Newsbyte: SAP Moves Beyond CRM With Customer Engagement and Commerce

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Sep 22, 2014, 09:00 ET

WALLDORF, Germany, Sept. 22, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Today's customers are digitally empowered and in control. They expect to be able to engage, research, buy and get service without necessarily speaking to or interacting with a "sales person." They want to jump between web, mobile, in-store or on the phone with a sales person seamlessly. And they demand that interactions with a brand be contextual, consistent and relevant, respecting where they are in the world and what they are trying to get done.

To help companies deliver on this, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced several cloud-based innovations and industry-specific applications that will enable organizations to move beyond traditional customer relationship management (CRM) and drive complete customer engagement. Combining customer engagement solutions with the unparalleled omni-channel commerce capabilities of hybris, an SAP company, and the power of the SAP HANA® platform, SAP will deliver a platform for businesses to engage their customers anytime, anywhere, from any device at any point in their journey.

"The CRM experiment has failed. Today's empowered customer requires a new model for engagement," said Ariel Luedi, head of global Customer Engagement & Commerce, SAP. "In a world where the consumer journey is fragmented across a range of different channels, devices and touch-points, it is more critical — and challenging — than ever for organizations to provide highly consistent and personalized brand experiences that engage and delight customers every step of the way. The innovations we are bringing to market today, coupled with SAP's unparalleled industry expertise, are uniquely designed to help them do this."

Delivering Personalized Experiences Across Channels
The customer journey is no longer defined or "managed" in a single channel. Rather it happens seemingly at random across a range of channels, interactions and marketing communications. SAP® solutions for customer engagement, including the omni-channel hybris platform and the SAP Cloud for Sales, SAP Cloud for Service, SAP Cloud for Marketing and SAP Cloud for Social Engagement solutions, enable B2B and B2C companies everywhere to provide real-time, consistent, contextual and relevant experiences to their customers regardless of channel or device.

The Customer Engagement & Commerce organization at SAP delivers a fresh approach that promises to transform customer engagement — and one that leading analysts say will be required to succeed in today's increasingly global networked economy. And with the release of additional industry-specific cloud-based versions of SAP solutions for customer engagement, companies can target their approach to meet the unique needs of customers across insurance, retail, utilities and now banking.

In its latest Wave report on The Forrester Wave(TM): Digital Experience Delivery Platforms, Q3 2014, global independent research firm, Forrester Research, Inc., states: "Companies want contextual, unified delivery capabilities for customer acquisition. Digital experience delivery capabilities help companies address challenges with providing personalized experiences across channels. As older technology becomes outdated and less effective, primarily due to siloed delivery and data, unified delivery and data will dictate which providers will lead the pack. Vendors that can provide these data management and unified delivery capabilities position themselves to successfully deliver business-first tools to their customers."

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contacts:
Andrea Meyer, +1 (415) 370-7329, [email protected], PDT
Geraldine Teboul, +33 6 23 40 39 40, [email protected], CET
Britt Gottlieb, PAN Communications, +1 (617) 502-4334, [email protected], EDT

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

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SOURCE SAP SE