The 2018 Customer Experience and Innovation Summit has sadly come and gone! The much-anticipated event generated a lot of excitement, network building and eagerly shared business knowledge, which are fast being translated into game-changing solutions.
The SAP Africa team had the privilege of showcasing a few of our ahead-of-the curve solutions. Aside from being able to share our industry secrets and engage with like-minded individuals, we discovered great take-home lessons from the many sessions that were held. These sessions were informative and gave us insight into how businesses in Africa are wanting to transform within their industries. As a team we sat down and reflected on how SAP Africa can help our partners and customers reach their goals of becoming more successful with greater industry wins.
Some of the questions that were posed to the customers were:
1. What they are doing when it comes to implementing, using and managing customer experience technologies in their organisations?
2. Where are they finding success?
3. Which aspects continue to prove challenging?
4. What lessons have companies learned from implementing customer experience technologies in their own organisations?
Our Chief Technology Officer, Simon Carpenter, conducted a session on The Five Forces Shaping Customer Experience Today.
• Trusted data which needs to be consent driven by customers.
• A single view of the customer across all channels and across all steps in sales and marketing.
• An engagement for customer for life which means being connected to the customer beyond purchase and creating an advocate for your product/service.
• Customers that you interact with come to you through a Digital Channel first and are millennial’s, who interact through various channels compared to the past where it might have been a retail experience or the store.
• Then finally – to provide an engaging experience, you need to connect the interface of the customer relationship, to your supply chain (the notion of the front to the back office).
To summarise Simon Carpenter’s messaging, SAP has the solution for our customers to deliver on these five forces with our five cloud solutions bundled as C4/HANA.
The following takeaways emerged from the speaker’s conversations as top priorities in the CX community:
• Creating a true customer-centric culture
• Bring emotion back – Great customer service does not equal great customer experience
• Translate data into customer insight
• Humanise the data – while technology has enabled more communication, it has reduced emotional connection…see customers as human beings and not only data points.
• Create long lasting meaningful relationships with customers.
In closing it’s more important than ever to learn how to exceed your customers’ expectations. A great customer experience can set you apart from your competitors. This is especially true in highly saturated markets where customers have many options to choose from. At SAP Africa, we strive to create customers and partners for life, so we invite you to reach out to our CX solution specialists team to discover how we can guide you to a road of coherent business success and fulfilment.
For more information or a quick chat I encourage you to connect with me either via email on: Litha.Cagwe@sap.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/litha-cagwe-231898103/
