PwC Consulting LLC (PwC Consulting), a long-standing partner of SAP, has collaborated with SAP Japan to further the advancement of customer data solutions to keep pace with the rapidly evolving personal data regulations and global business landscape. (InsideSAP Asia often references articles from websites in other languages to bring you as much information as possible.) The co-innovation partnership is centered on offering consulting services and solutions to Japanese companies and local governments leveraging the two companies’ products and field expertise such as SAP Customer Data solutions for customer ID and access management and PwC consulting services on data utilization, customer experience, and personal data protection.

“We are very pleased to announce the start of a partnership in the field of customer data solutions between SAP Japan and PwC Consulting,” Kenji Katsura, Senior Managing Executive Officer Partner of PwC Consulting LLC announced. “The collaboration between PwC Consulting and SAP Japan has been around for 30 years since the company entered the Japanese market. However, until now, the majority of our collaboration has been in the area of core systems such as accounting and human resources.”

PwC Consulting and SAP’s alliance have been delivering transformative solutions to organizations worldwide, harnessing PwC’s deep industry knowledge and end-to-end consulting and SAP implementation capabilities including in SAP Finance, SAP S/4HANA, and RISE with SAP. The SAP partner has been consistently recognized in several innovation awards such as the SAP Asia Pacific Japan Award for Partner Excellence 2022 for RISE with SAP; SAP Pinnacle Awards 2022 Winner in the Business Process Intelligence category; Best Run SAP Intelligent for ANZ – Business Process Transformation (ERP Subcategory) in partnership with NSW Department of Customer Service; and SAP Pinnacle Awards 2022 Winner in the Partner Application – SAP Business Technology Platform category for PwC Climate Excellence – Banking.

Elaborating on PwC’s latest innovation partnership with SAP Japan, Katsura added:

“PwC’s SAP business strengths for clients are not limited to the simple introduction of SAP products, but cross-departmental cooperation. It is possible to provide services that make full use of the method of “Business eXperience Technology (BXT)” that combines various technologies and specifically communicates to clients. This method will also be actively used in this alliance. We will continue to push forward.”

Advancing Customer Data Protection Software and Services

Hiroshi Tomita, Vice President, SAP Customer Experience Business Division , SAP Japan, highlighted that the pandemic has prompted companies to accelerate their digital transformation, including an emphasis on the urgency to enhance the customer experience across contact points. He detailed:

“By utilizing the consent management provided by SAP Customer Data solutions, we will help realize a world where customer data can be used more safely and securely, and a better customer experience based on customer consent can be realized. This time, by jointly promoting the concept formulation support service and personal information protection service provided by PwC Consulting, we will be able to provide total support from the formulation of personal information handling regulations to the introduction and operation of solutions. We were able to create a possible scheme.”

The SAP Japan and PwC service offerings are:

• Personal information protection/privacy protection and data utilization consulting in building business processes and systems

• SAP solution implementation support service

SAP Customer Data platform offer organizations revenue growth, risk protection, and scalability by connecting information across their enterprise. Specifically, the SAP Customer Data solutions for customer ID and access management builds customer loyalty while driving compliance support. The solution integrates separately managed customer IDs, centrally manages customer profiles while keeping them up-to-date and delivers customer-centered consent management.

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SAP has been increasing its sustainable customer-centric offerings and as such, introduced the new intelligent SAP Service Cloud in May this year. The innovative solution transforms customer service by maintaining constant, meaningful communication with customers. SAP Service Cloud upholds the purpose of the brand and ensures its continued development by focusing on speed, insights, and accuracy in the resolution of customer issues.

With SAP Service Cloud’s case management designer, customers can develop and modify service processes in response to evolving business requirements. In addition, SAP AppGyver integration also enables non-technical employees to swiftly deal with new business issues should their company necessitate deployment extension.

Moreover, the tech giant is committed to improving and expanding the interoperability of its customer experience products which include SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Customer Data solutions. In August, SAP received its eighth consecutive “Leader” designation in the “Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce” from IT research and advisory firm Gartner. 

