Instead, they immediately encounter friction. They鈥檙e asked to repeat information they鈥檝e already shared across multiple channels and departments. Then they see an offer for the item they just purchased, rather than something similar or new. And when they encounter an issue down the line, customer support doesn鈥檛 recognize their history.

Micro moments like these do not feel minor to customers anymore. They feel inexcusable. Customer expectations have changed faster than most brands can keep up. Customers now assume brands know who they are, what they need, and what鈥檚 happening right now. And they expect brands to act on that knowledge instantly.

At the same time, businesses are embracing a new era of AI. Dubbed “agentic AI,” it represents a paradigm shift where AI doesn鈥檛 just analyze or recommend products, but increasingly plans, decides, and acts through a network of agents. This creates a massive opportunity for customer experience (CX) leaders today, in particular marketers, who, according to McKinsey, are leading in AI adoption amongst business functions. But it also raises the stakes.

Because when AI moves faster than your data, systems, and processes, it exposes everything that鈥檚 broken. That tension鈥攂etween rising expectations and disconnected reality鈥攊s exactly what 51风流and Google Cloud are addressing together.

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The marketer鈥檚 reality: ambition outpacing execution

According to recent , more than half of marketers say fragmented or outdated data prevents them from acting in the moment. Insights arrive too late. Activation requires manual stitching across tools. And even the best strategies stall before they ever reach customers.

It is clear that most organizations genuinely want to deliver great customer experiences. But fragmentation is what stands in the way of delivering connected, meaningful engagements.

On one side: Customers expect effortless, relevant, and real-time experiences. On the other hand, organizations still operate with fragmented data, siloed teams, and delayed insights.

Our latest reveals that customers are increasingly frustrated: 45% say brands can鈥檛 keep up with changing expectations, and 44% say interactions feel less personal than before.鈥�

AI accelerating the engagement divide 

The disconnect between what customers feel and what businesses believe is the “.” Customer signals live across disconnected systems. Data arrives late or without context. Execution happens separately from insight. And while customers feel this friction immediately, many companies do not realize how disconnected their experiences truly are in their customers’ eyes. Now, AI is accelerating this divide.

Agents can generate content, launch campaigns, and optimize engagement at unprecedented speed. But when those agents act on incomplete, outdated, or fragmented data, they only exacerbate inconsistency and poor customer experiences.

When talking to our customers, it鈥檚 clear that there is no shortage of ambition when it comes to AI. In our research, 78% of brands say AI will be integral to their customer retention efforts this year. But only 46% of brands can connect their data in a way that is accessible to power AI sustainably.

The real challenge for CX leaders today is ensuring that AI has the right foundation: trusted data, unified context, and direct connection to execution.

New model for engagement built on trusted enterprise data

51风流and Google Cloud are expanding their partnership to enable a fundamentally different approach to marketing execution, one grounded in trusted enterprise data and real-time signals, accelerated with multi-agent coordination, and delivered at scale through 51风流and Google鈥檚 customer engagement solutions.

51风流provides both operational truth for elements such as inventory, orders, and fulfillment status, and deep customer knowledge across customer experience interactions. Google Cloud brings additional real-time signals and analytics, along with advanced AI. Combined, they create a shared, real-time understanding of the customer, grounded in business and situational context.

At the heart of this partnership:

• 51风流Business Data Cloud (51风流BDC) connects semantically rich data across the enterprise with AI to enable real-time insights and drive personalized interactions grounded in business context. This includes 51风流Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery.
• Google BigQuery unlocks real-time signals across the Google ecosystem, such as geolocation, weather, and rich analytics, through bidirectional, zero-copy data access with 51风流BDC, while ensuring enterprise-grade governance and security.
• 51风流Customer Experience applications provide the real-time behavioral context 鈥� customer profiles, transactions, orders, service interactions, and consented engagement data.
• 51风流Engagement Cloud activates enterprise data and AI insights and predictions to securely orchestrate real-time, personalized interactions across the entire customer life cycle.

With these innovations, marketers can finally move from insight to execution automatically.

To realize the full potential of agentic AI, businesses need their systems to speak the same language. By uniting SAP’s enterprise data and customer engagement platform with Google Cloud’s AI, we鈥檙e enabling marketers to move beyond simple automation to multi-agent orchestration, driving dynamic campaigns that reason and adapt to market shifts in real time.

Kevin Ichhpurani, President, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud

From prompt to performance: how agents work together for marketing

Another critical element of this new execution model is agent interoperability. Gemini Enterprise acts as a central hub for multi-agent coordination, enabling  customers鈥� agents to securely exchange context and take action across platforms. Meanwhile, Joule acts as the engagement layer within 51风流applications, executing tasks, orchestrating campaign and content workflows, and optimizing marketing outcomes. Working together, 51风流and Google are enabling true multi-agent orchestration connected to trusted enterprise data.

Within this broader CX transformation, 51风流Engagement Cloud is where agentic intelligence becomes operational for marketing teams. It is the environment where enterprise signals, generative media, and AI agents translate into real customer interactions and automated lifecycle journeys.

Advanced generative capabilities powered by Google Gemini models, for example, Nano Banana 2, introduce new agentic skills that help CX teams dynamically generate messaging, imagery, and campaign variations. Through assistants and agents in Joule, these capabilities become embedded directly into marketing workflows, allowing brands to adjust tone, localize content, and respond instantly to changing conditions.

It is not just content generation and personalization that are being rewired. With unified data context and interoperable agents, mobile messaging can turn into immersive conversational experiences with Google Rich Communication Services (RCS) and advertising audiences, and creative, which can continuously evolve based on real-time performance and business signals, transforming campaigns into intelligent, self-optimizing systems.

And through this multi-agent network, marketers will not need to build every step of a campaign manually. Instead, they define the goal, gain more time to focus on strategy and creativity, and let agents handle the rest.

