During a Nov. 1 fourth-quarter briefing, Volker Hildebrand, GVP of SAP CRM Solutions, told attendees on a conference call that customer insights are not valuable unless companies turn them into action plans.
“Technology is changing the game whether it’s mobile, analytics, Big Data, or social and customers are changing the rules because they’re using these technologies,” Hildebrand said. “Clearly, it’s time to engage with the better informed customers in new and innovative ways.”
CRM is an evolving focus, Hildebrand said.
“We believe this requires an outside-in approach with a focus on 1-to1 customer relationships in the moments that matter to them,” he said. “Get customer insights and identify opportunities. Get a view of their behavior for a complete 360-degree view of the customer. Use transactional data and inventory data and bring in a lot of new social contexts. Then you have this insight into creating these exceptional experiences across all touch points.”
Armed with voluminous customer data and insights, there remains one key point.
“You have to execute in order to drive operational excellence otherwise the overall customer experience will turn sour,” Hildebrand said. “Turn insight into action. You can’t just have insight. It’s really about turning insight into action to make it consumable for employees to better engage with customers.”
In September, SAP AG announced its acquisition of KXEN, a leading provider of predictive analytics technology for line-of-business users and analysts. The addition of KXEN promises powerful and easy-to-use predictive capabilities for the extensive customer base of industry-leading cloud and on-premise solutions from SAP.
The combination of KXEN with the advanced analytics, agile visualization, and enterprise business intelligence capabilities from SAP, along with the SAP HANA® platform, is intended to help companies harness Big Data, engage users across the enterprise, and aims to execute before their competitors to gain advantages.
SAP plans to incorporate KXEN technology into cloud and on-premise SAP applications built on SAP HANA, including the SAP® Fraud Management analytic application, SAP® Smart Meter Analytics software and the SAP® 360 Customer solution. The acquisition is expected to allow SAP to introduce new predictive capabilities to the portfolio of solutions for more than 25 industries, particularly data-intensive vertical industries such as telecommunications, retail, consumer products, manufacturing, and financial services.
“We will leverage predictive analytics a lot more and extend omni-channel to the in-store experience,” Hildebrand explained. “HANA will be the Big Data analysis engine. Our CRM solutions are gaining momentum and more companies are transitioning to the cloud to engage their customs like never before.”
Hildebrand said the company’s cloud subscription rate has tripled as there is “pretty impressive traction we’re getting in the cloud. We’ve seen accelerated growth across the board, in particular in the area of our cloud solutions. There has been a dramatic increase in the adoption of cloud solutions. We’re expecting cloud subscription rate growth of over 250% year-over-year by the end of 2013.”