When it comes to digital commerce, the SAP Customer Experience portfolio provides a comprehensive solution that exceeds the capabilities of conventional CRM software. The portfolio also incorporates consumer data, experiential and operational data, and machine learning (ML) to provide a holistic picture of the customer experience. Through this, companies can provide clients with a consistent, individualized experience across all touchpoints.

This month, SAP Korea recently hosted a press conference at the InterContinental Seoul COEX and provided a variety of perspectives on the topic of CX management in the post-COVID 19 era. Jen Bailin, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Customer Experience at SAP; Balaji Balasubramanian, Senior Vice President (SVP) and Global Head of Commerce Cloud at SAP; and Professor Kyung Jin Cha, Faculty Member of School of Business at Hanyang University, shared their insights during the event. (InsideSAP Asia often references articles from websites in other languages to bring you as much information as possible.)

“Businesses are investing a lot of money and manpower in customer management solutions, and customer experience solutions are one of the fastest growing areas of SAP’s business. Based on the four solutions of customer data, sales and service, and marketing, we will support companies and organizations to more efficiently manage and develop their customers,” Bailin stated.

Becoming an Intelligent Enterprise With SAP CX

The intelligent enterprise strategy developed by SAP places a significant emphasis on CX.  During the pandemic, customers all around the globe shifted from their conventional shopping and consuming habits to doing their activities online. As a direct consequence of this transition, businesses are accelerating the pace of innovation in their operations and transforming the environment in which their customers engage. Enterprises have now integrated data flows across the whole customer lifecycle and are beginning to harness the power of a wide range of data resources.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic nearing its end, Bailin noted that SAP is still focusing on how cloud computing can help businesses become more resilient and flexible so that they can better adapt to changing consumer expectations and market conditions. She added:

“The interactions between businesses and customers are changing rapidly. Today’s customers are looking for more connectivity than simply buying a product, and this change will only accelerate.”

Furthermore, SAP’s focus on the customer experience, along with developments like DTC and B2B consumerization, has resulted in a surge in the company’s clientele. SAP has distinguished itself as a solution provider throughout the pandemic, being chosen by three major worldwide vaccine makers, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna. SAP systems are widely adopted and used by both local and international businesses for managing customer data and advertising to their target audiences.

“SAP provides a wide range of tools and capabilities to help businesses fully understand and utilize the concept of customer experience. It is important to provide an immersive experience by understanding and providing only necessary information (orchestration),” Balasubramanian remarked.

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Leading Experience Management (XM) company Qualtrics and global logistics and transportation services provider UPS continue to strengthen their collaborative partnership to accelerate customers’ experience transformation journey. Specifically targeted at UPS’ small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers, the latest alliance intends to enhance the logistics company’s existing UPS Digital Connections programme by integrating Qualtrics’ Delighted XM solutions.

Qualtrics acquired Delighted, a customer experience (CX) measurement and rating firm focused on small and medium businesses, in 2018– further strengthening the position of the SAP-owned company in the SMB market. Now called Delighted by Qualtrics, the platform offers turnkey solutions and customizable surveys including Net Promoter Score surveys (NPS), Customer Satisfaction surveys (CSAT), and Employee Net Promoter Score surveys (eNPS) to help companies achieve greater visibility of customer experiences and become customer-led organisations.

The latest Qualtrics-UPS alliance innovation comes at a time when businesses are reinforcing their investments in e-commerce solutions that would help them remain agile and competitive. Commenting about the CX partnership with UPS, Caleb Elston, Delighted co-founder and CEO, said:

“Founders and business owners need to continuously listen to their customers and act on their feedback to create meaningful relationships as they scale. Our alliance with UPS will give thousands of new businesses the ability to leverage experience data to connect with customers, predict early trends and stay ahead of the market.”

Reinforcing UPS Digital Connections Programme

Qualtrics and UPS’ alliance has been highlighted last year to support the American logistics company’s “customer-first, people-led and innovation-driven strategy”. Mentioning UPS as one of the company’s big wins in the first quarter of 2021, Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin earlier said:

“Qualtrics will be their Experience Management platform, enabling them to listen across the company, take action to lead on critical customer and employee experiences globally. With Qualtrics, UPS is able to understand their customers and their employees at scale and take action to deliver what matters.”