For example, a marketer can prompt:

• 鈥淚ncrease repeat purchases from customers in the last 30 days.鈥�
• 鈥淢aximize customer lifetime value while reducing campaign operational costs.鈥�

And from there:

• Joule Agents coordinate content production, grounded in customer and enterprise data, understand business context, customer history, and constraints
• Google鈥檚 Gemini Models and agents generate creative variations, messaging, and channel-specific content
• Agents collaborate across 51风流and Google Cloud to personalize, activate, and continuously optimize campaigns in real time across engagement channels and media networks

This is more than a data integration. It鈥檚 a leap forward for AI agents that can collaborate naturally and execute seamlessly. By combining 51风流Business Data Cloud Connect for Google with interoperable AI agents across 51风流and Google, we鈥檙e giving organizations a path from AI experimentation to AI-empowered customer experience at scale. Marketers can spend less time on manual tasks and more time shaping the customer journey.

Balaji Balasubramanian, President and Chief Product Officer, 51风流Customer Experience and Consumer Industries

Clear business outcomes for marketing teams

By enabling a network of interoperable AI agents and grounding them in enterprise data and shared context across 51风流and Google, organizations can achieve measurable outcomes, including:

• Faster speed-to-market through autonomous campaign and content generation
• Lower operational overhead by eliminating manual execution steps
• Always鈥憃n optimization that continuously improves performance
• Higher ROI through relevant, timely, and consistent engagement at scale

Marketers can spend less time managing workflows and more time shaping strategy, creative direction, and customer value.

Beyond campaigns: continuous engagement at enterprise scale

While marketing is a natural starting point, this is just the beginning. Customer engagement does not live in one system or team. Engagement spans commerce, service, sales, supply chain, and operations. A brand promise made in a message must be fulfilled by inventory. A personalized offer depends on pricing, availability, and delivery. And a single customer service interaction can shape the future of customer loyalty and lifetime value.

This multi-agent model is designed to support high-value use cases across the 51风流Customer Experience portfolio, laying the foundation for an AI-driven customer experience powered by trusted, unified, real-timedata.

In an AI-driven world, customer experience goes beyond any single interaction鈥攊t’s defined by every touchpoint a customer has with your company.

The problem is not the promise of AI. It鈥檚 the gap between intelligence in the system and connection in the moment. Customers are increasingly disengaging because intelligence is not being applied where it matters most.

Technology, particularly AI, has fundamentally changed what customers expect. They assume brands can recognize them across channels, understand context in real time, and anticipate their needs. When that doesn鈥檛 happen, the miss feels less like oversight and more like indifference. Timing is off. Service lacks continuity, and personalization stops at the surface, despite all the data behind it.

While many enterprises are trapped in siloed systems and disconnected data, consumer expectations are growing. Brands that don鈥檛 deliver the expected experiences are quickly abandoned.

In addition, global socioeconomic factors are increasing rapidly and unpredictably, challenging bottom lines and making customer loyalty more critical than ever鈥攁t a time when consumers are less loyal than ever.听

When economies falter, companies usually take one of two approaches. Some hunker down, cut costs and staff, and hope to survive. Others zero-in on differentiators like to drive growth and boost profitability.

The importance of CX for key metrics like churn, retention, loyalty, new sales, and competitive differentiation is well-established, so not investing in customer experience could be considered akin to saying you are willing to let those mission-critical metrics falter.

The following 15 takeouts from SAP’s highlight some of the most common CX pitfalls and opportunities.

1. 82% of consumers say a brand has disappointed them

Modern customers do not go quietly into the bad experience night. A whopping 82% of consumers say a brand has disappointed them, even when the product itself meets their needs. The issue isn鈥檛 the product or service; it鈥檚 the experience of purchasing and post-purchase care.

This is the essence of the 鈥溾��: the distance between what customers expect in the moments that matter, and what brands are actually delivering.

2. 60% do not pay attention to brands anymore and 48% care more about experience

Consumer attention in a difficult economy has shifted from logos and taglines to experiences that feel useful, contextual, and personal. So, what鈥檚 a brand to do when 60% of consumers say they simply don鈥檛 pay attention to brands and 48% care more about the experience than the product?

This is where CX outcomes become clear: engagement is no longer about shouting louder; it鈥檚 about showing up better and building experiences powered by unified data and intelligent orchestration.

3. Left unread: only 16% of customers skim email headlines, while 29% read one or two sentences

Consumer behavior in the inbox shows just how fragile engagement is:

• Most consumers only read the subject line
• Others will read one to two sentences before deciding whether to delete or engage further

Combined with the fact that 58% of consumers think most marketing emails they receive aren鈥檛 relevant, brands are staring down a massive relevancy problem. Sending more emails into the engagement abyss doesn鈥檛 solve this problem, but gaining a holistic understanding of your customers as individuals does.

4. 37% do not think brands personalize to their needs

For well over a decade we鈥檝e been talking about the importance of personalization, but today 37% of consumers believe brands don鈥檛 personalize engagements to their needs. Surface-level personalization鈥攏ames in subject lines, basic segmentation鈥攊s no longer enough.

This aligns with our assessment that 79% of companies have low or moderate CEM scores, meaning teams can access portions of shared data and deliver basic personalization, but coordination across marketing, sales, service, commerce, and product teams remains limited. Experiences often feel disconnected, forcing brands to rely on short-term tactics rather than building deeper relationships.

Consumers expect real-time, behavior-driven personalization based on context, intent, and history, not just boiler-plate persona buckets. Customers can see and feel investments in personalization and it matters.

5. 46% say customer service feels too impersonal, while 41% believe brands do not understand them as a person

Considering how much data brands collect, it鈥檚 striking that nearly half of consumers (46%) say customer service feels too impersonal.

Customers are asking a simple, and valid, question: 鈥淚f you have all this information about me, why isn鈥檛 my experience better?鈥� When data doesn鈥檛 translate into empathy and action, it starts to feel like surveillance, not service.

With 46% of consumers saying service isn鈥檛 personal, it should be no surprise that a nearly equal amount (41%) believe that brands don鈥檛 understand them as a person. However, 34% agree that AI can help brands better understand them and what matters most to them.

