Using The Cloud Platform To Optimize The Customer Experience

At Sapphire Now 2018, SAP unveiled to the public an addition to their software suite that aims to help businesses become more customer-centric. Among the new offerings is a software system named SAP C/4 HANA. The aim of SAP C/4 HANA is to revolutionize the way companies interact with their customers and serve as a single repository for customer information – a true Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. SAP C/4 HANA is built on the base of SAP S/4 HANA but seeks to integrate the entire system into a single suite that incorporates the most important parts of business – Sales, Service and Marketing – under one single umbrella of products that share information across the cloud.

Customer Experience Driven by Innovation

SAP C/4 HANA represents an evolution of the traditional system since it doesn’t rely on transactional data solely to drive the system but is based more on engagement with the customer. This pushes the business to be more attentive to the customer’s needs and this, in turn, drives repeat business by the customer. Linking all the different parts of the system and then making it customer-centric is a step in the right direction since companies are currently aiming to change their corporate face into one that is more approachable by the public. SAP C/$ HANA helps to do that while at the same time keeping the efficient and ordered running of the business through cloud data and all analytics gathered and processed by the system in a simple, understandable form that would be familiar to all SAP S/4 HANA users. It’s not a different platform, just one that integrates customer experience into it more readily.

Adapting to Changing Ideas

SAP C/4 HANA extends the product known as SAP Hybris into something that is more adapted for customer engagement. SAP Hybris is now renamed as SAP Customer Experience, and under it a lot of the systems have also been tuned to fit this new scope of operations. Among the systems contained in SAP C/4 HANA are:

• SAP Service Cloud: A combination of multi-channel customer engagement, support and field service modules
• SAP Commerce Cloud: An evolution of the on-premise solution that was the flagship of the Hybris name
• SAP Sales Cloud: A unification of SAP Revenue Cloud, SAP Billing Solution and SAP Hybris Cloud of Customers
• SAP Customer Data Cloud: Uses Gigya profiles to pin down Profile, Consent and Identity profiles for each customer

New Ideas with a Familiar Functionality

The most impressive part of C/4 HANA is that it doesn’t require users to learn new ways of doing things. It’s not a SAP S/4 HANA upgrade, but is built on the familiar base of S/4 HANA, making it robust, completely cloud oriented in a fashion that most users won’t have a hard time getting used to. Combining the aim of pushing business towards a more customer-centric model while at the same time retaining how the business functions is an integral selling point for SAP C/4 HANA. The
SAP C/4 Hana is built to cover a wide variety of industries from Telecomm companies selling
SIM only plans to medical products.

The Modernization of Customer Relationship Management

Most of business has marched unswervingly into the twenty-first century, yet CRM seems to be firmly rooted in the middle of last century. SAP seeks to bring CRM into the twenty-first century with SAP C/4 HANA by providing businesses an option for a single location to house both their business and customer relationship records and analysis. Customer relationships are one of the few things in business that isn’t a simple matter of input-process-output. They require cultivation to function properly. C/4 HANA was developed to give businesses a way to address the long-term management of individual customer relationships, and grow them over time. In this way, customers that are well-served may, in turn, become brand ambassadors themselves, creating their own organic marketing system that is far more valuable than any paid marketing plan.