Today, the innovation partnership between the two companies goes further with the enhancement of the UPS Digital Connections programme leveraging Delighted AI, a purpose-built in-house solution that automates the customer feedback process such as scheduling surveys and generating dashboards without the need for an extensive configuration or AI algorithm training. The AI-powered platform advances SMBs’ customer experience programme by gathering real-time customer feedback across channels including email, website, and app to help them build customer loyalty, gain a competitive edge, and achieve their bottom line.

As part of the UPS Digital Connections programme, UPS customers can now access Delighted to:

• Help them scale their CX initiatives
• Achieve better visibility of factors that affect a customer’s delivery experience including delivery type, delay time, and provider
• Streamline the routing of reports and alerts to respective service teams with Delighted’s capability to integrate with the SMBs’ CRM and mission-critical apps

Felicia Allen, UPS President of U.S. Marketing, emphasised that businesses must measure factors, including last-mile delivery, in the customer journey that affect their satisfaction. She explained:

“The goal of the UPS Digital Connections program is to help level the highly competitive e-commerce playing field and provide more small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access to UPS and new digital platforms to enhance various aspects of their business and grow their customer base. Delighted offers one of the fastest and easiest ways to implement a customer experience program across every channel and take action on customer feedback.”

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Qualtrics sealed a new partnership with a global leader in cloud customer experience and contact center solutions Genesys to revolutionise the customer journey by integrating engagement data with experience data. The alliance aims to deliver world-class customer service experiences at scale by connecting Qualtrics CustomerXM for Customer Care with Genesys PureCloud, a unified, all-in-one customer engagement, and employee-management software solution.

Sharing about the relevance of the solution in today’s changing customer behaviors, Tony Bates, CEO of Genesys, said:

“Digital transformation has changed the way consumers expect to engage businesses and they’re using the channels that offer the fastest path to what they want or need, and they expect total service. Successful companies are delivering personalized experiences with empathy at their core. With Qualtrics and Genesys, businesses can now orchestrate an empathetic customer service experience starting in marketing and spanning to sales and service interactions.”

The pandemic has changed the consumer landscape dramatically, forcing organisations to accelerate digital transformation efforts. In a recent study by Qualtrics XM Institute, over 75{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of nearly 18,000 global consumers started new digital activities over the past year, which includes buying groceries, taking online courses, and availing of virtual medical consultations. 

In addressing the challenges related to limited face-to-face customer interaction, enterprises rely on intelligent technologies such as AI-powered chatbots and self-service resources to ensure they continue to deliver seamless customer service. Having visibility on customer’s experience data and acting on it enables enterprises to increase customer loyalty, decrease churn, and deliver truly personalised experiences at scale.

Zig Serafin, CEO of Qualtrics, said:

“As companies undergo a massive experience transformation, they need to understand the hearts and minds of their customers more than ever to deliver experiences that drive loyalty. The combination of real-time customer sentiment from Qualtrics with individual service history from Genesys helps companies take action to deliver incredible customer experiences at scale.”

Qualtrics and Genesys PureCloud Integration

The strategic partnership between Qualtrics and Genesys merges the two companies’ expertise in experience management and worldwide customer reach. Qualtrics, the world’s leading Experience Management (XM) provider and creator of the XM category, has tapped over 13,500 organisations around the world leveraging the Qualtrics XM Platform. 

Genesys pioneered Experience as a Service, harnessing the power of the cloud and AI, to help organisations of any size provide true personalisation at scale, interact with empathy, and foster customer trust and loyalty. Headquartered in California, the company’s global footprint spans North America, Latin America, EMEA, the UK, and the Asia Pacific.

Together, Qualtrics and Genesys’ integrated solution offers organisations the competitive edge to predict, understand, and act on customer issues to improve the support experience and keep consumers engaged in this always-on digital economy. With customised, role-based dashboards and automated action workflows, users can share insights effortlessly across the organisation.