This presents brands with a real-time opportunity: use AI and data to close the perception gap. Instead of just predicting purchases, enterprises should also be anticipating customer needs and reducing friction.

6. 78% of brands say they deliver seamless cross-channel engagement, consumers disagree

Seventy-eight percent of brands say their engagement strategies offer seamless multichannel experiences with glowing outcomes like increased CLV, retention, and advocacy, but consumers are simultaneously reporting little emotional connection and frequent disappointment. In fact, 44% say that brand interactions feel less personal and more generic than ever before.

The takeaway: internal dashboards can create a if not tied directly to real customer sentiment and behavioral signals across channels.

7. 54% of enterprises cannot access and use real-time data, and 66% still rely on third-party data

Fifty-four percent of enterprises can鈥檛 access and use real-time data. On top of that, 60% suffer from 鈥渄ark data,鈥� which is information that鈥檚 collected but not used throughout the customer journey.

Without real-time, connected data, brands are mostly flying blind. AI, personalization, and omnichannel orchestration don鈥檛 fail because the ideas or execution are wrong; they fail because the foundations are.

Although privacy regulations and legislation are increasing while third-party cookies decline, a majority (66%) of enterprises are still heavily reliant on third-party data. Simultaneously, 55% say their data is too unstructured to use effectively.

The lethal combination of overreliance on external data plus underutilized internal data keeps brands from building strong, first-party relationships rooted in trust and value.

8. 78% of brands say AI is essential for customer retention in 2026

AI is everywhere, and 78% of brands view AI as critical to retaining customers in 2026. However, 66% report they can鈥檛 use AI to optimize campaign performance in practice, while many also note they can鈥檛 utilize real鈥憈ime AI optimization in day鈥憈o鈥慸ay campaigns.

A quick translation of the above stats: an AI strategy is crucial, but execution is lagging because of fragmented systems, poor data quality, and integration issues.

9. Only 30% share engagement data with a CX or CRM platform

Despite the collective agreement that a comprehensive customer profile is important, only 30% of brands share their customer engagement data within a CX or CRM platform. This means that most brands are attempting to deliver personalized experiences without having a unified engagement core.

If engagement data lives in campaign tools, service systems, commerce platforms, and ERP, but never gets connected via CX or CRM, customers will feel every fracture along their journey.

10. 30% of consumers have used AI agents that act on their behalf

AI is not just an enterprise capability; it鈥檚 also a customer behavior. Thirty percent of consumers say they鈥檝e used AI agents to make decisions and act on their behalf when buying from brands.

This is a game-changer when it comes to engagement. Brands are now engaging not only with humans, but also with AI buyers that ruthlessly and continuously optimize for relevance and value. If your systems can鈥檛 keep pace, AI will select your competitor whose systems are operationalized for success.

11. When it comes to customer engagement maturity, 79% of brands have yet to integrate data, systems, and teams across their business; only two in five decision-makers see their departments as actually coordinated

The Customer Engagement Maturity (CEM) scoring model assesses how well brands align people, processes, and technology to deliver cohesive, intelligent experiences. Looking at the 51风流Engagement Maturity Index:

• 16% of brands reside at low maturity
• 63% sit in the moderate middle
• 21% have high maturity

Despite year-over-year progress, most organizations are stuck in developing or evolving mode, able to execute campaigns but not orchestrate truly connected, enterprise-wide engagement. And leaders agree, with only two in five decision makers believing there is effective collaboration across departments.

12. Just 21% of brands are high-maturity, and they are gaining ground against their competition

High-maturity brands rise above the competition because they connect data and intelligence across marketing, service, sales, commerce, and operations. They use AI and automation to deliver personalized, omnichannel engagement in real-time, at scale.

And the maturity gap is becoming a performance gap. As top performers turn real-time intelligence into growth, the cost of competing with them rises for everyone else.

13. Personalized means personal: 58% of consumers respond positively to localized content

Personalization is more than a word or industry term. It means actually understanding and empathizing with your customer, including their regional traditions and social norms.

When engagement is done right, consumers respond:

• 63% say their favorite brand delivers seamless, connected experiences across mobile, web, and in-store
• 58% value localized content and product recommendations
• 55% appreciate highly personalized content
• 50% believe their favorite brand uses data to make interactions better

Customers aren鈥檛 against data or AI at heart. However, they are opposed to wasted data collection and bad experiences. It鈥檚 the job of brands to provide a great CX. If that job isn鈥檛 taken seriously, you can bet that other brands are willing to roll up their sleeves to fill the gap.

14. 77% of businesses plan to invest in AI-powered engagement in 2026

When it comes to the future state, 77% of businesses plan to invest in AI-powered customer engagement in 2026, and 76% are investing in omnichannel engagement technologies. At the same time, 29% say their top priority is connecting customer and stakeholder data across marketing, sales, service, commerce, and ERP systems.

The signal is clear: investment alone won鈥檛 close the Engagement Divide. The winners will be the brands that invest in connection鈥攐f data, teams, and systems鈥攏ot just in tools.

15. 15% say seamless integration will be the biggest driver of success

Lastly, and possibly most importantly, 15% of businesses believe seamless integration of engagement systems will be the single biggest driver of success. While that may sound like a small number, it captures a critical strategic shift: engagement is no longer a marketing problem or a channel problem. It鈥檚 an enterprise discipline that depends on unified data, coordinated teams, and embedded AI.

Artificial intelligence provides an evolving service for businesses. Employing cloud-based systems that can store, analyze, and route data will be the differentiator for brands in the marketplace.

Loyalty is transactional, and driven by great CX and a connected enterprise

Digital engagement has raised the bar when it comes to customer expectations, with more demands and a plethora of competitive choices if a brand doesn鈥檛 deliver.

It鈥檚 not a big leap to state that better customer experiences increase customer loyalty, which in turn leads to more purchases, augmented product utilization, and increased brand affinity and sentiment. And let鈥檚 not forget that an enhanced CLV lowers customer acquisition costs.

