Every consumer’s needs evolve as they adopt new communication technologies available to them. Today, consumers want faster, ever more personal experiences when interacting with their favourite brands, while also demanding to buy products or services at the best possible price and quality. To meet this need, brands have had to adapt quickly to use technology to engage consumer audiences and increase customer experience, and so are now realising ever more AI-powered interactions with customers on channels like SMS, WhatsApp and Instagram. With publicity on new AI platforms like ChatGPT increasing consumer interest in AI, it has also helped build their trust in AI, as they are seeing the benefits of AI themselves firsthand, outweighing a lot of previous scepticism. Therefore, far more consumers are more open to AI and like the increased customer experience it offers.

However, without the right kind of data, AI will never be able to provide meaningful insights that can help brands create the personalised experiences that build business growth, provide consumer value and develop customer loyalty. Consumers are far more likely to share their data when they know that doing so will provide benefits to them, in terms of cost savings, better customer care and closer connections to brands they love. Transparency is needed from brands as it’s crucial in gaining trust. Sharing how data is being used when consumers first interact with a company means those brands that provide transparency and direct value will enjoy the kind of wide-reaching brand loyalty that only comes from more personalised, value-oriented interactions.

It is also important that consumer data isn’t seen in isolation. It can span engagements across customer service, marketing and sales transactions. So, it’s important it is not siloed by companies and covers multiple communications channels the consumer uses to interact with brands.

, Senior Sales Lead, Africa & Israel for – a global communications platform as a service (CPaaS) leader – says: “Modern customer engagement has to enable rich, interconnected, omnichannel communication across multiple channels for a personalised experience. So, to gain a full 360-degree view of the customer, including their prior engagements and sentiment, a brand need access to consolidated omnichannel data.”

He cites, for example, the retail opportunity to generate targeted digital marketing, linked directly to sales, customer verification, delivery confirmation and engagement, returns, complaints and customer service. However, consolidating and integrating disparate systems and data plus integrating and automating key processes to achieve this can prove challenging.

“Organisations need to choose solutions designed to integrate and deliver business value through improved customer engagement. Their customer experience strategy should be supported by established partners who have the expertise to guide them and the advanced technologies to support their business strategies,” he adds.

, Sales Leader, at , adds: “With ever-improving and sophisticated algorithms, we can now better understand customers, anticipate their needs while providing a human-like conversational interaction. Yet, complex and tailored solutions that cater to unique business requirements demand a vast and composable partner ecosystem. Intelligent customer experience comes from working with technology partners that understand individual industry needs, providing connections across departments and their technologies. Working with the best technology partners that can provide integrated operational and contextual data from across the entire enterprise with AI insights to support a seamless customer experience is therefore critical to success.”

It is therefore vital that any business that wants to have an intelligent customer experience approach must support current and future growth and have feature-rich, composable, core platform capabilities. This allows customisation at a flexible pace through vetted, certified and integrated technology partners.

Sinch, recognised as a leader in the , and in the , is the only SAP-endorsed contact centre solution that works with 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA, 51·çÁ÷CRM and 51·çÁ÷Service Cloud. With out-of-the-box integration with SAP, Sinch supports omnichannel contact centre communication across channels, including telephony, e-mail, chat, video, SMS and a broad range of messaging apps. It also supports RCS communication – the next generation of SMS that is  in the near future. Sinch is also the partner for SMS and WhatsApp. Its own chatbot solution – Sinch Chatlayer – is pre-integrated with Sinch Contact Centre to deliver 24/7 human-like voicebot and chatbot conversations.

51·çÁ÷Customer Experience Partner Director EMEA South, says: “As a key partner, Sinch fits perfectly into SAP’s customer experience strategy, the Sinch Contact Pro solution together with its AI-enabled Chatlayer, gives SAP’s Service Cloud customers the opportunity to communicate with their customers on all mobile channels and reduce the number of calls to customer service by approximately 80% – a true customer experience moment.”

Sinch and 51·çÁ÷will co-host a webinar for South African organisations, focusing on the future of customer engagement, on 21 September 2023. For more information and to register for this event, click .

The post Smart Partnerships Key to Next-generation Customer Experience appeared first on 51·çÁ÷Africa News Center.

Modern organisations are faced with the daunting task of collecting, storing and analysing vast amounts of data and deriving insights from that data that inform decisions and lead to improved business outcomes.

The large volume of data means this is no easy feat: by 2025, , equivalent to more than 212 million DVDs every day.

Organisations are dependent on technology tools to collect, reconcile and rapidly process data to deliver insights into the performance of the business.

In 2010, 51·çÁ÷released what would be a game-changer for real-time data processing and insights generation: its in-memory relational database management system 51·çÁ÷HANA.

“51·çÁ÷HANA sits at the heart of our business applications, including our flagship business suite 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA,” said Pieter van der Merwe, Regional Sales Director for Platform and Technologies at 51·çÁ÷Africa.

“It is designed to help organisations make sense of a broad range of data types and make accurate decisions in real time thanks to the integration of intelligent technologies. Organisations can use 51·çÁ÷HANA to embed real-time machine learning into business processes to empower them with predictive capabilities, while integration to the 51·çÁ÷Analytics Cloud gives organisations confidence to make accurate end-to-end business decisions.”

In a recent study by IDC, organisations that are using 51·çÁ÷HANA to achieve business gains and operational efficiencies had on average achieved return on investment of 679% over a five-year period, achieving revenue gains of $34.1-million per organisation.

“Organisations use 51·çÁ÷HANA to enable the development of intelligent custom applications and increase the pace of innovation in a cost-effective way by simplifying the management of data, and improving access to data and insights,” said van der Merwe. “By leveraging data, organisations can more easily identify new opportunities for revenue growth and create new services to better meet customer demands.”

51·çÁ÷HANA is used by more than 28,000 organisations around the world to analyse complex data and deliver actionable insights in real time through custom applications and innovative use cases. According to Beveridge, 51·çÁ÷HANA delivers business value along four key areas, namely:

1. Risk mitigation

By reducing the impact of outages on users and business, organisations can achieve higher business productivity and minimise revenue losses.

The IDC study found that HANA users achieved 21% higher gross productivity for users.

2. Improved IT team productivity

51·çÁ÷HANA enables custom application development that substantially improves the productivity of developers and database administrators, with up to five times higher productivity and an 18% gain in database administration efficiency.

3. Reduced operational costs

By leveraging HANA to identify inefficiencies and gaining a deeper understanding of expense structures, organisations can lower their operational costs and make savings of more than R15-million ($845,800) per organisation per year.

4. Higher levels of business productivity

The IDC study found that leveraging data in innovative use cases for custom applications increased revenue and improved employee productivity levels while reducing business operational costs.  through higher revenue, increased productivity and lower costs.

“It’s critical that organisations leverage their data to drive competitive advantage,” said van der Merwe. “With the world in a state of widespread disruption and constant change, having the benefit of accurate data over the total performance of the business and developing insights in real time can mean the difference between growth and decline, success or failure. The tools we need to navigate this uncertain period are already available: organisations now need to take the bold step of empowering their decision-making with the powerful business technology platform from SAP.”

The post Four Statistics that Illustrate the Business Value of 51·çÁ÷HANA appeared first on 51·çÁ÷Africa News Center.