Here are the capabilities of the solution:

• Deploy dynamic surveys based on 20+ attributes such as contact frequency, geolocation, and customer segments
• Automate alerts and actions based on defined thresholds for metrics such as CSAT, Customer Effort Score, or NPS
• Create new tickets based on actions triggered from customer feedback and assign owners
• Improve response rates by automatically surfacing survey problems like broken question logic, mobile compatibility, legal compliance issues, and even potential bias in survey question wording
• Connect systems with no coding required. This out-of-the-box solution only requires configuration and authentication

The Qualtrics and Genesys solution is available to customers on both the Qualtrics Marketplace and Genesys AppFoundry. 

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As many businesses reinvent themselves through the pandemic, many are hyper focused on leveraging big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence to improve their business processes, personalize the customer experience or monetize data.

This requires integrating data across multiple systems; migrating compute and data storage to scalable cloud platforms; and expanding access to business-ready, up-to-date information to everyone in the organization.

But to accomplish this, businesses need flexibility.

Flexibility to unlock and provide governed but easy access to business data in systems, such as SAP and others; flexibility to choose any cloud compute and storage platform based on their companies’ needs and commercial economics; and flexibility to scale experimentation with big data machine learning models.

Responsive, automated data platforms underpin this agility with technology capabilities, such as no-code or low-code application development; more configuration versus manual coding; and active intelligence that makes continuous, up-to-date information available at the speed of business.

At Qlik, we are committed to helping organizations unlock and accelerate their full innovation potential. The Qlik platform enables real-time, cost-efficient data integration automation and world-class modern data analytics. Powerful data replication and automated analytics data pipelines make available enterprise data across diverse platforms and hybrid on-premise or cloud environments.

And the recently announced SAP solution accelerators jump start and accelerate end-to-end data modernization, helping businesses gain competitive advantages. SAP solution accelerators are now available for Order-to-Cash, Financials and Inventory Management.

Working hand-in-hand with our technology partners – Snowflake, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – Qlik has developed solution accelerators that build upon our proven data and analytics platform. Acceleration comes from agile data integrations, ever-refining data models, tailored key performance indicators and purpose-built analytic dashboards (see an example below).

These solution accelerators not only provide enormous value for SAP customers but also for Qlik partners in the SAP ecosystem. Remember this mantra: innovation, flexibility and acceleration.

Our SAP solution accelerators are just one way we can help you break away from the pack. For more information on how Qlik data integration and analytics solutions supercharge your SAP data in a trusted way that’s SAP certified, download your free copy of “3 ways to transform SAP data into value” now.

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post Innovation + Flexibility + Acceleration = Competitive Business Advantage appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

We face not only market changes through disruptive technology, digital transformation and competitive threats, but also COVID which has shifted customer expectations.

To drive the perfect enterprise, we need to redefine how enterprise software creates value in a digital, networked economy.

SAP S/4HANA delivers massive simplifications (customer adoption, data model, user experience, decision making, business processes, and models) and innovations (Internet of Things, Big Data, business networks, and mobile-first) to help businesses run simple in a digital and networked economy. This is why SAP has evolved its application platform to empower businesses to transform their operations to meet the changing needs of their customers and employees.

There are 3 perspectives to consider. The business value perspective, where SAP S/4HANA creates unique opportunities to reinvent business models and drive new revenues and profits. From an IT value perspective, this means that SAP S/4HANA simplifies the landscape and help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

Just how do you make the move, exactly? The legacy infrastructure currently installed may not be the one you need to get the most out of an SAP S/4HANA deployment. Traditional ways of implementing and managing infrastructure simply don’t work in today’s rapidly changing business environment.

SUSE considered the challenges customers face:

• Choosing the right mix of on-premise, public cloud and hybrid cloud platforms
• Maintaining increasingly complex infrastructures
• Replacing outdated manual processes that are time-consuming and error-prone
• Learning new skills to support cloud platforms
• Addressing business requirements for faster time to market

Moving to SAP S/4HANA means rethinking infrastructure and processes. To make that move, and ease the customer’s pain by addressing those challenges effectively, you need a trusted partner that can deliver benefits such as:

• Automating infrastructure management
• Delivering services faster with automated tools
• Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA on-premise or to the cloud smoothly
• Minimizing risk of downtime with services to ensure reliability and security

Learn how SUSE can enable you to harness the promise of SAP S/4HANA.