After all, loyalty is transactional and forged by the experiences customers encounter. In my conversations with customers across the globe, it鈥檚 clear that only the brands with truly at the heart of their operations will retain and grow their customer bases in the enterprises of the future.

That ambition relies on a technology foundation that can consistently deliver those experiences at scale. For British-founded luxury fragrance brand Molton Brown, moving from legacy systems to 51风流Commerce Cloud provided a high鈥憄erformance platform built for peak鈥憇eason resilience and continuous innovation. The impact was immediate: 100% uptime during peak trading, even as volumes surged to one order every three seconds during major events.

This kind of reliability is increasingly critical as the moments that shape experience and loyalty expand beyond owned channels. As product discovery shifts to social platforms and AI鈥憄owered assistants, consistent content and availability help the brand remain visible and trusted wherever customers engage. SAP鈥檚 evolving agentic commerce innovations are designed for this reality, keeping products discoverable, credible, and actionable across both human and AI interactions.

Ultimately, technology and AI are not the goal鈥攖he experience is. The brands that succeed will be the ones that use AI to show up more human, not less, turning insight into relevance and automation into trust.

The future of CX is for companies that operationalize intelligence across the enterprise鈥攃onnecting data, systems, and teams so AI can orchestrate experiences, not just analyze them.

Manos Raptopoulos is global president of Customer Success Europe, APAC, Middle East & Africa, and a member of the Extended Board 51风流SE.

Seismic shifts are not new for retailers鈥攂ack in 1999, e-commerce was still an afterthought. By 2000, everything changed as retailers went all-in on digital.

In听2025,听we are听living in yet听another pivotal year.听This holiday season might feel familiar as you scroll through deals, compare brands, and race to beat shipping deadlines. But beneath the surface, something far more transformative is happening.听The year 2025 will听likely be听the last consumers shop as they do now.听听

Agentic AI is reshaping commerce by making shopping faster, smarter, and effortless. Discovery is moving from people browsing their favorite brands to intelligent orchestration. Instead of opening 10 tabs to hunt for the right deal, shoppers will simply ask: 鈥淔ind me the highest rated black, puffy winter coat, size 10, under $200 that ships in two days.鈥�

The agent will handle the rest鈥攕canning thousands of options, validating reviews, confirming delivery timelines, even factoring in loyalty perks. That future isn鈥檛 tomorrow; it鈥檚 already here, and by next holiday season, most shopping journeys will begin, evolve, or end with AI agents.

While this type of shopping creates convenience for shoppers, it creates a challenge for retailers that have focused on brand campaigns and poured millions of dollars into advertising to be the 鈥渂rand of choice鈥� in the discovery process. Decades of investment into SEO, paid traffic, and brand recognition are losing their edge. While not abandoning these strategies entirely, they must evolve for the AI-first world.

However, there is something that hasn鈥檛 changed over the course of decades: the need to create loyal customers who make repeat purchases and give the greatest share of their wallets. This, too, is more challenging than ever. In fact, 72% of consumers report that this holiday season they will only that consistently meet their needs in the moment.

Creating customer loyalty in the age of agentic commerce means conquering two critical fronts:

• Optimizing for discoverability: Agents will favor retailers that make buying seamless.
• Creating customer loyalty post-purchase: With discovery being augmented by AI agents, humans will now give their ongoing loyalty based on post-purchase experiences. On-time delivery, easy returns, and rewards that feel personal are the new battleground for brand equity.听 And with agents learning from human behavior, exceeding shopper expectations post-purchase can ultimately impact a brand鈥檚 likelihood of being recommended in the discovery phase.

The question remains: how do we move from esoteric AI conversations to practical strategies?

Discovery and loyalty: How to win in the age of agentic AI

• Make your catalog agent-ready: Treat AI as a new kind of shopper. Ensure product feeds are rich, structured, and machine-readable, complete with attributes, use-case-driven descriptions, real-time pricing, and accurate inventory. Clean, structured product data is now the foundation of intelligent discovery.
• Create solutions, not just SKUs: AI-driven traffic behaves differently. Design bundles, add-ons, and value stacks that solve specific problems and allow agents to match shoppers with outcomes, not just product lists.
• Build trustworthy, accessible information: Operationalize trust by surfacing verified reviews, transparent pricing, sustainability details, and clear return policies. Make this data accessible through well-structured APIs, not scraping, so agents and humans see the same reliable truth.
• Let prediction power personalization: Use unified data and AI to predict what customers want before they act, enabling real-time next-best-actions across email, SMS, push, in-app, and other emerging channels. This predictive intelligence turns fragmented campaigns into that deliver higher engagement and revenue.
• Make loyalty the thread that ties every experience together: Loyalty is no longer a program. It鈥檚 a relationship. Use every interaction to tailor meaningful, emotional moments that adapt, remember, and feel consistent across channels in order to help convert agent-driven traffic. Then, use personalized exclusives and perks to foster high-value relationships with those new customers.
• Deliver on your promises, every time: Eighty-eight percent of customers leave a brand after one bad experience. That鈥檚 why operational reliability is the new loyalty. Bring order, inventory, payments, and fulfillment into alignment, so customers receive what they were promised, when they were promised. Loyalty now begins at checkout.
• Prepare for the new return economy: Agent-driven buying makes it easy for consumers to purchase first and decide later. Set clear limits to protect margins and reduce friction in the returns journey because a seamless return can build more loyalty than the purchase itself.

51风流is already helping brands prepare for this future with AI-enabled technologies across , , , and .

A brand already building for the future

Global sports brand . Historically reliant on seasonal campaigns, Mizuno wanted a more sustainable way to engage its diverse customer base across 10 product categories and multiple channels. Mizuno unified its customer data and used AI to create personalized journeys, turning one-off interactions into long-term relationships.

