Business Trends

July 27, 2021 7 minute read

How to Manage Customer Experience with Data & Analytics

Nowadays, customers aren’t as driven by product or price like they used to be, which is causing organizations to ask themselves how to continue delivering results to their stakeholders. With customer experience (CX) overtaking other drivers of purchase, companies are scrambling to understand their customers to build great experiences across the entire customer journey.

The advent of customer experience, sales, and marketing has customer service departments trying to collaborate better to deliver seamless end-to-end journeys for their customers. Unfortunately, this isn’t as simple it seems. CX teams often encounter at least one of the following roadblocks, preventing them from delivering exceptional customer experiences:

Regional, departmental, and technological siloes prevents businesses from gaining an in-depth understanding of the customer
Lack of real time access to data negatively impacts companies’ ability to unlock value faster and act with confidence
Inability to anticipate customer needs and predict their behavior influences CX teams’ ability to stay ahead of the competition

CX leaders need to address these challenges, so their employees are equipped with the right tools to deliver truly unforgettable customer experiences.

Data & Analytics Challenges for Customer Experience Leaders

To truly understand what CX leaders need to focus on, let’s dive deeper into the data and analytics challenges mentioned above.

No central data access point to gain a holistic understanding of the customer

Organizations aspire to use data efficiently but often can’t if they’re using standalone marketing, sales, and service solutions that aren’t connected to one another. Disparate systems mean data silos, no single source of truth, and imprecise strategic decisions.

This has an impact on efficiency, sales, and morale across the entire business. Sales and customer service require a holistic customer approach to ensure your employees can create superior, hyper-personalized experiences.

Limited access to real-time customer insights to make agile decisions

Today, it’s essential for the CX organizations to be able to observe their customer interactions in real-time. You need to be providing your employees with self-service and augmented analytics capabilities to access, connect, and analyze your business data quickly and easily. With no access to timely customer insights, all your decisions are reactive and, made too late, can negatively impact your business.

Inability to predict and prevent customer churn to improve retention

If your customers feel like you don’t understand them or their needs, they’ll take their business to your competitors. Understanding your customers, anticipating their needs, and predicting their behavior are the first steps to building customer loyalty.

How SAP Solves Your CX Challenges with Data & Analytics

SAP’s Data and Analytics solutions in the cloud provide organizations with a unified platform that addresses all your data needs. With SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud, you can support both IT and business users to champion your organization’s data journey.

Enterprise Data and Analytics for Customer Experience

For your data management needs, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud consolidates all your CX data, offering a single point of access across the enterprise. SAP Analytics Cloud consumes that data to further pull insights, providing a unified view of your customers.

When these solutions are paired together, they provide the framework to combine sales interactions, commerce transactions, and Web interactions, as well as customer feedback, into one location for immediate analysis and business value.

Accelerated Customer Insights for Faster Time to Action

Self-service capabilities of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud allow your LoBs to use data freely and out of siloes. With self-service data access, modeling, and analytics capabilities, users are empowered to blend enterprise, departmental, and their own data to build models.

Powered by SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud provides your employees with real-time data access allowing them to unlock value faster and act with confidence. With Business Content, you can jumpstart customer analytics projects, automatically connect to your source systems, and populate rich dashboards to explore information. While the Data Marketplace allows you to connect external data and find even more accurate insights.

Try SAP Data Warehouse Cloud for free. Sign up now

Then, to further draw insights from your data, SAP Analytics Cloud’s augmented analytics capabilities, such as smart insights and smart discovery can be used to automatically uncover relationships, hidden patterns, and outliers in your data to make more agile decisions.

Try SAP Analytics Cloud for free. Sign up now

Planning can no longer be executed in silos across lines of businesses—it needs to be collaborative for better alignment and business outcomes. When planning data is linked, you can act in the moment and transform your territory planning from reactive pipeline review to proactive opportunity identification.

You can also forecast sales and customer behavior to inform better business decisions.

For instance, with the right solution, you can leverage predictive capabilities to determine the probability of customer behavior based on historical trends. This can help you anticipate churn, buying propensity, and purchase preferences to craft a customer journey that places you miles ahead of the competition.