This article is sponsored by SUSE

The post How You Can Get The Most Out Of SAP S/4HANA appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

In September 2019—less than a year after its establishment—the SAP Customer First initiative was credited by Gartner for inciting significant improvements in the quality of SAP’s support and account management. According to a report, SAP Customer First helped change the perception of the German multinational software company from a sales-driven business to one focused on customer success.

By equipping employees with the tools and resources to deliver the right experience and cultivating a company-wide mindset of customer empathy, SAP customers and partners are provided with a proactive end-to-end engagement experience.

Today, as the world faces a huge crisis and economic disruptions brought by the global COVID-19 pandemic, the SAP Customer First strategy is proving to be one of SAP’s best assets in ensuring business continuity during these uncertain times:

Mrugal said in an “In Focus” interview broadcasted via SAP TV:

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprise after enterprise has proven that the safety of their employees, service to customers, and commitments to stakeholders are top priorities. It’s our job to passionately champion our customers by providing the best tools, services, and inspiration to help them meet their obligations and thrive in the process.”

Here at Inside SAP Asia, we’ve covered several SAP customers and partners which SAP successfully helped in navigating the sudden disruptions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Amara Raja Group – The Indian conglomerate company was able to complete its SAP S/4HANA ERP digital transformation despite the nationwide-lockdown imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Grab – The ride-hailing and mobile services provider leveraged SAP Concur solutions to automate its expense and invoice management system. The solution allowed the company in playing a key role in moving people seamlessly and meeting new consumer demands and needs during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in many Asian countries.
• Gojek – Another mobile services provider, the company was able to turn real-time insights into actions through Qualtrics XM technology to provide the necessary support needed by employees during these uncertain times.

What is SAP Customer First?

SAP’s strategy with Customer First combines the operational capabilities (O-data) of the company’s traditional offerings—such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM) and supply chain management—with the experience management (X-data) capabilities of the Qualtrics platform. This customer-centric approach aims to deliver the best customer experience in the industry by leveraging SAP’s people, processes, and technology.

According the software solutions company the SAP Customer First initiative is:

• a mindset of being relentlessly focused on customer business outcomes
• an engagement methodology for delivering a simple, holistic, and consistent experience that is value-oriented, and adoption and business results-centric
• an organization of empowered employees across the cloud and on-premises

The SAP Customer First field unit consists of the Industries and Customer Advisory Group which was created in January 2020. The newly added organization unified SAP’s Industries, Presales, and Customer Advisory areas. According to Peter Maier, Industries and Customer Advisory Group President, the organization aims to connect two important SAP roles—software developers and sales representatives—to ensure the right solutions are built by making sure essential customer experiences and needs are fed back into the development process.

In an interview, Maier said that as part of the organization’s goal of balancing SAP’s capabilities worldwide, it started an incubation model to bring in experienced employees from selected markets into the Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ) region to support the growth of the region’s sales team in gaining more traction.

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The SAP Endorsed App initiative is an invite-only program that consists of three specified tests:

• integration certification tests
• cloud quality check
• static security code scan

SAP ICC analyzes the application code and makes tailored recommendations to further enhance and optimize the partner solution. Solutions that achieve the SAP Endorsed App certification gain a competitive edge that denotes a value-added functionality, a smooth integration, and a secure investment for SAP customers.

Currently, there are nine SAP Endorsed Apps available on the SAP App Center. These applications focus on providing innovative business solutions for improving customer and employee experience—factors that are increasingly becoming more relevant in today’s uncertain economic climate. With business operations disrupted, social norms and customer behavior rapidly changing, organizations need to fast-track their digital transformation to better meet demands and stay relevant.

This first part of our SAP Endorsed Apps feature series discusses the solutions made for customer experience management.

Mediafly Sales Enablement & Content Management Platform

This sales enablement software works with SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud. The solution allows businesses to deliver dynamic and highly-valuable sales interactions even when there is no Wi-Fi. It features a multi-faceted Evolved Selling toolset that helps businesses present content and materials for any product more effectively, market more efficiently, and measure impact, before, during and after every sales meeting.