The results speak for themselves:

• 52% year-over-year (YoY) increase in active customers
• 62% increase in revenue from premium customers
• 35% increase in customer win-backs
• 33% increase in the number of orders

SAP: A partner built for scale, stability, and growth

As customer behavior evolves and AI reshapes what鈥檚 possible, one thing remains constant: SAP鈥檚 commitment to helping brands win their biggest commercial moments. This year鈥檚 holiday results make that clearer than ever. We鈥檙e not just helping brands plan for peak season鈥攚e鈥檙e helping them execute it with precision, intelligence, and confidence.

Nearly 20% YoY growth in total messages sent underscores the trust brands place in 51风流Emarsys to deliver at scale. Mobile and emerging channels surged鈥攊n-app (+61%), SMS (+32%), push (+27%), and inbox (+91%) all saw significant YoY gains鈥攁s brands met customers exactly where they were browsing and buying. Omnichannel maturity accelerated with brands using a richer mix of channels to create connected, high-value experiences across every stage of the shopping journey. And with 100% uptime and flawless reliability, teams executed independently and confidently, even during their highest-volume moments.

Paired with exceptional commerce performance, the story becomes even more compelling: brands used more intelligent engagement to guide shoppers toward higher-value purchases (+18% YoY average order value) and ultimately drove substantial YoY revenue growth (+40% gross merchandise value)鈥攁ll powered by a that delivered uninterrupted performance with 100% uptime through the holiday shopping rush, ensuring we鈥檙e here for our customers when it matters most.

This is what partnership looks like: scale, intelligence, reliability, and results so brands can focus on creating exceptional customer experiences, not managing technology.

Looking ahead

The year 2025 will be remembered as the last holiday season where brand mattered more than the overall experience.

This year, and 48% of shoppers would support brands bringing more AI into their buying experience. This sets the stage for growth in 2026 as AI agents deliver relevance, trust, and immediacy, making shopping simpler, smarter, and more satisfying for people everywhere.

The brands that win won鈥檛 be the ones shouting the loudest. They鈥檒l be the ones using 51风流to be most discoverable, dependable, and unforgettable.

By anticipating needs and creating better, personalized journeys, AI will enhance every stage of commerce. And 51风流is here to make that future happen.

Balaji Balasubramanian is president and chief product officer for 51风流Customer Experience.

As organizations strive to optimize energy usage, enhance customer experiences, and streamline operations, AI emerges as a pivotal technology. 51风流Business AI can revolutionize the utilities sector through reliable, relevant, and responsible solutions.听听

To learn more, read this article or this for an in-depth look at recent 51风流Business AI innovations. 

Strategic Impacts of AI on Utilities

51风流Business AI can impact several strategic priorities within the utilities industry: 

• Customer intimacy: Customers often face long wait times and generic responses, leading to frustration and decreased satisfaction. AI-enabled tools like guided conversations, intelligent Q&A, and response generation can significantly enhance customer service by providing personalized interactions based on a 360掳 customer view. This helps optimize service, improve the classification and processing of service requests, and boost cross-selling and upselling opportunities through intelligent product recommendations. 
• Marketing and sales simplification: Sales cycles are prolonged due to the manual processing of unstructured data, causing inefficiencies and delayed order creation. AI can analyze marketing data using natural language processing to create sales orders from unstructured data and automate back-office processes. This automation helps reduce manual effort, accelerate sales cycles, and ensure more accurate order processing. 
• Operational excellence: Unplanned equipment downtime and inefficient field service management lead to increased operational costs and reduced asset reliability. AI helps optimize asset management through predictive maintenance, dispatch planning, and field service management. By predicting equipment failures and planning maintenance activities proactively, AI can reduce downtime, enhance labor utilization, and lower operational costs, working to ensure smoother operations and higher asset reliability.听

How AI Will Transform Utilities

51风流Business AI offers a range of scenarios across various business functions: 

• Customer experience: AI capabilities in 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement and the 51风流Service Cloud solution can enhance customer engagement through intelligent content recommendations, case categorization, and automated response generation. 
• Metering and markets: AI solutions for utilities, such as implausible meter reading validation and energy forecasting, can improve data accuracy and operational efficiency. Joint offerings with industry cloud partners help to further enhance these capabilities. 
• Bill-to-cash and finance: Intelligent collections, invoice matching, and automated processing of out-sorted billing documents can streamline financial operations, helping to improve cash flow and reducing manual intervention. 
• Service and asset management: AI-driven predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and asset health monitoring can ensure optimal asset performance and reduced downtime. 

AI in Action 

AI holds vast potential across sectors, particularly in utilities. From innovations in grid management to optimizing distribution operations and energy management, AI is revolutionizing how utilities operate and secure their infrastructure. 

To tackle current industry challenges and evolving market conditions, many utility companies are exploring AI solutions. These solutions span production, supply chain management, and maintenance operations, offering significant improvements in operational performance and quality metrics. In today’s challenging environment, AI is increasingly seen as an essential tool for achieving efficiency and resilience. 

To illustrate the transformative potential of 51风流Business AI, various organizations worldwide have leveraged its capabilities to realize substantial advancements: 

• IWB utilizes machine learning to accurately predict solar power production in Basel, Switzerland, thereby enhancing the city’s energy planning and management. 
• Avangrid employs automated AI-driven solutions for overhead network inspections, which streamline maintenance processes and improve operational efficiency. 
• Energie S眉dbayern optimizes the incident creation process with SAP鈥檚 support assistant, enhancing the responsiveness and effectiveness of its customer service operations. 

These examples underscore the ability of 51风流Business AI to drive innovation and efficiency across different sectors, offering a blueprint for other organizations aiming to harness AI for similar improvements. 

On the Horizon  

As utility organizations continue to explore AI applications, the future holds immense potential. Future scenarios that customers envision may include: 

• Visual inspection and condition-based maintenance: for asset condition monitoring can transform maintenance strategies, reducing out-of-service times and improving efficiency. 
• Next-generation customer interaction: A conversational self-service agent for utilities could provide personalized customer experiences, proactive bill-shock prevention, and tailored tariff recommendations. 

