The progress of SAP Customer Experience and Qualtrics

In my previous blog I wrote about SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics. Within this blog, I gave an introduction about the Qualtrics platform as well as that I have described how this acquisition will have its influence on our existing SAP systems. Right now, I will follow up on this blog by providing more details how the cooperation between SAP and Qualtrics is created. Although SAP and Qualtrics are still working on multiple integration scenarios, I would like to describe what progress has been made in the meantime. It is important to mention that I will limit my research, findings and writings, since I only focus on the impact Qualtrics will have (or already has) on the SAP Customer Experience portfolio.

With the rise of smartphones, social media, web shops and digital channels, it has never been easier for customers to evaluate which brands or organizations deliver a great experience, and which ones do not. Now, we see that early adopters in the field of experience management outperform the laggards (source: Customer Experience Drives Revenue Growth, Forrester). Organizations focusing on experience management, optimizing not only customer experiences, but also product, brand -and employee experiences based on customer feedback, are rewarded by turnover growth and margin increases. On the other hand, organizations that fail in delivering an experience to its customers are punished and are having difficulties in surviving in the experience economy.

The experience economy has changed the way businesses perform, compete and deliver. The main focus on products and services is replaced by the experiences delivered. Experiences drive customer expectations, brand perceptions and can make or break an organization’s success. Below, you can find a short promo video about this topic.

This is exactly why we now see that organizations are in need of experience management tooling; a software category of which experts believe that it is created by Qualtrics itself. Now let me share my thoughts about this topic with you in the following statement:

“Within 5 years from now, I believe that experience management tooling will be as common as CRM or ERP are right now”.

Experience management tooling such as Qualtrics can help organizations to better understand the beliefs, emotions and intentions of their customers. Operational tooling, such as ERP, CRM, E-commerce or marketing automation can definitely enable organizations to follow up on these beliefs, emotions and intentions and deliver outstanding personalized experiences. The only way to achieve this is to combine the power of experience data (X-Data) and operational data (O-Data) so companies can truly understand what is happening at every single step of the customer journey.

In practice, by combining the SAP Customer Experience suite (C4/HANA) with the Qualtrics CustomerXM platform, organizations are now able to unlock this value and gain actionable insights at every step of the customer journey and deliver personalized experiences. But how does this actually work for our SAP Customer Experience suite as we know it?

SAP Qualtrics CX for Commerce: E-commerce has been one of the most upcoming digital channels delivering an experience. Nowadays, we all recognize a shift towards online where e-commerce plays a significant role. Lots of organizations have spent much time and efforts to build and develop e-commerce environments providing personalized offerings to their customer via websites, portals, apps and so on. Now, with the acquisition of Qualtrics, customer feedback across digital interactions can be gathered. The scenario asking the customer to evaluate the online order processes is of frequent occurrence. Other scenarios measure for instance the website layout, mobile experiences, navigation, personalization or easiness to use. By implementing findings and conclusions based on customer feedback, delivered experiences are continuously optimized transforming along with the ever-changing markets and customer needs. Improving these experiences will help organizations to reduce cart abandonment, increase conversion rates and improve customer loyalty.

SAP Qualtrics CX for Sales: For sales managers, account managers and new business managers, there is continuously a need to improve sales effectiveness. Nowadays, we see that technology can support these managers to better build customer relationships in order to be more productive. Having a richer and more detailed context of the customers helps managers to better serve them, delivering an ultimate experience to their customers and moving them forward in their decision-making process. SAP Qualtrics CX for Sales can help managers by role-based dashboards to deliver customer insights. This technology also supports managers with insight to focus on the right opportunities.

SAP Qualtrics CX for Customer Service: Imagine, you contact a customer service agent from an organization asking them for a specific form you need. After your phone call, you are redirected to a personal questionnaire which asks you some questions by phone regarding your evaluation about the service provided. Let us assume that the customer service agents just told you to send the specific form by e-mail to you this afternoon. Probably, you will evaluate your touchpoint as positive. However, what if you will never receive the form? How satisfied are you with the service provided? So, what value does this measurement directly after your phone call has for the organization?

This is one of the multiple examples where customer satisfaction is measured within an organization. Here, SAP Qualtrics CX for Customer Service comes in, helping organizations to measure different kind of experiences across multiple stages in a customer journey, not limiting itself to only measure individual touchpoints. This technology considers every support channel of your organization such as chat, in-person conversations, web forms, phone calls, etcetera. Now, measuring experiences across all touchpoint in multiple customer journey stages will help you to continuously optimize your personalized customer service by closing the experience gaps.

SAP Qualtrics CX for Marketing: Utilizing this technology will provide marketeers with more insight into customer behaviour then before. In fact, most marketeers now have operational data available from its customers such as geographical, demographical and transactional information. Now, you are able to communicate new product offerings to target audiences based on location and purchase history. However, the motivations and intentions why a customer has bought your product or service remains most of the time unknown. This is where SAP Qualtrics CX for Marketing comes in, gathering feedback from customers to better understand what drives segments, target audiences and behaviour. This can help organizations to build more effective campaigns. Marketing teams can better target the right customers with the right message via the right channels at the right moment in time, resulting in incremental conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Do you want to have more in-depth details how the integration between Qualtrics and the several CX cloud applications works? Please feel free to send me an e-mail (thijs.den.dikken@acorel.nl), and I am pleased to inform you with the functional roadmap and use cases. Also, SAP provided a public webinar recently. Feel free to watch that webinar: click here.