from running a business to guaranteeing great experiences for every single person.”
Experience management ties customer feedback to specific moments in time, whether those be customer service interactions or specific transactions. SAP acquired
Qualtrics to do exactly that –
give people a voice that can lead to positive business change using end-to-end data collection between customers, employees, brands, products, and experiences. Qualtrics is an experience management platform that specializes in applications to manage the key experiences in any businesses. The platform utilizes deep learning neural networks, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in its data which leads to actionable insights for SAP to listen and respond to customers and employees in a personalized way.
Experience + Operational Data: The X + O Equation
Data that reflects people’s experience (X-data) tells part of the story, like
why a product does or does not succeed in the market. Operational data (O-data), including logistics, supply chain, financing operations, and manufacturing, explains
what is happening. Together, the
why and
what give SAP a way to convert data into actionable insights. X plus O data allows for innovation. In the short-term, SAP can identify potential problems and resolve them more quickly. In the long-term, SAP can use the data to innovate on product features which better match the user requirements or improve operational processes for increased efficiency.
How the SAP Transformation Navigator Guides Businesses to the Intelligent Enterprise in the Experience Economy
The SAP Transformation Navigator is an intuitive self-service that automatically imports the customer’s existing SAP product landscape, helps them assess key aspects to their business needs and technical environment, and helps plan their custom transformation to an Intelligent Enterprise with SAP S/4HANA.
Many features and functions of the SAP Transformation Navigator fuel experience management for the four interconnected pillars of the experience platform:
- Customers: The Usage Data feature automatically pre-selects the customer’s current product usage and maps it back to the solution capabilities. This feature eliminates the need to analyze numerous capabilities for each product and manually select which capabilities might be used by various lines of business within the company. By taking an activity that would have required collaboration with employees in numerous departments (HR, Finance, etc), and simplifying it to be done in essentially ‘one-click’, customers are seeing more value with less work.
- Employees: The collaboration feature provides an end-to-end feedback loop among colleagues within the customer company, among SAP employees and partners, and most importantly between the customer and SAP, promoting every voice to be heard in the road map creation process. This feature is a great way to gather requirements from different users in different lines of businesses. For example, a Sales colleague can input their requirements into the SAP Transformation Navigator, then send it to a Finance colleague to enter in their unique needs, and so on. The road map can then be sent to an SAP Partner or SAP Account Executive for review, and that individual might send it to an internal colleague for additional input. The tool seamlessly involves employees from various lines of business in multiple companies to join in on the conversation.
- Brand: for many years, SAP has proudly shared its purpose, ‘to help the world run better and improve people’s lives’. The SAP Transformation Navigator supports that purpose by guiding customers along the digital path to an Intelligent Enterprise. It very clearly recommends a product landscape and provides a value-based business case to help customers realize their business and technology strategies. This, in turn, helps customers do more with less, automate processes, impress their customers, empower their employees, and create revenue – with ease and intelligence.
- Product: The Value Maps functionality recommends solutions from SAP’s complete product portfolio, tailored to your specific industry. This subset of solutions outlines main business needs and highlights the products required for a best-run Intelligent Enterprise. Value Maps provide clear guidance on implementation by providing one solution capability per business need, making capability selection simpler than ever before.
The tool helps customers map the way towards becoming an Intelligent Enterprise – one that uses leading-edge integrated applications and intelligent technologies such as machine learning and the Internet of Things, all on a digital platform. This enables customers to auto-adapt to changing conditions of the experience economy, and continuously improve performance by focusing on higher-value outcomes.
The
simplified road map creation process sparks the conversation leading to the experience management movement by promoting a
user-friendly interface that allows customers to select products that best match their unique needs. For example, the tool simplifies the transition from on-premise to cloud by selecting the best SAP solutions to integrate into a customer’s product landscape. This allows an organization to benefit from increased technology efficiencies and stay competitive in the rapidly-changing industry. To further accelerate the process, the SAP Transformation Navigator provides
industry-specific templates which contain representative products and capabilities most relevant to a specific industry. With the pre-selected decision points in the industry templates, this is a great way to analyze the end-to-end process and kickstart the organization’s transformation journey.
SAP Transformation Navigator at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019
The SAP Transformation Navigator and Road Maps Team will be at
SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, Florida from May 7 to 9, 2019. In addition to hosting various sessions, the team will be at the Service & Support Pavilion on the showfloor, for in-person guidance. Visit us to learn more about the tool, and how it can support your business’ transformation to an Intelligent Enterprise in today’s economy.
Call for Action:
SAPPHIRE NOW: Register for an in-person one-on-one session with an SAP Expert and build a complimentary, custom road map for your business.
Learning: Watch these quick tip videos to easily learn about the specific features and functionalities of the tool.
Online: Try the tool for yourself by logging in with your SAP Support ID (S-User) or
visit this page to learn more.