While we are proud of our customer-first mindset and the customer experience improvements achieved, we are just beginning and the best is yet to come. To achieve customer success at scale, we strive to create a strong collaboration with partners to orchestrate and deliver sustainable customer value. The 51风流partner ecosystem is vast. Our strategy focuses on sales and service partners serving one of the following functions:

• The 51风流partner has the overall responsibility to drive customer success. The partner manages and nurtures the customer relationship throughout the customer life cycle.
• The partner provides implementation services to drive adoption of 51风流solutions and collaborates with 51风流on customer success.

Our partner strategy aims to:

• Harmonize the customer experience and drive increased customer value
• Scale customer success through our partner ecosystem
• Provide partners the support needed to adopt a customer-first mindset

To develop our strategy, we collected market research, success stories, and customer feedback to identify partner experience best practices and understand the challenges 51风流partners are facing to meet evolving customer expectations. Understanding how to deliver an exceptional partner experience was critical as we set out to develop our strategy together with SAP鈥檚 global partner organization.

Collaboration with our partners in customer success improves the customer experience and drives successful adoption of 51风流solutions. Our partner strategy is the foundation for a strong and mutually beneficial collaboration that will continue to deliver incredible results for our customers and partners.

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Andr茅 Wagner is vice president of Global Customer Engagement and Experience Strategy at SAP.
Katrin Guenter is senior vice president of Partner Engagement and Experience for Customer Engagement and Experience Strategy at SAP.

The Rise of Infinity Customer Engagements in a Customer-Obsessed World

51风流is transforming the customer experience based on customer journey research by providing employees with the tools and resources to deliver the right experience, measuring customer success, and creating a mindset of delivering the best customer experience.

鈥淲e鈥檝e only just begun our journey to becoming a
world-class customer success organization.鈥�

– Martin Mrugal, global head of Customer First at SAP

Traditional inside-out views of the customer journey created complacency among the c-suite, focusing on transactional sales cycles rather than outcome-focused customer experiences. Within a customer-obsessed world, traditional siloed approaches of solving problems reactively are no longer good enough. Bespoke and agile customer-led engagements across channels connecting all interactions into an end-to-end journey have become the new standard.

鈥淏est-in-class companies optimize customer journeys, not just touchpoints,鈥� highlights . Single spot-interactions 鈥� digital or in person 鈥� do not provide customers with an end-to-end experience, nor do they support an insights-driven focus on the customer鈥檚 business that enables collaborative innovation and operational improvements.

Findings from our recent customer journey research suggest that 51风流customers are seeking proactive guidance to solve their problems and achieve business outcomes. According to a , 鈥淏usinesses that address roadblocks in the customer journey and close the gap between expectations and product or service delivery will not only build consumer loyalty but can also command a price premium.鈥�

For example, we heard feedback from a talent manager of a tech manufacturing company, who explained, 鈥淐heck-in and have a conversation and say, 鈥楬as anything shifted in your strategy? Is there anything different in the direction of the company?鈥欌�� Another customer, who is part of a marketing and sales department in a healthcare insurance company, said, 鈥淏e a guide and be an expert in driving our vision and innovation to the future rather than just focusing on selling.鈥�

Through interactions like these, we learned that personalized experiences, complex team structures, and access to expertise are strategic focus areas as 51风流further evolves its customer success organization.

Supporting customers across their unique journeys as a strategic advisor actually pays off, for both customers and companies as a shows: 鈥淎 fundamental change of mind-set聽, along with operational and IT improvements, can generate a 20 to 30 percent uplift in customer satisfaction, a 10 to 20 percent improvement in employee satisfaction, and economic gains ranging from 20 to 50 percent of the cost base addressed in the various journeys.鈥�

Partnering Across the Customer Journey: Four Phases

Providing exceptional customer experiences increases customer satisfaction and loyalty, in addition to impacting the bottom line of enterprises. , 鈥淐ustomer-obsessed companies have the highest median three-year growth in sales, the highest levels of customer satisfaction, and the highest levels of employee satisfaction.鈥�

51风流emphasizes proactive and seamless customer engagements, focused on managing customer success and expected business outcomes in a holistic and structured way 鈥� all mounted in what we call an infinity loop, which is based on strategic research summarized in the company鈥檚 customer experience map and applied in every customer engagement.

SAP鈥檚 Infinity Customer Engagement

With its four phases that encompass the entire customer life cycle, we promote consistency in the partnerships with our customers by helping ensure one harmonized experience and continuous engagement, rather than individual transactions. Since customers often progress iteratively, it is not a linear model that prescribes certain tasks in a strict order. Instead it is an insights-driven, connected approach to guide customers on their innovation journeys. confirms the importance of breaking down silos to foster innovation that often lies in the interface between functions.