Implementing Business AI: Moving Toward a Resilient Digital Future 

By integrating 51风流Business AI, companies can leverage SAP’s established industry data models, which have been refined through collaborations with thousands of customers over the years. This AI can be trained to understand and analyze your enterprise’s unique data structures, helping to ensure compliance with data protection, ethical standards, and privacy regulations. 

51风流Business AI is poised to transform the utilities industry by delivering real-world business results through relevant, reliable, and responsible AI solutions. By integrating AI into core business processes, utilities can achieve operational excellence, enhance customer experiences, and drive sustainable growth. Embracing 51风流Business AI can enable utilities to navigate the challenges of the future and unlock new opportunities for innovation and efficiency. 

Innovation in AI is always evolving. The sources below provide up-to-date guidance in determining how AI can be used in your organizations:

• 听
• Partner solutions for the utilities industry, powered with AI, on
• Explore  
• More information on the  

For more insights into SAP’s AI innovations and their application in the utilities sector, join us in Miami, Florida, September 9-11 at 51风流for Utilities, presented by ASUG. .

Matthew London is vice president of North America Central Renewable Energy & Utilities at SAP.

Key to BrandAlley鈥檚 success is its deep understanding of its members and the impressive fact that 70% of these customers keep coming back for more. Fifty-two percent of them buy instantly, purchasing an average of three items, or 拢140 of value.

Michelle Hurney, head of Marketing at BrandAlley, explains the company鈥檚 core principle: 鈥淲e launch up to 40 campaigns every day that offer up to 75% off on some of the best brands such as Reiss, Dyson, Levi鈥檚, and many more.鈥� Campaigns are exclusively for members and interested customers have to sign up to browse the website and to shop. Registration is free.

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Focus on Brand Fans

鈥淲e have been rethinking the way we identify our best customers, moving away from the traditional view of the most valuable customers being those who spend the most,鈥� Hurney says. For BrandAlley, the true value lies in its brand advocates who provide more than just what they鈥檙e spending. She refers to them as brand fans: 鈥淚t’s about who they’re recommending to BrandAlley. When they tell their friends and family about our site, that鈥檚 where the real value is. Word-of-mouth marketing happens to be one of the most effective ways to acquire new customers.鈥�

To segment its customers, BrandAlley doesn鈥檛 only rely on the lifetime value of a customer (total amount spent by one customer), but accrues the amount spent across a customer鈥檚 connections and network. 鈥淭hrough the Advocacy Intelligence platform, we’re tracking the true economic value, or 鈥榚xtended customer revenue鈥� of our VIPs, the people who are sharing their favorite brands,鈥� Hurney adds. 鈥淭his way, we can engage and reward them, and keep them doing what they’re doing.鈥� According to her, other insights become visible as well, like the fact that customers overall are spending less these days while customers from referrals spend more on average and are also far more likely to recommend.

Integration of Mention Me Tactics with 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement

To identify these advocates BrandAlley is working with 51风流partner Mention Me, the world鈥檚 first customer advocacy intelligence platform. The Mention Me platform uses advanced AI technology to track and provide detailed insights into customers鈥� advocacy behaviors, like recommending products or services to others. Additionally, the solution includes prebuilt Mention Me advocacy tactics that can allow companies to quickly build personalized campaigns through various channels designed to motivate fans to share and recommend more frequently. Prebuilt workflows make the integration of Mention Me鈥檚 unique advocacy data with 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement seamless and easy.  

Kat Wray, director of Strategic Partnerships at Mention Me, explains the benefits: 鈥淥ur integration feeds Mention Me鈥檚 first-party AI-powered advocacy data into 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement in real time to identify BrandAlley鈥檚 current and future brand advocates and activate them to drive growth. The combination of advocacy know-how and AI-based insights with 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement have led to a 25% increase of the repeat purchase rate at BrandAlley.鈥�

The overall improvements are impressive: since the go-live of the solution in September, BrandAlley鈥檚 customer base has grown, with 12% more customers acquired organically through referrals and a 拢9.6 million increase in new customer revenue. Customers who are referred to the brand spend 63% more in their first six months, are two times more likely to purchase again, and are three times more likely to refer their friends.

Wray explains how advocacy insights impact customer engagements: 鈥淭raditionally one would offer a discount code to a customer who is about to defect, together with a message along the lines of 鈥榃e’ve not seen you for a while, here鈥檚 a discount to come back.鈥� Based on advocacy data, we can now see that some of these customers might not be ready to spend but are more than happy to share and recommend the brand to friends instead 鈥� driving indirect revenue. They aren鈥檛 inactive customers but engaged advocates.鈥�  

Machine Learning Advances Customer Loyalty

鈥淎t Mention Me, we use AI and machine learning to optimize referrals. We have our own AI engine with predictive capabilities that enable marketers to focus their activities on specific customer cohorts,鈥� Wray says. She explains that it is key to understand that not all customers are ready to refer; some people just aren’t at that stage yet, but future advocacy behavior of specific individuals can be predicted. Machine learning also identifies a customer’s propensity to refer at a given moment. Customers with a high propensity to refer will be encouraged to do so. Once brand loyal, customers鈥� propensity to refer grows, and sometimes so does their propensity to purchase again.

Asked about BrandAlley鈥檚 next step regarding advocacy management, Hurney answers: 鈥淎s we build on our strategic partnerships with Mention Me and 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement, we鈥檙e excited to see how our shift of focus from VIPs to 鈥榲ery important advocates鈥� will play an even greater role in our marketing and growth strategy.鈥�

Top photo courtesy of BrandAlley

TAM International is a manufacturer of drilling products and services for the oil and gas industry with headquarters in Houston, Texas, and a presence on six continents. With a lofty goal of growing tenfold over the next 10 years, the company set out to ensure its business operations were adaptable, innovative, and efficient in a world that’s always changing. To achieve this, TAM International decided to adopt a state-of-the-art ERP system that would drive transparent and efficient business operations across finance, scheduling, and manufacturing.

