Collaboration from Sea to Sea for B2B2C with a Public twist

Canada’s motto is A MARI USQUE AD MARE, which officially translated means “From Sea to Sea”. That could as fittingly be the motto of SAP Precision Marketing, which brought together a transactional development team from Montreal (Atlantic) and Vancouver (Pacific) for two years of exhilarating exploration, co-innovation and finally pilot run and productizing with STM, Montreal’s Transport Authority.

If you take the Metro or bus in Montreal, you are familiar with “STM Merci”, the program that informs and rewards public transportation travelers. You can download the iPhone application freely.  And this is where you start to experience the personalization and context savvy of SAP Precision Marketing. From your preferences, history and real-time context, the service provides you with information and commercial offers that are of most relevance to you –but only as far as you agree to share your personal profile.

It was STM’s vision to morph what sounded initially like a purely commercial platform into a real public service one –and SAP was only too ready to oblige.  The teams pored jointly on the transformation: several tiers of services, a large number of commercial partners issuing offers (several hundreds in STM’s case), a huge target population (millions of users) –all while respecting the stringent code of conduct and privacy of a public service.

The Financial Post reported on the service during the 20,000-user pilot project.  If you are curious for more, dive into the Case study built by Jennifer Belissent from Forrester in September 2014: “Driven Customer Engagement Transforms Public Services”. There, you will see a step-by-step on how customer engagement is the reward of an intense collaboration.  This said, in Montreal, 70-80% of SAP employees use public transportation to get to work. Self-serving? Absolutely. 

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