SAP

SAP CX (Customer Experience) Suite Explained

In today’s digital world, we are seeing a consolidation and integration of tools for sales, marketing, ecommerce and customer service that have traditionally been separate and disconnected. This integration is enabling businesses to unlock greater customer insights by connecting data along customer journeys and behaviors.

At the forefront of this revolution is SAP CX (Customer Experience), SAP’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) software and the next-gen version of SAP CRM.

The SAP CX platform combines SAP’s own technology with solutions the company acquired between 2013 and 2018. It runs on the famed SAP HANA platform and is operated by users via the SAP Fiori UI.

SAP CX has its roots in SAP’s acquisition of Hybris in 2013, which allowed the company to offer industry-leading ecommerce software to customers alongside its existing CRM solutions. When SAP’s revolutionary S/4HANA in-memory ERP was launched in 2015, the integration of different products began in this new platform and third-party CRM tools were added as they were acquired.

This work culminated in the announcement of SAP C/4HANA in 2018, which was when SAP felt its cloud-based product suite could power businesses across commerce, marketing, revenue, sales, and service. In the same year, experience management company Qualtrics was added to the SAP portfolio, meaning C/4HANA users could now gain insights from customer sentiment.

With Qualtrics considered the icing on the cake, SAP rebranded SAP C/4HANA as SAP CX in 2019 to stake its claim as a leading player in what is considered the “customer experience revolution” in business insights and data-informed decision making.

What does SAP CX do?

In its current form, SAP CX can be broken down into five products, which are separate cloud solutions focused on a unique aspect of CRM. These pillars include:

SAP Customer Data Cloud: This tool allows businesses to collect, store and protect customer information in a way that is ethical and compliant with regional privacy laws.
SAP Marketing Cloud: This part of CX is for driving business tasks focused on acquiring and retaining customers by allowing businesses to evaluate marketing data and make informed decisions.
SAP Commerce Cloud: This solution is aimed at simplifying content management, experience management, personalization and order management by providing ready-made ecommerce functionality.
SAP Sales Cloud: This tool enables the sales team by applying AI to forecasting, data collection and reporting so that businesses get a deep and holistic view of customers.
SAP Service Cloud: Finally, this feature is for handling a range of customer service requests across social, call center, email and beyond to provide a seamless customer experience.

SAP CX (Customer Experience) Suite Explained

What are the benefits of SAP CX?

SAP CX goes far beyond a traditional CRM. It is much more customizable and allows companies to interact with and analyze its customers in real time. Advances in machine learning have been taken advantage of to greatly improve customer engagement, and SAP CX allows businesses to focus more on long-term loyalty building than single transactions.

The platform’s integration of different customer touchpoints is powerful because it allows departments to work together more cohesively on optimizing the customer experience. For example, the sales team can be seamlessly notified about product pricing and features upon the launch of a new marketing campaign, allowing them to create personalized offerings.

Another example to consider is a potential customer agreeing to share their personal data on your website, triggering the collection of data that can be turned into valuable insights by the marketing and customer service teams that shape targeting and communication with that person.

SAP CX is about making customers the central focus of your business, enabling you to evolve your activities to their desires and behaviors. The best users of SAP CX leverage the platform to create mutually beneficial customer relationships and drive major brand loyalty.

Another benefit of SAP CX is that the solution is built with the agility and scalability of the leading cloud solutions. This means you can get to market faster with new features and changes to your offerings and campaigns. Furthermore, the suite is designed to be a digital ecosystem that can integrate seamlessly with other third-party systems.

Getting into some of the more pillar-specific benefits, SAP Marketing Cloud allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customer interests, sentiments and behavior through an easy-to-use profile dashboard, sentiment engagement tool and customer journey insight tool. These features enable high-volume audience segmentation and unified customer view.

SAP Service Cloud, on the other hand, is a huge leap forward for customer support. By enabling cohesive customer query processing across every channel before and after a purchase, it makes it easier to keep customers happy and provide a painless customer experience.

How do I deploy SAP CX?

There are different ways a business can deploy SAP CX, which we’ll briefly cover here:

Cloud: This is the easiest and most powerful way to deploy SAP CX solutions, allowing the business to take full advantage of a suite designed for the cloud. It is possible to choose only the pillars that your business needs, for example you might decide that you need Marketing, Commerce, and Sales but not Service or Customer Data. However, SAP CX is designed to be most powerful with all five tools operating together.
Rapid deployment solutions: SAP provides the option of fixed-scope, fixed-deliverable and fixed-fee services for customers in need of guidance in implementing SAP CX. This is a good option for businesses that require more assistance than a simple plug-and-play cloud setup.
On-Premise: If you prefer to host your software on site, SAP CX is available on-premise, however this is considered an outmoded way of running software and should only be an option of those businesses with specific reasons to keep their hardware in house.

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Ameri100 deploys SAP solutions including the CX (Customer Experience) suite for large enterprises. We’d love to learn how we can help your business get up and running on this powerful platform so you can begin taking advantage of its game-changing features.