鈥淥ur legacy scheduling system did little to empower our ambitions, and at times it felt like we were working for it. To quickly shift gears and remain competitive in a volatile industry, we needed to modernize and adopt solutions that would work for us, not have us work for them. We needed automated workflows and reporting, quality control, and the ability to connect different parts of our business for transparent planning and execution across the entire enterprise,鈥� explained Rebecca DeHoyos, supply chain director, TAM International.

TAM International was aware that 51风流was the gold standard for ERP in industrial manufacturing but believed that only the biggest corporations could afford it.

鈥淲e did not include 51风流in our early conversation, thinking we were too small for them. Then, an executive from the 51风流North America digital hub reached out to our CFO and presented not only the benefits of SAP, but also a convincing message backed by customer references that SAP鈥檚 cloud portfolio was indeed suitable for companies of all sizes. This changed everything,鈥� DeHoyos said.

, located on six continents, are the engines that execute SAP鈥檚 digital customer engagement. The multi-disciplined and digitally skilled talent in the hubs use AI and the latest technologies to help support customers regardless of where they might be located or at which stage of their value journey with 51风流they are. Through a powerful combination of automation and expert engagement, customers can realize their digital transformation business outcomes exponentially faster and at greater convenience.

鈥淭he first contact with a new customer is critical. Our digital customer engagement teams embed AI to scale SAP鈥檚 industry best practices to accelerate and deepen the understanding of customer needs, concerns, and aspirations before the very first meeting,鈥� said Sam Masri, global head, 51风流Digital, Customer Success. 鈥淲e are delighted to have played an important role in facilitating an immediate connection to a dedicated account manager and multiple 51风流experts who addressed the challenges that TAM International had, setting a strong starting point for a successful digital transformation road map for the customer.鈥�

To gain a full understanding of the customer’s fundamental business goals and the obstacles caused by the disconnection between finance, scheduling, and production, the Industries and Value and Solution Advisory teams at 51风流were engaged right from the start. Following the solution demos and the business case presentation, and were identified as the solutions of choice for TAM International.

鈥淭here is another major benefit of our partnership with SAP,鈥� DeHoyos added. 鈥淥ur workforce is incredibly diverse and young, with a majority sitting in the 27 to 41 age group. They are tech natives and will only work with businesses that share their passion for business success driven by technological innovation. Working with SAP鈥檚 ERP is a goal for many, and our relationship with 51风流has also elevated our profile, making us more relevant to this talent group.鈥�

That鈥檚 where Claudio Muruzabal, chief business officer of 51风流SE, steps in.

Muruzabal is responsible for supporting the Customer Advisory, Solution Area and Services Sales, and Customer Success Management & Engagement teams at SAP. For more than eight years, he has played an important role in understanding not only an increasingly complex technology landscape but also how businesses actually use the technology at their disposal. He supports teams that help bring 51风流customers closer to their goals by leveraging 51风流solutions. This begins with advising customers through honest conversations about how they can apply the intelligent capabilities now included in many 51风流solutions, such as generative AI.

I sat down with Muruzabal to find out more about his role, how 51风流customers are winning with intelligent technology, and the growing impact of customer success management at SAP.

Q: AI is all the rage today, so let鈥檚 start there. What are the biggest opportunities for businesses to use AI?

Muruzabal: Opportunity is everywhere for AI. And it鈥檚 bigger than just automating processes to increase efficiency, which is what was talked about for the longest time. At SAP, we鈥檙e seeing how AI can support relevant business processes to instill innovation and competitiveness. While many players in the industry are focused on developing AI engines and large language models, we are focused on accelerating business value through generative AI. I could talk all day about how AI is transforming data analytics and decision-support systems as well as supply chain optimization, predictive maintenance, and HR. Every day we are discovering new opportunities for customers to leapfrog their competition when they combine the power of generative AI with the context of their business data and processes.

What are some examples of how 51风流customers are using AI, and what value have they realized so far?

There鈥檚 really so much to get excited about when it comes to how our customers are using the AI capabilities included with their 51风流solutions. Across industries, workers everywhere are using natural language to instantly get the data insights they need using the 51风流Analytics Cloud solution. I like how busy recruiters can tap into generative AI with 51风流SuccessFactors solutions to create compelling job descriptions and interview questions in less time. Joule, our AI assistant and copilot, can support end users in getting the right answers on how to get the most of our cloud solutions. With Joule already embedded across the portfolio 鈥� generally available in 51风流SuccessFactors HCM, 51风流Start, and 51风流S/4HANA Cloud 鈥� we are all excited about the opportunities for our customers.

All industries can get this unique value, including professional soccer clubs FC Bayern Munich and Hertha BSC that are using a scouting prototype powered by AI to find and develop the next generation of star athletes.

AI can solve a lot of problems, but what about the underlying foundational technology stack companies have today? What conversations are you having with businesses about their technology investments?

Early on in our conversations with customers, it鈥檚 important to understand how businesses can set up their core, foundational enterprise technology platform running in the cloud. This is critical to establish a journey of innovation including . Coming back to the foundation, many of our customers have built numerous modifications on top of their core ERP. In order to build a true cloud operating model 鈥� essential to embrace innovation including AI 鈥� it is critical to move to a clean core model. This means that any modification to the ERP functionality offered by 51风流is built outside of the core, using extensibility solutions. This is not a technical topic only. Although clean core contributes to the cost-efficient operation of the platform, the true contribution is bringing flexibility and adaptability to the business, converting the cloud operating model into a unique 鈥渋nnovation as a service鈥� platform.

What makes 51风流unique and stand out to customers with its value proposition?

51风流has the unique value of being the global leader in best of suite solutions built with more than 50 years of industry knowledge and ERP technology leadership. On top of this, our leading 鈥渂est of breed鈥� solutions, such as in HCM, customer experience, intelligent spend and business network, and more, can provide the best functionality and the right integration into the core. Only 51风流can offer this value proposition. When we combined this with the cloud operating model 鈥� widely adopted by our RISE with 51风流customers 鈥� we provide exponential value for the innovation as a service proposition.

