Leading customer experience giants like SAP are striving to achieve the right human-machine intelligence balance. In this Dialogues in Digital episode, Oliver Conze explains the steps that SAP is taking to help its clients fill the knowledge gaps in industries without direct-to-customer routes, which industries are leading this battle, and how its newly-acquired experimental data-focused firm Qualtrics falls into the end game of better customer understanding.
Leading customer experience giants like SAP are striving to achieve the right human-machine intelligence balance. In this Dialogues in Digital episode, Oliver Conze explains the steps that SAP is taking to help its clients fill the knowledge gaps in industries without direct-to-customer routes, which industries are leading this battle, and how its newly-acquired experimental data-focused firm Qualtrics falls into the end game of better customer understanding.
Leading customer experience giants like SAP are striving to achieve the right human-machine intelligence balance. In this Dialogues in Digital episode, Oliver Conze explains the steps that SAP is taking to help its clients fill the knowledge gaps in industries without direct-to-customer routes, which industries are leading this battle, and how its newly-acquired experimental data-focused firm Qualtrics falls into the end game of better customer understanding.
Dialogues In Digital Transcript
Javaid Iqbal: Hello Oliver, thank you for talking to us, First of all, a great presentation. It’s amazing to see what SAP has done in terms of coming back into the customer game & understanding what the needs of modern consumers are. What do you think about the new platform that SAP has put together, with Qualtrics, added into the mix, & where do you see that going?
Oliver Conze: I think that Qualtrics is the perfect complement to what SAP has been building with the customer experience suite for the past two years. At every session today, we heard about the customer journey, & how important it is to orchestrate that across the entire customer experience, with every function contributing. Qualtrics is the missing piece that shows the exact customer perception. We learned about the experience gap, what the experience that we generate for our customers is, how does it resonate & how is it perceived on the customer side at every step of the journey. Qualtrics can contribute to that. You can listen to your customers; you learn from that & you act on improving how to better engage with your customers. That’s where it’s closing that move to manage customer experience holistically.
Javaid Iqbal: So, what industries have been the early adopters of this platform? What have been the early successes that are dovetailing into something new for the journey that you’re building?
Oliver Conze: Great question. SAP caters to 26 industries, so it is not easy to pick out a few because it’s happening everywhere. It’s no surprise that industries like retail are always a front-runner in managing these experience gaps, so it deserves a shout out here. But a lot of industries, where it’s about finding the direct-to-consumer way, B2B2C, e.g. in consumer product companies, automotive companies. This is even more important because with all these tiers that you have between you (an automotive OEM) & then the end consumer, sometimes the voice of consumer gets lost in translation. So, it’s I would say, equally important in those industries where you’re traditionally a little bit more distant to your end consumers.
Javaid Iqbal: One last question. So, we see a lot of machines entering this space, we have AI & machine learning into the mix, as well as connected devices with IoT, Big data, & all the multiple industry buzzes that are taking their stride. Where do you see a platform like this integrating & enhancing the customer experience, with regards to the machine & the predictive side that you talked about? Tell us a little more about the whole experience of machines working with humans.
Oliver Conze: Great point. You hear from SAP the big focus around the intelligent enterprise, & I think it couldn’t be more relevant in every aspect of the front office of the customer experience suite that we’re offering. You’ve already heard me talking about it on a marketing level – where you have the discovery of new audiences, the intelligent orchestration, the right content, current insights from engagements, how can the system assist so you can optimize & make intelligent recommendations, improve your engagements, the effectiveness of marketing & customer experience as a whole. We’re looking at these closed-loop scenarios to leverage AI & machine learning to assist you a lot better. It’s interesting how you balance, let’s say, a more traditional approach, with more expertise & linearity, with AI/ML techniques that tend to be a bit of a black box, & you need to balance that in a right way to give the end-user a choice of mixing both. This builds up more & more trust for the user that the machine is giving good results but does not take everything out of the hand of the user, at the same time. So, this balancing act is a really fine line, & I think we are striking that by introducing machine learning in many different spots, but very gradually & not the sudden black-to-white shift, where it looks like a black box to the end-user. So, I think that’s an interesting journey we’re on & it’ll benefit consumers of this approach about the best of both worlds.
Javaid Iqbal: Gradually seems to be the right approach. I wish you all the success.
About the speaker(s)
Oliver Conze is the Chief Product Officer of SAP Marketing Cloud and a leading global authority on Customer Centric products. He brings his multi-vectored experience across science, engineering and customer engagement in modern industry and holds a MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/oconze/
Javaid Iqbal is the Co-Founder & CEO of TransformX . He has previously served as a Customer Success & Engagement Leader at Salesforce and held various leadership positions at multiple consultancies including EY and PwC where he spearheaded large-scale complex business transformation efforts for global Fortune 100 clients and Federal & State and Local governments across North America, Europe & Asia.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jiqbal/
About Dialogues In Digital
The rampant pace of technology and its impact on the environment often makes it near-impossible to take a breath and realize the countless upheavals affecting organizations, industries, and societies in real-time. Events and breakthroughs with widespread repercussions can go unaccounted for and their potential lost forever. TransformX’s Dialogues In Digital Series is one attempt to assemble business leaders from a wide cross-section of industries and geographies to share their insights on such disruptive developments and highlight the role that key stakeholders in the leadership ranks can play in their sphere to become a crucial cog of their industries and ecosystems. Catch these conversations on our YouTube channel and follow us on our social feeds for the latest and greatest in the world of digital innovation.