And the result? You turn customers into advocates and reduce attrition with holistic insight-driven engagement across all customer touchpoints. None of this is possible without enterprise planning.

With SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, you can optimize sales, service, and marketing resources with extended planning & analysis. Leverage the enterprise planning solution to create strategic alignment across all departments and enable your workforce to better collaborate on plans. Gain the ability to analyze demand to determine the skills and number of resources necessary for success.

Features to Help You Be More Customer-Centric

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud provide you with a breadth of features and capabilities that help your analytics team discover insights and turn your customers into fans.

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud come with a breadth of connection capabilities to SAP and non-SAP data source, in the cloud, or on-premise. Both solutions have an out-of-the-box understanding of SAP data and can easily extract and analyze it in real-time. Easily connect data from SAP S/4HANA, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and more, to enable a holistic view of all your customer touchpoints.

Business Content

To jump start your analytics projects, SAP and Partners are creating Business Content packages – a collection of end-to- end business scenarios that contain connectors, models, and dashboards that help you leverage your data quickly and reduce time to insight. Among many currently available packages for both SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud are:

Marketing Data Integration from Adverity: Integrate and harmonize all data from marketing sources into a single location – your SAP Data Warehouse Cloud storage – and analyze and visualize it in SAP Analytics Cloud.

Sales Dashboard from IBsolutions: Get insights into the performance of your sales channels, predict future scenarios, and see their impact on your operational results.

Customer Service Insights from Bitech AG: Connect to your SAP S/4 HANA system to access comprehensive maintenance information with relevant KPIs to successfully manage your customer service business.

Revenue Growth Management for CPG Industry from SAP: Gain further insights into the sales orders, material sales, promotion sales to track and manager your revenue growth.

Explore more business content: SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Business Content

The upcoming Data Marketplace will allow you to improve your analytics with 3^rd party data in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud in a matter of clicks. External data will be available to blend with your enterprise data to build more robust data models and explore even more precise insights.

At release, the available datasets will be:

Opinion data from Civey: Measure purchase intent in order to precisely identify potential customers and sales opportunities.
Microtrends data from NOW.ai: Identify and leverage microtrends in real-time with data reflecting the world as of right now.
E-Commerce data from Datazeit: Take fact-based decisions by harnessing the value of customer and product data, from search visibility to customer feedback.
Consumer data from Acxiom: Better understand your customers to create better experiences and business growth.

With internal and 3^rd party CX data in one place you can bring in an outside-in perspective and take the external factors into consideration when making data-driven decisions, further improving the impact of these decisions.

Learn more: Data Marketplace – External Data in Clicks, Not Projects

Predictive features allow you to simulate and identify or analyze future trends using your existing marketing and sales data by connecting to your relevant data sources. This can help you better anticipate customer needs and interests which enhances personalization. Which means, marketing and sales can foster a stronger relationship with your customers, which helps with retention.

You can also leverage augmented analytics capabilities to automatically receive strategic insights about customers using machine learning technology. This helps you go from insight to action in a fraction of the time. It also unveils the true story behind what drives your customers.

When looking for your solution, make sure you have basic capabilities, such as automated forecasting, or more advanced features like predicting future outcomes to identify the probability of specific scenarios.

Additionally, you can gain quick insights via natural language processing to easily ask questions and surface immediate results.

Putting it all Together

Part of SAP Business Technology Platform, Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud together provides your business with a unified data & analytics strategy, enabling your CX leaders to achieve agility, business value, and continual innovation. With an integrated platform you too can benefit from the Data Value Formula: an end-to-end strategy that combines data volume, quality, and usage to create data value for organizations.

With SAP Data Warehouse Cloud you gain control and flexibility over your data quality, and with SAP Analytics Cloud, all users have access to real-time data—it’s the perfect match!

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Customer success stories:

Porsche Empowers Sales with Enterprise Data

San Jose Sharks Optimize Email Marketing

SAP and Adverity Optimize Paid Search