Added value through migration

Efficient customer experience in the cloud

Classic CRM has had its day. In today’s digitalised business environment, software solutions are needed that make all customer-related data available quickly and easily, enable comprehensive analyses and allow automation. The SAP Customer Experience CX suite covers all these tasks as a cloud solution. Customers also benefit from this.

Text: Felix Raymann, Image: istock, 31. Januar 2022

To serve all customers efficiently and provide a good customer experience, it is no longer enough to simply list customer data and store it in various data silos, analyse individual interactions, and utter prophecies about the development of leads and opportunities. With SAP Customer Experience (SAP CX), by contrast, customer-related information can be used across all business areas in the cloud. In addition to the SAP Sales Cloud, the four other main components of this comprehensive suite (Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud and Customer Data Cloud) create a unified customer experience across channels and enable deep analytics and visualisation, real-time insights and automation for businesses.

Intelligent support in sales: SAP Sales Cloud

With the CX solution SAP Sales Cloud (previously SAP Cloud for Customer), sales processes in the B2B environment can be effectively planned and controlled. “In contrast to on-premises solutions such as SAP CRM, the complete SAP Sales Cloud solution uses the full potential of a cloud solution and can optimise the entire sales process. It also generates better buying experiences thanks to the knowledge of customers’ decision-making processes,” says Mark Eichmann, Head of SAP CX Solutions at Swisscom. “The move from SAP CRM to SAP Sales Cloud is not simply about making an existing solution cloud-capable. Rather, SAP has created a completely new system from the ground up – with functionality that is simply not available in traditional CRMs.”

Mark Eichmann gives an example of a Swiss industrial manufacturing company: “With its old system, the company had to calculate the configurations of its products laboriously with the help of third-party solutions to be able to submit them to customers. Now, with SAP Sales Cloud, they can create complex configuration models quickly and easily and offer them with different versions, configurations, prices and combinations.” This results in an enormous gain in efficiency – and a transparent, uncomplicated offer check for customers.

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The benefits of customer management in the cloud

In addition to the advantages that cloud solutions offer companies in general, SAP Sales Cloud provides further unbeatable benefits, explains Mark Eichmann. He uses a specific example of a Swiss company with around 1,000 employees and branches in the USA, the Far East and several European locations to illustrate what he means by this: “The company used SAP CRM until recently and had to let some of its potential go unused. With SAP Sales Cloud, the international company was able to standardise and massively optimise its sales processes.” Mark Eichmann explains the four most important factors that have ensured these optimisations:

The company always works with the latest CX system.
Because the CX Suite is a SaaS solution, the customer never misses a release change and benefits immediately from the latest software developments and functions. In addition, the company does not have to take care of the operation of the solution and benefits from lower costs and much higher (outage) reliability.
The company knows its customers better and can serve them individually.
SAP Sales Cloud has made market monitoring much easier and simultaneously more efficient. The sales team can now meticulously monitor their sales steps and, for example, use machine learning to create forecasts for future leads and calculate the chances of winning deals using opportunity scores. In addition, there are many minor functions that are appreciated by employees: for example, the connection to LinkedIn, thanks to which the sales team immediately learns when a customer writes a post on a relevant topic.
Employees from all departments can access current data at any time and from anywhere.
Transparency in customer processes across the entire company has never been as great as since the introduction of SAP Sales Cloud. Employees in the back office and field service work at all company locations with common data and services. Thanks to the CX cloud solution, problematic data silos have been eliminated, which not only makes work more efficient but also allows customer data to be made available or deleted quickly and easily in accordance with data protection regulations.
The CX Suite connects well to other systems.
Cross-system integration – including of non-SAP applications – is possible without any problems. In the company, all customer-related data from different company areas is now combined and also connected with the ERP system. Integration into existing peripheral systems was also possible without any notable complications.

Migration and transformation challenge

The change from local operation to the cloud is a source of concern for many companies. In most cases, the necessary know-how is lacking, which is why a competent partner is needed to carry out the migration efficiently and securely. Thanks to the extensive expertise of numerous in-house specialists, Swisscom ensures successful migration while developing a customised customer experience strategy at the same time. “If necessary, we work together with the customer to make a precise benchmark analysis, look for the pain points and define areas for action in the CX area,” says CX expert Mark Eichmann.

He knows many companies that have been successful in replacing their local systems. “Although a migration poses many challenges, the switching of (customer) data, applications and technologies from one’s own infrastructure to a managed platform is actually always worthwhile,” he says. He continues: “In virtually all the examples I know of, on-premises prevented the optimal use of data and applications – meaning that after the migration, hardware costs fell, data availability improved and security increased.”