Dialogues In Digital Transcript
Javaid Iqbal: Hello Oliver, thank you for talking to us, First of all, a great presentation. It’s amazing to see what SAP has done in terms of coming back into the customer game & understanding what the needs of modern consumers are. What do you think about the new platform that SAP has put together, with Qualtrics, added into the mix, & where do you see that going?
Oliver Conze: I think that Qualtrics is the perfect complement to what SAP has been building with the customer experience suite for the past two years. At every session today, we heard about the customer journey, & how important it is to orchestrate that across the entire customer experience, with every function contributing. Qualtrics is the missing piece that shows the exact customer perception. We learned about the experience gap, what the experience that we generate for our customers is, how does it resonate & how is it perceived on the customer side at every step of the journey. Qualtrics can contribute to that. You can listen to your customers; you learn from that & you act on improving how to better engage with your customers. That’s where it’s closing that move to manage customer experience holistically.
Javaid Iqbal: So, what industries have been the early adopters of this platform? What have been the early successes that are dovetailing into something new for the journey that you’re building?
Oliver Conze: Great question. SAP caters to 26 industries, so it is not easy to pick out a few because it’s happening everywhere. It’s no surprise that industries like retail are always a front-runner in managing these experience gaps, so it deserves a shout out here. But a lot of industries, where it’s about finding the direct-to-consumer way, B2B2C, e.g. in consumer product companies, automotive companies. This is even more important because with all these tiers that you have between you (an automotive OEM) & then the end consumer, sometimes the voice of consumer gets lost in translation. So, it’s I would say, equally important in those industries where you’re traditionally a little bit more distant to your end consumers.
Javaid Iqbal: One last question. So, we see a lot of machines entering this space, we have AI & machine learning into the mix, as well as connected devices with IoT, Big data, & all the multiple industry buzzes that are taking their stride. Where do you see a platform like this integrating & enhancing the customer experience, with regards to the machine & the predictive side that you talked about? Tell us a little more about the whole experience of machines working with humans.
Oliver Conze: Great point. You hear from SAP the big focus around the intelligent enterprise, & I think it couldn’t be more relevant in every aspect of the front office of the customer experience suite that we’re offering. You’ve already heard me talking about it on a marketing level – where you have the discovery of new audiences, the intelligent orchestration, the right content, current insights from engagements, how can the system assist so you can optimize & make intelligent recommendations, improve your engagements, the effectiveness of marketing & customer experience as a whole. We’re looking at these closed-loop scenarios to leverage AI & machine learning to assist you a lot better. It’s interesting how you balance, let’s say, a more traditional approach, with more expertise & linearity, with AI/ML techniques that tend to be a bit of a black box, & you need to balance that in a right way to give the end-user a choice of mixing both. This builds up more & more trust for the user that the machine is giving good results but does not take everything out of the hand of the user, at the same time. So, this balancing act is a really fine line, & I think we are striking that by introducing machine learning in many different spots, but very gradually & not the sudden black-to-white shift, where it looks like a black box to the end-user. So, I think that’s an interesting journey we’re on & it’ll benefit consumers of this approach about the best of both worlds.
Javaid Iqbal: Gradually seems to be the right approach. I wish you all the success.
About the speaker(s)
Oliver Conze is the Chief Product Officer of SAP Marketing Cloud and a leading global authority on Customer Centric products. He brings his multi-vectored experience across science, engineering and customer engagement in modern industry and holds a MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/oconze/
Javaid Iqbal is the Co-Founder & CEO of TransformX . He has previously served as a Customer Success & Engagement Leader at Salesforce and held various leadership positions at multiple consultancies including EY and PwC where he spearheaded large-scale complex business transformation efforts for global Fortune 100 clients and Federal & State and Local governments across North America, Europe & Asia.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jiqbal/
About Dialogues In Digital
The rampant pace of technology and its impact on the environment often makes it near-impossible to take a breath and realize the countless upheavals affecting organizations, industries, and societies in real-time. Events and breakthroughs with widespread repercussions can go unaccounted for and their potential lost forever. TransformX’s Dialogues In Digital Series is one attempt to assemble business leaders from a wide cross-section of industries and geographies to share their insights on such disruptive developments and highlight the role that key stakeholders in the leadership ranks can play in their sphere to become a crucial cog of their industries and ecosystems. Catch these conversations on our YouTube channel and follow us on our social feeds for the latest and greatest in the world of digital innovation.
