Renewing customer experience with SAP C/4HANA

My last blog post focused on SAP’s C/4HANA strategy. This time, I highlight why the experience economy is changing the balance of power and how SAP C/4HANA and Capgemini are delighting customers by answering their most fundamental needs and enabling them to take proactive actions on trusted data at the right time!

Companies are amidst several macro and micro-level changes affecting the very DNA of business. While some factors have immediate ramifications, others have grave consequences over time. Everything from trade wars between large economies, climate change, need for sustainability, efficient ways of operations, and maximizing profits impact the path an organization takes towards its future goal.

Survival in this volatile, disruptive market is largely dependent on an experiences-driven, end-user economy. To battle this, SAP with C/4HANA and Capgemini are tying together IT/business and front/back-office functions to ensure that companies remain relevant and empathetic to end users’ needs. It’s not about using  SAP C/4HANA Foundation, SCP Extension Factory or Qualtrics as the magic solution. It’s about simplifying the enterprise core and moving everything bespoke outside this standardization with differentiating at the edge of a PaaS through savvy use of cloud architecture, APIs and microservices. Thus, we’ve come up with the concept of the Renewable Enterprise. A company that has a unified integrated architecture based on platform theory, that allows standardization with a high degree of innovation-differentiation without complicating the business or IT landscape. Companies that have made the journey to become a Renewable Enterprise are agile, cloud-ready, and adaptable to market changes – including its relations with customers thanks to the right transformation and the right technologies, such as SAP C/4HANA solutions, and the right systems integrator, such as Capgemini. The Renewable Enterprise allows a company to be able to constantly grow, adapt and “renew” itself to unlock new business value using the X-Data and the O-Data!

The Capgemini SAP Center of Excellence is doing more than the business-as-usual work of moving customer legacy CRM systems into new sales/service cloud solutions. We’re innovating with customers in a completely redefined, agile way to support their experience journeys. For example, taking an advisory approach with C/4HANA, we’re helping customers rethink their omnichannel customer strategy as part of the larger digital transformation they are addressing. Apart from our portfolio offerings of Engagement Index Framework, Customer Engagement Solution, etc., we’re building industry solutions. For example, in the utilities sector we’ve developed an integrated portal for all B2B and B2C interactions that is dramatically improving customer and stakeholder engagement through a new communication channel.

Companies are being compelled to pivot to new business models as we see a more technology-disruptive market. Will you be one of the many followers who will look at cost cutting, or be the bold leaders who catapults in this opportunity to increase margins by better understanding your evolving customer expectations and internal processes?

The drivers of change are already here. The need for a faster, coordinated communication between employees and end users; move to a higher profitable growth, cost saving transformations, and the need for operational efficiency; creating templatized global IT rollouts to tackle business impacts of sustainability, circular economy, digitalization (AI, IoT, etc.), and new mergers and acquisitions. Are you ready to move towards the next level of experience management with your customers?

To learn more, see our demos or rapid build PoCs for a Renewable Enterprise, contact my colleagues Kim Zelders, Martijn van Deel, Herve Desgouttes or me. Want to see this live in action? Visit us at our Applied Innovation Exchange Centers or at CXLive2019 Booth P3 on November 05th in Munich, Germany!

Aditya Kamalapurkar

Expert in Digital Transformation, Strategy & Transformation

I lead the Go-To-Market for the SAP Centre of Excellence. I am responsible for the marketing and strategy of our portfolio of offers.