The Evolved Selling toolset provides dynamic content control and access, making a company’s marketing content and sales materials easier to find, send, assemble and track which increases alignment, efficiency and effectiveness of sales and marketing processes. Storytelling and creating an interactive customer experience is achieved through customized presentations based on a potential customer’s interests. To support the sales process and empower the sales team, useful insights and data are delivered—saving a company time spent in meeting preparations and allowing for quicker sales closing times.

Optimized Dynamic Pricing

This tailored SaaS solution integrates with SAP Commerce Cloud and enables SAP customers to quickly and confidently respond to rapidly changing market conditions, especially now with the economy highly-impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. The SAP-endorsed app from Price f(x) offers the following features for businesses to achieve and maintain pricing excellence, improve customer and product segmentation, increase customer demand, and optimize cash flow:

• utilizes machine learning technology to calculate prices in real-time 
• powerful analytic capabilities to regularly monitor price changes, market reactions, and revenue, margin, and volume improvements
• works with multiple backend systems, terabytes of data, millions of transactions and historical price points 

MyWave.AI Intelligent Personalization Platform

The intelligent customer relations management (CRM) platform allows businesses to gain a personal relationship with each individual customer at scale through the use of artificial intelligence, personal data and proactive automation. The solution leverages investments made on operational data and experience data to deliver better and improved sales outcomes. Features and benefits include:

• Intelligent Personalization for every customer, resulting in increased business revenue and net promoter score (NPS)
• delivers Precision Offers based on customer preferences, intents and transactions history 
• equips customer service agents with highly-personalized information on each individual customer, enabling them to improve the customer experience journey

The post SAP Endorsed Apps: Solutions for Customer Experience appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Leading digital agency BORN Group has received an SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence 2020 for SAP Customer Experience in the last SAP Field Kick-Off Meeting in Singapore. As a company focused on experience management and enterprise commerce solutions, BORN was one of the top-performing SAP APJ partners this year that helped customers drive digital transformation and best run with SAP solutions.

“Having built the APJ SAP CX practice from scratch, I am personally honored to have received this award. This award is a huge recognition of the body of work we have put in for market-leading brands across South East Asia, India, ANZ & Japan. This award is great motivation for the entire SAP CX team at BORN,” said Prakash Gurumoorthy, MD APJ at BORN.

BORN CEO Dilip Keshu proudly shared how their new strategic framework contributed to the SAP recognition. He explained:

“Our Stella Framework provides clients the ability to connect front and middle office applications to back office and books of record. SAP covers all these areas to deliver channel-connected brand and behavioral experiences. This win validates seven years of hard work.”

The Stella Framework

Stella, a Latin word meaning star, represents the universal aspiration of brands to reach high, excel, and provide superior offerings. Launched in November 2019, BORN’s Stella Framework combines brand and behavioral experiences on a foundation of data to elevate overall customer engagement and conversion across connected channels.

The strategic framework focuses on three aspects: 

• Brand experience. BORN’s core offerings include creative design (UX/UI), content production (personalized media), integration, and data science.
• Behavioral experience. Stella addresses how people engage and transact on channels such as web, mobile, social, voice, stores, events, print, broadcast, radio, displays, gaming, packaging, mail, and IoT appliances.
• Data. Stella’s data layer provides for the integration and interaction of the brand and behavioral experience layers with an enterprise’s underlying books of record, such as CRM, OMS, ERP, and other systems.

Ben Corser, SVP, Head of Channels and Partners, SAP APJ said: 

“Partners play a major role in Asia’s digital transformation journey. The SAP Partner Excellence Awards exemplify the shared purpose, commitment, and success that allow our partners, together with SAP, to deliver value to our customers on an ongoing basis,” said Ben Corser, SVP, Head of Channels and Partners at SAP APJ. 

“To that end, I am pleased and honored to recognize and congratulate BORN as the recipient of the SAP APJ Partner Excellence Award for SAP Customer Experience. We look forward to building on this partnership with BORN to realize even greater success in 2020, and help our customers succeed,” Corser expressed. 

