Delivering the Ultimate Customer Experience – SAP CX, Omnichannel and BRIM

With a focus on enabling the creation of an intelligent enterprise, SAP has redefined the scope of conventional Customer Relationship Management applications with dedicated solutions for Customer Experience. This article from our solution expert Keshav Harake (SAP CX and BRIM), will provide enriching insights on how SAP CX can be best leveraged to enrich customer experience and drive business transformation.

The dynamic and fast-paced needs of customers in the current times have led to an emphasis on personalized and intuitive Customer Relationship Management processes. Businesses often face operational challenges by using different solutions for marketing, sales, and support. They need a unified suite that covers the entire customer lifecycle across all touchpoints in a single application. There is an underlying need to engage customers with the right information at the right time, and from the right channel.

The Focus on Customer Experience (CX)

This comes from emerging business requirements that have necessitated a need to connect customers with real-time data and improve customer engagement to increase sales, customer retention, and loyalty.

The answer lies modernizing the technology stack by discarding disparate legacy systems and move towards next-gen solutions that are unified and aligned with business requirements. A focus on enriched Customer Experience is now the new norm, replacing conventional Customer Relationship Management solutions.

• Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Cognitive Analytics are being widely used to accurately predict customer needs and provide tailor-made solutions to create a better customer experience.
• A 360° view of the customer journey has replaced siloed customer data across multiple applications, enabling every touchpoint to offer intelligent, intuitive, and personalized customer engagement.

Let’s take a look at how SAP redefines the complete lifecycle of customer engagement by SAP CX and SAP BRIM and facilitates building Omnichannel capabilities.

The SAP Customer Experience suite

SAP CX is a successor to SAP CRM and includes features and capabilities from a host of acquisitions made between 2013-18. It brings businesses closer to SAP’s vision of an intelligent enterprise by its automation and integration features that drive agile customer experience management. The suite was previously called SAP C/4HANA and is now named SAP CX. It consists of five cloud-based components outlined below to cover the entire lifecycle of the customer journey.

SAP Customer Data Cloud-Enabling Data Security and Compliance: The SAP Customer Data Cloud is used to collect, store, and distribute customer information in a secure manner for compliance with regulatory norms such as GDPR.

Emarsys is the Omnichannel Customer Engagement platform for SAP CX, delivering marketing automation, real-time personalization, and campaign sophistication that drives business outcomes.

Driving Efficient Decision Making: The Emarsys Cloud analyzes the customer data for businesses to make informed data-driven decisions to better engage customers by providing enriching interactions.

SAP Commerce Cloud-Creating Personalized Customer Experience: The SAP Commerce Cloud is used for product content, orders, and personalized experience management. It facilitates the creation of an E-Commerce sales channel with its out-of-box capabilities

SAP Sales Cloud-Enhancing Visibility: The SAP Sales Cloud handles the entire sales lifecycle with AI-powered capabilities for forecasting, data collection, and reporting. It offers a 360° view of the entire customer journey, helping sales teams to better understand customer needs and preferences.

SAP Service Cloud-Enriching Support Channels: The SAP Service Cloud helps manage the entire support operations across various channels. It ensures a prompt and consistent experience for customers reaching out for support.

The cloud-based systems make deployment easier, cost-effective, and secure. Users can choose the required systems from the five core components and can scale up as per future requirements. In addition to the above, SAP CX offers the below solutions.

• SAP Emarsys Marketing Automation
• SAP Sales Cloud
• SAP Service Cloud
• SAP Configure, Price, and Quote
• SAP Customer Data Cloud
• SAP Commerce Cloud

With the above features, SAP CX offers a unified environment for commerce, sales, service marketing, and revenue management capabilities for a harmonized customer experience. The suite also includes features for master data management, analytics and is extensible and easy to integrate with other applications. It takes personalized customer experience to a new level by creating dynamic customer profiles that store data of every product, and service that they inquire and purchase, along with their buying preferences. This enables businesses to give intelligent and tailor-made recommendations and offers, to boost sales, revenue, and improve customer retention.

The Omnichannel Experience in SAP

Omnichannel is an integration of all selling platforms, giving a seamless experience for the entire customer journey, be it across web, mobile, kiosks and physical stores. Businesses can develop Omnichannel experience across sales, marketing, and support operations, expanding their scope of customer engagement and ensuring a quick and enriched buying experience.

SAP enables the creation of an Omnichannel landscape through SAP Commerce Cloud by integrating backend data and applications with the front-end platform. This helps in managing product availability, pricing, promotions, orders, and fulfillment across the entire purchase lifecycle. Some of the distinct solutions include Omnichannel Article Availability and Sourcing (OAA) and SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing web service, giving a seamless buying experience to the customer across all sales channels and empowering business teams with the right data that they require.

SAP BRIM-Integrated Billing and Revenue Management

SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management (BRIM) is a solution for high-volume businesses that require intelligent and comprehensive billing and invoicing processes. It facilitates faster processing of customer requirements, personalized billing, managing a high volume of data, and creating targeted products and services. The suite consists of five components outlined below.

• Subscription Order Management (SOM)
• Convergent Charging
• Convergent Invoicing
• SAP Convergent Mediation
• Customer Financial Management

Typical Use Cases for BRIM

Energy Sector: The energy sector works on a pricing model based on usage in peak and non-peak hours. This requires real-time processing of the billing details as per the consumption. BRIM offers a complete solution to automate the billing process with its fast and accurate processing of high volumes of data.

Leased Services: A example of a business model for leased services is for car rental firms that need to bill customers on a real-time basis. BRIM can process data from location sensors and give an accurate bill for services, doing away with the complexity of manual billing. It is also useful for billing in transportation, supply chain, and logistics.

Telecommunications: BRIM can simplify the complex billing processes in the telecom sector by factoring usage across various types and parameters.

Software Subscriptions: BRIM can process billing for varying subscription models such as for trail versions, and monthly and yearly packages.

Here’s how SAP BRIM can help Businesses provide an Integrated Billing Solution

• BRIM provides end-to-end solutions for pricing, billing, invoicing, and claims management. It integrates with support systems to create a seamless billing process that simplifies the customer experience with complete traceability and transparency.
• It provides pricing models for usage or subscription-based services by determining the price on a real-time basis.
• BRIM supports the flexible handling of revenue-sharing models across various channels.
• It supports the billing and management of prepaid, postpaid, and hybrid billing models with lowered TCO.
• BRIM offers easy integration capabilities with other SAP modules and billing systems.

The above solutions offerings by SAP have augmented its definition of an intelligent enterprise by giving the required capabilities to offer an enriched customer experience. The focus is on providing on-time and personalized product and service offerings that are tailor-made for customers by a deep analysis of their preferences and interests. This is essential in the highly competitive marketplace, where customer demands are both diverse and dynamic. The SAP CX suite, in conjunction with BRIM can create a unified, intelligent, and intuitive business model that simplifies customer engagement, both for the business and for the customer.