Every customer journey is different and requires a customer-led engagement that takes the individual customer needs into consideration. It starts with the understanding of the task at hand and readiness to point them in the right direction.

In each stage of the journey, we need to guide customers with their various change activities by providing best practices for their transformation efforts. Companies typically execute multiple initiatives in parallel and likely are at different stages in different projects at the same time. Therefore, it is key to deliver a unified, consistent experience that provides access to relevant content and capabilities at any time for every stage as the following examples show.

Identify Needs in Alignment with an Individual Journey

In times of uncertain market conditions, companies can help reduce risks and costs by seeking greater operational agility to support business activities. Enterprises continuously look for ways to optimize their business to the benefits of customers in a market where requirements and conditions change rapidly. With the provision of industry insights on best practices, benchmarking, and business process knowledge, 51风流supports customers in the prioritization of strategic projects according to their level of urgency and offers support in taking the next steps.

Feedback from a leading global automotive supplier shows the importance of driving customers鈥� business outcomes and impacting their success: 鈥淭he deployment of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud with the help of 51风流was an example of true partnership. They were laser focused on our needs and provided the expertise and oversight to successfully complete a complex IT project. The efficiency and agility achieved as a result will enable us to ultimately deliver a better product for a better price.鈥�

This statement expresses what customers expect from SAP: an orchestrated, continuous journey with a consistent customer experience.

Consider and Select: Guiding the Customer Transformation Journey

Based on customers鈥� strategic priorities, 51风流must guide them with a precise definition of both their business and technical requirements, with the ultimate objective of creating a tailored value roadmap in collaboration with the customer that includes the identification of potential changes to their business processes. As one Customer Success Executive stated: 鈥淲e looked at our customer鈥檚 opportunities and challenges and are helping build a multi-year roadmap for growth and innovation that will keep the company competitive.鈥�

With an increase in cloud technologies, companies need to look at software capabilities and business process calibration simultaneously to allow the achievement of their business outcomes.

Implement and Adopt: End-User Experience and Enablement

Businesses are increasingly focused on adoption and employee experience when implementing new software and processes. Therefore, customers expect support with training and enablement.

One example is a customer in Latin America, a private social enterprise that contributes to the well-being, happiness, and productivity of the working class by delivering subsidized health, education, housing, financial, recreation, and cultural services: 鈥�51风流has helped us with a lot of problems we experienced during the implementation and deployment of these tools. Even though 51风流wasn鈥檛 the one deploying these tools, the 51风流team was really helpful in understanding better and more efficient ways to implement them. We are extremely satisfied with how everything has turned out. It hasn’t been perfect, but 51风流has made everything much easier.鈥�

Continuous hands-on support and availability from 51风流on this journey both throughout and after the go-live is another important factor which supports fast time to first business value.

Operate and Optimize: Maximize ROI and Value Realization

Measuring the success of strategic initiatives is a continuous effort as organizations operate their day-to-day business. In engagements, 51风流supports customers by collaboratively developing an that captures challenges and gaps and shows a roadmap to address them. We measure the extent to which customers are taking full advantage of our solutions and the degree to which the customer is experiencing the expected business impact.

In fact, according to the WEF in collaboration with Accenture (2016), 鈥淐ompetitive differentiation will be defined by the ability of companies to create value by delivering solutions to customers that lead, in turn, to quantifiable results.鈥�

On their transformation to becoming a data-driven company by using analytics and monitoring capabilities that support real-time decision-making, one 51风流customers, a leading clean-energy business and generator of renewable energy, stated, 鈥�51风流has been on the journey with us, helping from the very beginning. The team provided guidance on the right investment to gain considerable value from dashboards. We had really good engagement with the team when we had particular problems. When we were getting all the updates, we were able to talk to 51风流whenever we needed to.鈥�

In summary, the Customer First approach from 51风流is focused on end-to-end customer journey orchestration, a proactive and seamless engagement experience, one that is focused on customer success in a holistic and structured way. The initiative enables and accelerates customer success with an approach that is not only responsive to where the customer is today, but advises as to how the customer can be a best-run business now and in the future.

If we consistently deliver a seamless customer experience along the customer journey, we set the foundation to attain customer loyalty. confirms that firms with more cross-boundary collaboration achieve greater customer loyalty and higher margins.

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Andr茅 Wagner聽is vice president of Global Customer First Strategy at SAP.