BORN has been in the industry for over 25 years with a presence in North America, Europe, and APAC and an SAP Partner since 2012. The digital and content production company has completed several successful SAP Commerce implementations. BORN’s implementation is marked by an award-winning creative design and robust customisation of the B2B, B2C, and B2B2C platforms to meet the complexities of the business.

Some notable APJ implementations are:

• MHE-DEMAG (Malaysia) – First ever SAP CCV2 implementation in South East Asia. Launched B2B Commerce site in Malaysia. 
• PT Astra International (Indonesia) – First-ever C2C marketplace implementation worldwide. Launched B2C, B2B, and B2B2C storefronts for their automobile business.
• Lorna Jane (Australia, Singapore, EU, and US)- Launched SAP Commerce Cloud storefronts in Australia, Singapore, EU, and the US. Won several awards for creative commerce.
• Razer (Singapore)- Launched SAP CX storefront in 21 countries. Won Asia e-commerce awards in Singapore!
• (A leading machinery player in Japan) – SAP CCV2 B2B implementation work-in-progress in Japan
• (A leading chemical & cosmetic player in Japan) – Launched SAP CCV2 B2C site along with ABEAM Consulting partnership and integration with SAP CDC, SAP Marketing Cloud using SCPI.
• Petronas (Malaysia)- Launched SAP CCV2 B2B implementation for their PDB merchandise with unique promotion, voucher capabilities
• Shoppers Stop (India) – An end-to-end SAP CX implementation including order management

The post How Digital Agency BORN Group Won SAP CX Award appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Some shopping malls are closing down while some continue to thrive in the present times. Malls that are declining may have lacked efforts to offer experiences other than the usual dining, shopping and film watching. Meanwhile, malls that continued to stay in business are those that have evolved themselves to function like a community centre that offers a place to spend time after work and outside of the home.

Despite the increasing preference to shop online, malls still have a chance to redeem themselves by utilising empty or vacant spaces for innovative features.

For example, some malls offer their extra space to cultural associations or art schools. These provide customers a different kind of experience that is not within their usual interests.

Hichem Maya, the general manager of Consumer Industries and Life Science for EMEA South at SAP, pointed out that a successful space is a place people want to visit. In his statement, he added:

“You have to give people a reason to be there, and if they’re spending their time somewhere, they’re usually spending money too.”

The Generation Z are consumers born between 1996 and 2010. This generation engages more online and is tech-dependent, which leads them to reject what may be considered old, and malls are not an exception. These consumers are most likely to interact, discuss ideas and drive commerce in a virtual world.

Maya shared an encounter with a 21-year-old man named Sami, whom he met while he was waiting in front of a large mall in Dubai. He approached the man and asked questions. During their conversation, Sami shared that he did his shopping online because of its affordability and speedy delivery, plus the attractive variety of brands and offers.

With the answer obtained, Maya said:

“This young man obviously showed no interest in visiting the mall’s shops.”

Introducing a new concept for managing customer experience

Malls need to reinvent their experience model to survive in the ever-changing economic and social environment.

Maya noted the importance of convenience; hence, some of the solutions considered could include a central click-and-collect point put up at a vacant unit. He then introduced SAP’s Experience Management solutions and shared how it offers a “powerful real-time platform that seamlessly blends the physical environment and the digital ecosystem.”

Generation Z consumers, like Sami, seek for entertainment, instant gratification, seamless engagement and social affirmation. Their priority in shopping will always be a frictionless experience. And with today’s technology, this can be possible with state-of-the-art solutions that are needed to deliver the experience they want to have.

SAP software combines features such as customer identity technology, digital marketing campaigns and recommendation engine that is built based on technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Additionally, other features such as e-wallet and e-commerce technologies, order management, real-time inventory and social media can help in managing customer experience and enable the next phases while biometric technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) can deliver a smart fitting room and a limitless aisle opportunity. Lastly, Experience Management solutions can enable the feedback process.

This SAP technology links retailers and the mall management in delivering a customer-first approach and creating a new seamless experience for all parties involved, such as the customer, the tenant and the mall employee. This helps rid of friction in both the online and offline aspects of the businesses. It also enables all parties to answer the what and why an incident occurred and impacted the process. The experience management tool offers an opportunity to reimagine and recreate the mall experience.

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