Paving the Way to the Digital Age (Part 5)
Providing an Enhanced Customer Experience with SAP S/4HANA
In today’s competitive environment. It’s more important than ever to keep your finger on the pulse of the latest trends and innovations. To retain customers, businesses need to act on feedback and suggestions. But how can they find out what people are really thinking?
The final post of this blog series explores how SAP S/4HANA enables enterprises to implement an omni-channel strategy and more effectively fulfil their customers’ needs.
Gaining Clear Insights into Buying Behavior
There are now a wide variety of ways for a customer or business to find out about, view, and purchase products. Orders can be placed in-store, online, and via email, phone, or app. With buying habits evolving so quickly, it is becoming more and more difficult for sales representatives to analyze the behavior of their customers. And as product ranges expand, offering high-quality after-sales service becomes more challenging. This is why it is high time for B2B enterprises to adopt an omni-channel approach.
SAP S/4HANA provides a single source of truth to integrate all data related to purchases. This makes it much easier for businesses to view customer information and gain valuable insights across all sales and distribution channels. Furthermore, sales representatives now have instant access to customers’ purchase history and can quickly find the right article by looking through previous orders.
It is also important to compare actual sales figures with predicted buying patterns. SAP S/4HANA makes this possible. If there are irregularities between the two figures, sales representatives can be automatically notified and sent to visit the customer. This not only helps companies to achieve their sales targets, but also strengthens customer retention.
How SAP S/4HANA Increases Customer Centricity
Customer feedback is one of the most important factors in an effective sales strategy. The way in which a company collects and responds to it is decisive. To find out what their customers are thinking, many enterprises still rely on the tried-and-trusted methods of organizing events and conducting surveys. But for businesses who want to beat the competition, this is no longer enough.
Social media presents a promising opportunity for obtaining customer feedback. Groups and forums encourage customers to air their opinions about a company and its services or share their ideas for new products. Thanks to the open SAP HANA plat-form, SAP S/4HANA is able to capture and analyze data exchanged over social media platforms. This makes it much easier for marketing teams to identify emerging trends, uncover previously unknown customer desires, and gain inspiration for product improvements. Moreover, marketing costs are cut as fewer customer satisfaction surveys need to be conducted.
The result is that businesses can generate new revenue streams by developing products targeted at their customers’ actual needs. Sales representatives are able to instantly pinpoint the products with the greatest potential, shortening the step from analysis to development. What’s more, enterprises can show that they value their customers by listening to, and acting upon, their feedback and suggestions. This strengthens relationships, increases loyalty, and reduces churn.
To help you understand exactly how SAP S/4HANA can enhance your enterprise’s sales and marketing strategy and improve your customer experience, we have created a fictional business named LaGarda. Based on experience gleaned from numerous projects by NTT DATA Business Solutions. The story of this company shows what can be achieved with the next-generation business suite from SAP.