It’s wrap on NRF, and it is no surprise that customer engagement and artificial intelligence (AI) were top of mind for most retailers. This furthers SAP’s commitment to delivering compelling innovation that empowers our customers to deliver the best customer experience.
We are leaving the biggest retail event of the year with so much excitement for what’s to come for the SAP Customer Experience portfolio this year. Here’s a look into SAP CX innovations for 2025.
Data-Driven Loyalty Management Solution
We announced a new loyalty management solution that helps brands earn the loyalty of their customers using experiential journeys and personalized, real-time offers.
Creating loyalty is key to profitable growth; however, lasting loyalty has been illusive to many brands. According to the SAP Emarsys Customer Loyalty Index, there are diverse motivations among consumers that drive brand loyalty. Forty-percent credit their loyalty to long-standing reputations, 30 percent say brand consistency is what brings them back, and 22 percent say it’s because of a brands iconic status. Yet, despite this loyalty, only 17 percent of consumers feel “truly valued,” leaving the majority wanting more.
Helping consumers feel truly valued is no small feat. Traditional reward redemption methods focus only on customers who actively join loyalty programs, and that is no longer enough. Brands are innovating loyalty programs to create a sense of nostalgia, community, and devotion that delivers a memorable experience through personalized offers across the entire life cycle and on every channel.
The new loyalty solution from SAP aims to equip organizations with experiential journeys and personalized, real-time offers to help earn customer loyalty through integration with the SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Emarsys and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, retail, fashion, and vertical business solutions. Key features that enable this are:
- Loyalty profiles that connect every shopper with a cloud-based loyalty wallet, facilitating targeted and personalized offers, entitlements, and real-time basket analysis
- Multi-brand loyalty management, as well as shared loyalty programs with partners that centralize loyalty programs across regions and markets, enabling combined brand programs for gaining market share
- A single place for omnichannel promotion planning with real-time redemption to deliver any type of offer, digital payment, and gifting to all customers on any channel
- Loyalty journey planning that delivers experiential omnichannel journeys tailored to customer needs through personalized commerce, marketing, service, and retail interactions
- Quantifiable metrics that track promotion performance and loyalty-related liabilities, linking to financial systems to measure ROI, and enable settlements with the member and partner brands
We are currently recruiting customers for a lighthouse program, and interested customers can learn more by contacting Yaron Gur-Ari. The solution is expected to be available in the second half of 2025.
Artificial Intelligence Makes Shopping Frictionless
We are also launching an AI shopping assistant to make e-commerce search and discovery a lot easier for customers.
Search abandonment is a real challenge. According to a 2023 Google research report, retailers face more than a $2 trillion loss when shoppers cannot find what they are looking for on a retailer’s website. And to add insult to injury, search challenges also serve a huge blow to customer loyalty, with 78 percent of consumers viewing brands differently and 82 percent of consumers saying that they would avoid websites where they’ve experienced search difficulties.
With the AI shopping assistant, users can now deliver that white-glove experience to their customers online. For industrial buyers, it acts as a technical specialist — helping source specific replacement parts, comparing complex specifications, and suggesting compatible components. For retail customers, it serves as a personal shopper — understanding style preferences, recommending complementary accessories, and answering detailed product questions.
The assistant seamlessly integrates with SAP Commerce Cloud through a flexible API, allowing users to easily plug it into new or existing storefront while maintaining the brand experience. With built-in security and support for multiple languages, it is designed to deliver sophisticated product discovery at scale.
The AI shopping assistant, as part of the SAP CX AI Toolkit, is available for early access now and will be generally available in March of 2025 for SAP Commerce Cloud customers.
Effortless Payment Service Integration
We previously announced a new composable payment solution, SAP Commerce Cloud, open payment framework, that helps retailers continue to scale and remain agile as new payment options gain popularity.
Open payment framework is a no-code, low-code framework that gives retailers a low-cost, adaptive, and agile payments system that can best fit their business and customer needs without the need to build out integrations on their own. Extensible and headless, the framework ensures that the front and back ends are decoupled and operate independently, catering to a wide range of requirements across channels and allowing customers to have the freedom to pick their preferred payment methods. It covers common payment needs and end-to-end payment processes across authorization, capture, refunds, and re-authorization as well as automatic updates with security and compliance standards. Open payment framework is natively integrated with SAP Commerce Cloud.
Open payment framework is planned for general availability on January 22, 2025. Customers can sign up for SAP Early Adopter Care program here.
Intelligent Search Service Makes Product Discovery Easier
The intelligent search service is a modern, multi-tenant SaaS solution designed to deliver seamless, AI-powered search experiences for both shoppers and business users. Key benefits that empower end-to-end commerce journeys are:
- Effortless product discovery for shoppers on the storefront with natural, intuitive search capabilities, enhanced by AI-driven verbatims, flexible indexing, and intelligent scoring. Features like smart word suggestions and personalized recommendations help showcase the most relevant products, improving navigation and driving higher satisfaction.
- Search operation management with ease for business users through back-office processes that enable data-driven merchandising strategies, powered by integration with intelligent selling services. This ensures measurable impact and optimization of search experiences.
By combining modern technology with AI, the intelligent search service maximizes conversion rates and product views, delivering a natural and intuitive shopping experience. It helps retailers not only enhance customer satisfaction but also build long-term loyalty and lifetime value.
The service is planned for general availability on January 22, 2025. Customers can sign up for SAP Early Adopter Care program here.
At SAP, we are committed to empowering businesses to deliver exceptional customer experience while driving profitable growth. By leveraging connected, insightful, and adaptive technology solutions, we help our customers put their customers at the center of their operations to build loyalty, foster innovation, and unlock new opportunities for success.
To learn more about SAP CX, visit sap.com/cx.
Balaji Balasubramanian is senior vice president and global head of Commerce and Industry Cloud at SAP.
