How to Close Common Gaps in Customer Experience With SAP Customer Experience Services

The customer experience gap represents the difference between the expectations/needs of customers and the company’s delivery.

Studies have repeatedly shown that there is a disconnect between the perception of a brand’s performance between the brand itself and the brand’s customers.

Such blind detachment happens when customers do not understand the needs of customers properly. This could be due to wrong interpretation of data, limiting experience to marketing, poor employee engagement, or non-cohesive experience models.

Businesses can overcome these challenges and close the gaps between themselves and the expectations of their customers by using the right tools, which, in this case, happen to be SAP Customer Experience Services.

Data Insights

If the majority of business leaders believe they are delivering an excellent customer experience but only a small sum of customers concur, then it is high time that businesses rethought their approach to understanding their customers. That begins with closing gaps in customer data analysis.

Collecting data is good. It gives you insights into the behaviors and motivations of your customers. But too much data is also a problem. With too much data, businesses end up with meaningless data: noise. And noise prevents you from identifying the most important nuances.

Even if there is a lot of data coming from different sources, you should be able to identify what really matters. Failure to do this leads to many missed opportunities and wrong decisions regarding customer experience. What many SMBs really need is a framework to optimize data collection and organize data points for keener insights and smart solutions.

Incidentally, that is an apt description of SAP Customer Experience Services, a suite of solutions for SMBs to strengthen their customer experience strategies. SAP Customer Data Cloud allows businesses to drive innovation and value in customer experience through consumer data insights. It also provides expert support and guidance throughout a project’s lifecycle.

Daimani utilized this solution to collect useful data about customers in order to personalize customer experience, launch targeted campaigns, and enhance the buying process overall. This has helped the business increase sales and scale faster.

Business Process Integration

Businesses make a significant mistake when they assume that customer experience is just a marketing issue. It is not. Sometimes, the customer experience gap is that your business is delivering a product (in a way) that customers do not want.

Improving customer experience must cut across the entire business. And that requires a framework to understand how business operations affect the end goal of customer satisfaction. For instance, how do supply chain operations affect demand and supply? And how does inventory management affect service delivery?

Using SAP solutions, Casey’s, a Pizza company was able to optimize its online ordering process by introducing a mobile app and also creating a new loyalty program to boost customer retention. That’s a project that extends beyond marketing, requiring the business to reexamine its core operational framework as it boosts customer experience.

SAP Customer Experience Services aggregate customer experience with commerce, sales, marketing, and other business operations. This helps businesses to understand how multiple business processes affect the customer experience. After all, the ultimate goal is customer satisfaction.

By putting all this information on a single platform, SAP Customer Experience Services do not only provide visibility into business operations but also clarifies the context, which is an important factor in streamlining customer experience.

Employee Relations

Customer support is not all strategy; it is culture too. In building a culture that ensures customer satisfaction, enhancing employee experience is critical. Maintaining solid relationships across the board in the business has benefits that translate into success with customers. It is the employees who interact with customers, as well as collect and analyze data regarding customers’ desires and behaviors.

According to Mckinsey, the customer-centric culture is the main feature of “an organization where all employees collectively and individually prioritize customer needs in everything that they do every day.” But to achieve this, employees must first be empowered, properly equipped, as well as motivated to put customers first. What this means is that a healthy employee experience is a key driver for improving customer experience.

SAP’s range of Experience Management solutions do not only target the customer; they also include tools to optimize employee experience. SAP Model Company for Human Resources can help your business optimize the onboarding process, develop mentoring programs, and also understand how to better engage customers through feedback from employees.

Indeed, the proper customer experience culture must be built on two-way communication. Customer experience optimization should not just consist of a set of rules handed down from the executive team without considering feedback from employees, particularly those on the front lines who have to relate with customers directly.

Omnichannel Experience and Resilience

Customer expectations often vary by external trends; they are never static. Businesses must create an adaptable strategy to adjust to customers’ changing needs. COVID-19 provides a perfect lesson on building a robust plan for customer satisfaction. The pandemic disrupted supply chains, transformed operations, and more importantly, changed consumer spending patterns.

Organizations that led in customer experience proved to be more resilient in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, rebounding more rapidly and gaining higher returns.

Source: Mckinsey 

In the 2020 COVID crisis, the resilient retail businesses are those that have prioritized digital, and omnichannel experiences for their customers. The omnichannel approach to customer experience has worked because it is adaptive, creating a seamless interaction with customers across channels.

Countdown, New Zealand’s leading supermarket brand, enhanced the login experience of customers by unifying customer data records. Using SAP Customer Experience Services, the brand could implement features such as Single Sign-On that make registration easier. This couldn’t have been possible with dispersed customer profiles.

Conclusion 

SAP Customer Experience Services allow you to identify gaps in customer experience as well as offer guidance on implementing transformative solutions. Beyond tools, you also access dedicated support from professionals to guide you throughout your project. After all, having the right tools does not solve the problems, until you have the right people and strategy in place for execution.