SAPPHIRENOW 2016 offers Retailers ways to Re-imagine Customer Engagement

The Digital Economy has become a reality and this year’s SAPPHIRENOW event in Orlando reflected that. In fact, the show had to offer some concrete advice on how to use the newly gained Digital insights to drive innovation in customer experience and ultimately serve your customers like never before.

In the opening keynote SAP CEO Bill McDermott made it clear that we are living in Customer-to-Business economy and that Business-to-Business-to-Consumer is gone. Everything has to start with that ultimate empathy for the end-user and the experience they are getting from your customers. For SAP that means we need to apply Design thinking principles and imagine what the end customer of our customer is experiencing.

Sports Basement showed how they innovate with SAP HANA and build trust with their customers. Through the mobile In-Store app mobile app designed and build on SAP HANA and the Microsoft Azure platform brings the digital experience into the store. It provides product information allows their customers to run relevant price checks on their items vs competition conveniently while they are in store. Sports Basement can use the digital engagement to make powerful cross-sell offers thus building loyalty and trust and adding value while increasing share of wallet.

Christian Klein, SAP’s COO, showed how the Digital Boardroom allows to equip C-level executives with real-time contextual information and ad-hoc analysis and had concrete examples how Retailers respond to demand and opportunities in real time. Check out and illustration in this video.

Under Armour has been at the forefront of Digital for some time. CIO Paul Fipps talked running a live business connecting to all the athletes and leveraging the data to run their business end-to-end.

Burberry CIO Fumbi Chima spoke about their Digital journey to Omnichannel and the essential need to have single view of the customer. Burberry have taken SAP HANA and pushed it too the limits to integrate their in-store and digital experiences.

All of this just came through the 1st keynote – Bill McDermott Live, SAP CEO : Run Live, Run Simple | SAP, time to watch the replay is well spent.

Just outside the Keynote in the Live Business Area we showed a retail showcase that made a New Digital Experiences come alive. A Sports Retailer that is using sensors to creating compelling offers and issues them in the moment they matter post to the customer.

In the Industries area we had two sessions stand out:

Introduced by Achim Schneider, appointed Global Head of Retail at SAP, York Rasmusson, Finance Director at Carter’s talked about their transformation with S4HANA Finance.

In a 40-minute interactive session Rockport shared their expeirence and go-forward perspective on transforming and revitalizing their brand with SAP HANA.

All of these examples show how Retailers can run a LIVE business succeed in the age of the Digital Economy.

For some impression check out some of the live tweets from the event https://twitter.com/joergkoesters

This is only the first set of highlights for Retail at SAPPHIRENOW – Please come back for more on customer presentations from Carter, Tumi, Rockport and updates on the SAP Apple Retail Clienteling App and many other topics.

Joerg Koesters is a Technology Marketing Executive with passion for Retail and Consumer industries, and a retail ambassador for SAP. You can also follow him @joergkoesters on Twitter.