Let’s start with a quick reminder in one sentence. The SAP Business Suite provides an integrated set of modular solutions and end-to-end processes, designed to connect applications, data and AI to optimize every function of an organization, with a primary focus on the Public Cloud as the standard approach.
Many of the solutions of the suite look primarily at the back office, such as supply chain, human capital management, or finance.
But what about the customer?
Do companies really know customers across their enterprise?
For example, how do they prioritize customers for their limited inventory, manufacturing capacity, and service capabilities? Would they change the prioritization for a customer who is a churn risk? What if their last order was canceled? Maybe this is a huge, high-value-potential, brand-new customer. But maybe not…
To make business processes really work for companies and customers, the front-end processes have to be connected to back-office processes.
This is where SAP Customer Experience, including SAP Commerce Cloud, comes in.
CX is an integral part of the SAP Business Suite
Most enterprises have a customer context gap: They cannot fully leverage SAP S/4HANA or SAP ERP data to create world-class customer experiences; nor can they utilize CX data to prioritize the right customers in operational processes.
You cannot close the customer context gap with data warehouses, Master Data Management platforms or other traditional customer data stores.
What you need is a system to:
- Identify customers as they interact with your company across any channel.
- Understand who they are, how important they are, and what they are doing right now.
- Orchestrate the right action.
Only SAP enables companies to seamlessly leverage CX data in business processes, and also seamlessly leverage backend data in Intelligent CX. SAP’s unique competitive advantage is connecting the master and operational data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP, with the contextual data captured from front-end CX applications. With BTP as the glue from SAP S/4HANA to CX, we allow for deeper integration into SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP, more advanced customization and further automation of processes and advanced business and financial analytics connecting multiple data types across the enterprise to make the right decision at the right time.
Good Customer Experience is Teamwork
It isn't only the front-and-back-end connection that is complex. Excellent customer experiences need different teams and solutions to work together effectively. Marketing, Sales, Service, and Commerce need to interact, if customers are to get the modern experiences they're looking for.
Our intelligent CX portfolio offers a comprehensive suite of solutions – with customer data at the core - to deliver a seamless end-to-end experience for both customers and employees.
By integrating these five solutions, businesses can create a holistic approach to customer Experience Management, ensuring that every touchpoint is optimized for efficiency and effectiveness. This harmonious alignment of processes fosters improved customer satisfaction, higher retention rates, and increased revenue growth.
SAP Commerce Cloud’s Central Role
Often, customers will interact with companies most frequently via SAP Commerce Cloud. It's via digital commerce channels that customers will get to experience what a company has to offer. Whether it's to shop, explore, get support, or other types of interaction. Customers will ultimately experience many of the powerful capabilities of the various solutions in the SAP Business Suite when interacting on digital commerce channels.
The rich features, scalability, and agility of SAP Commerce Cloud are some of the main drivers in deciding whether a customer has a great experience and returns again in the future.
It's also here that much of the information needed to truly understand a customer is gathered. What searches are performed? What products are bought? What support requests are sent in? And, of course, there are many more interactions that give insight into the customer’s needs and wishes.
Summary
- The SAP Business Suite offers a strong framework for enterprise management by offering an integrated suite of solutions bringing together applications, processes, and AI.
- A key component of this suite is SAP Customer Experience. The five SAP CX solutions, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Customer Data Cloud work together to deliver exceptional customer experiences. These experiences are made more powerful when combining the customer data collected by CX solutions, with back-end data from the rest of the SAP Business Suite. This integration of data can transform business processes.
- SAP Commerce Cloud plays an important role in SAP CX and the wider business processes, by being one of the main touchpoints for customers. It's here that customers experience many business processes, making SAP Commerce Cloud central in securing customer loyalty.