The powerful platform of the internet has meant that customers can now become brand advocates for companies that are successful in creating an environment in which every individual gets a personalised treatment. In pure marketing terms, brand advocates are gold: unpaid advertising that extols your brand, unprompted and unbiased. So how do organisations get to the stage of producing positive brand advocates? The key lies in perfectly managed personalisation of the customer, and that’s achieved by integrating each of the elements that make up the entire business process. The key is in consistency of service, and trust.

It sounds much simpler than it actually is, especially if your particular organisation operates at scale. It’s simply not been possible to offer a personalised series of interactions if your business deals in thousands, if not millions of customers.

That is, until now. SAP Customer Experience offers the kind of opportunities that not only automate and manage the creation of individualised interactions, but go above and beyond what have become the norm. As a recognised leader in enterprise software right across the globe, it’s probably no wonder that it’s to SAP that existing and new users are turning to create the kind of hyper-personalisation that today’s customers demand – in the B2C space, but also in B2B.

When we talk about customers, many will immediately think of retail businesses. But the truth is that customer engagements take place every minute of every day, right across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, irrespective of vertical. Whether it’s interacting with customers in a service-led industry, or reaching out to new sales channel partners, customers come in many forms, and with SAP Customer Experience solutions, also known as the SAP C/4HANA suite, you can manage and transform your relationships with all of them.

The SAP C/4HANA suite comprises five cloud suites covering marketing, commerce, sales, service and customer data management. The solutions work individually and together to manage and transform your customer relationships by delivering connected experiences each and every time the customer interacts with you. At the key customer touchpoints across sales, marketing, commerce and service, you can finesse the different parts of your offering and swiftly react to customer needs and demand.

Supporting B2C, B2B and B2B2C operations, the SAP Commerce Cloud creates a personalised omnichannel experience populated by individualised, approved product details that help you run the commerce experience as you’d like to see it. It does away with multiple applications that are difficult to integrate with each other and it works out of the box, which means you don’t need the services of IT when you need to modify or extend. There are readymade extensions that are specific to most verticals – finance, travel, retail, services and public sector – meaning you’re able to provide the kind of experience to your audience that will turn them into loyal customers.

The SAP Sales Cloud creates full visibility into existing interactions with your customers, meaning that sales staff are fully up with the game in every conversation with existing and prospective customers. Predictive analysis surfaces new opportunities, and down the line, helps craft personalised quotes according to preset guideline – even handling discounts and commissions. Sales Managers will love the way Sales Cloud helps with distribution of territories and remunerative hierarchies, resolving disputes and ensuring staff are fully focussed. In combination with the SAP Marketing Cloud, prospective customers’ profiles mean that sales outreach activity is timely and personalised, and every aspect of the customer’s data is visible through configurable mobile dashboards, which give real-time data, wherever staff may be, online or offline.

Trust between people is built over time, based on countless interactions, big and small. It’s the same for businesses. Underpinning the SAP C/4HANA suite is the Customer Data Cloud that helps you manage data protection and privacy issues to build trusted, personalized customer relationships based on transparency and personal data control.

It’s important to not only tie together the solutions that support the touchpoints in your customer journey, but also to ensure that these connect to the systems that ensure you can deliver the product or service you’ve sold to your customer. This is why SAP C/4HANA integrates with other ERP solutions, simplifying and smoothing the path between your demand chain and supply chain so your customers have a seamless experience from awareness to purchase, payment, fulfillment, invoicing and ongoing service

But stand-out customer experience isn’t only based on supply and demand – that’s a simple transaction most organisations can deliver. The most exceptional customer experiences are based on feelings and emotions. SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics bolstered SAP’s ability to provide a world-leading experience management (XM) platform by integrating O “operational” data (what happened: what a customer bought, how long and what path the sale took, when it was delivered, what service was required) with X “experience” data (why it happened: why did the customer choose a particular product, how was the service experience for them, why did the customer decide to switch brands). Organisations are now able to collect direct feedback from customers at every meaningful touchpoint, then analyse it to understand why things are happening, what to do about it, and automate actions that drive improvement across customer, employee, product, and brand experiences.

By using the SAP C/4HANA suite, today’s businesses can create an environment that provides meaningful interactions with their customers, business partners, and suppliers. Driven by the deep insights that only a meta approach to enterprise data management can bring, your customers and partners will be getting the best of your business, from hyper-personalised marketing to individual customer care. Only SAP provides the platform that’s broad yet powerful enough to create this environment for today’s businesses.

By using the SAP Customer Experience, you deliver on your promises and build longer, more fruitful relationships.

How do you grow your business, maximise conversions, and deliver unparalleled customer experiences across any channel in 2019 and beyond? Find out in these new reports by the Ecommerce Foundation, an independent global organisation that develops ecommerce benchmarks and reports. Access full versions of the these reports: Australia, India, and Global.

To learn more about how the SAP Customer Experience can create meaningful customer experiences that will drive your sales upwards right alongside customer satisfaction metrics, request a demo, or get in touch with a representative today or visit cx.sap.com to learn more.