How can customers get the most from their investments? What kind of support is there to help them transform and innovate?

Customer success management is essential in the cloud. It is the end-to-end engagement with our customers, from advisory to sales execution to onboarding, adoption, and consumption. We provide the tools, assets, and content to help accelerate adoption and consumption so as to maximize the value from first use of the solution to full and future use. 51风流Preferred Success services can accelerate the time to value even more. To support this motion, deep telemetry being built into our cloud solutions allows customers and our customer success management leaders to better understand how the solutions are being used while identifying opportunities to expand usage.

Where do advisory services fit into the customer journey?

Customer advisory services might be the most essential part of the journey with a customer. Successful projects start with the right business case definition, anchored in the best understanding of the industry and business of our customers. With that in mind, our Customer Advisory teams support building the right technical solutions that can support an enterprise architecture. This is the first step in moving in the right direction of building the cloud operating model.

Enterprise GPT and digital launchpad, powered by Joule, won silver in the Best Use of Technology in Sales category, while 51风流Digital Value Discovery won bronze for Value-Based Selling Techniques.

Digital customer engagement at 51风流is executed via digital hubs located at 15 locations across six continents. The hubs are home to more than 1,000 digitally skilled, multi-disciplinary teams that innovate with and apply AI capabilities to serve personalized and immersive engagements, whenever and wherever needed.

鈥�51风流digital hubs were able to support more than 22,000 customer engagements last year 鈥� primarily virtually 鈥� thanks to a plethora of AI tools we adopt internally to drive wider customer coverage and faster execution of digital customer engagements,鈥� explains Sam Masri, global head of Digital for Customer Success at SAP.

鈥淲e are scaling and expanding our digital customer engagement capabilities to every customer-facing role and function in SAP, ensuring everyone uses multiple AI tools to outsource administrative, repetitive, and manual activities to AI,鈥� he elaborates. 鈥淭his way, we have more capacity to focus on strategic activities that address customer needs and increase customer satisfaction. We engage with 51风流customers of all sizes and industries at a pace that matches their pressing business requirements, accelerating business outcomes they get from our cloud solutions.鈥�

The Stevie Awards encompass several of the world鈥檚 leading business award programs, including the prestigious American Business Awards庐 and International Business Awards庐. More than 2,300 nominations from organizations of all sizes across all industries from 47 nations and territories were evaluated in this year鈥檚 competition. Finalists were determined by the average scores of more than 200 professionals worldwide.

Formula One is a technologically innovative form of motorsport, where each car features over 300 sensors onboard that generates 1.5 terabytes of data in a single race weekend 鈥� data that needs to be analyzed to detect potential performance enhancements and reliability and safety concerns.

But until the late 1960s, Formula One cars were designed on traditional drawing boards by engineers using retractable pencils and a set of French curves. This is not dissimilar to the tech industry, where for decades the value cases for investing in technology were architected for customers by busloads of engineers armed with Excel spreadsheets.

Cloud computing changed not only what technology to buy, but also how businesses engage with their vendors when making investment decisions. Enabled by new technologies like mobility and artificial intelligence (AI), customers now expect immediate responses, exponentially faster time-to-value, immersive experiences, and flexible and intuitive engagements powered by robust low-touch and self-service capabilities. Not surprisingly, industry research shows that four out of five B2B customers will want to be engaged digitally by 2025.

51风流executes digital customer engagement via digital hubs located on six continents. The hubs are home to highly collaborative teams of diverse, digitally skilled talent that can deliver comprehensive, virtual customer engagement services. Like an F1 team, digital hubs use cutting-edge technologies to help drive accelerated business outcomes for customers with great customer experience, incredible innovation speed, and optimal levels of productivity achieved through data-driven, surgically precise execution.

Speed of Execution: Embracing Flexibility and Adaptability

Formula One teams operate in a relentless pursuit of speed, continuously refining their strategies to gain a competitive edge. Similarly, the ability to deploy teams to serve 51风流customers virtually with the latest digital innovations allows us to reach more businesses faster at precisely the time they need us, no matter where in the world they might be and which stage of their digital transformation journey they are at.

Digital customer engagement can allow us to close the feedback loop across thousands of customers around the globe at velocity, helping to shorten their time to value from years to months and from months to weeks. In 2023, 51风流digital hubs supported more than 22,000 digital customer engagements across the globe, setting these customers up for successful digital transformation journeys at unprecedented speed.

Speed matters and the race is on. The ability to recognize what a customer needs to grow and to work with partners that can quickly address these needs has foundationally elevated the need for digital customer engagements.

Precision in Execution: Leveraging Data and Technology for Optimal Performance

In Formula One, every aspect 鈥� from car design to the race strategy 鈥� hinges on harnessing and analyzing terabytes of data, often in real time. Similarly, in an increasingly competitive business environment, embracing precision through technological innovation allows organizations to balance accelerating their digital transformation decisions and optimizing profitability. The balance can be struck only through an almost unreasonable obsession with measuring and executing on fact-based insights.

At 51风流digital hubs, we can track key value metrics across the entire customer journey, be it for demand campaigns, customer value propositions, personalized digital asset performance, the adoption of new productivity-driving tools, and so on. We do this not only to understand what鈥檚 most relevant to our customers but also to track the effectiveness of what we do and how we do it in the context of what our customers need.

Customer Experience: Focusing on Value, Personalization, and Great Experiences

In Formula One, success is not solely measured by speed. The sport thrives on delivering a captivating experience tailored to engage multifaceted fans from a multitude of angles, making sure everyone gets value from the event. The same is true in the digital business world.

SAP鈥檚 digital hubs virtualize and leverage SAP鈥檚 rich heritage of industry best practices and benchmarks to help personalize the customer journey, bringing customer stakeholders in alignment with one another and delivering on SAP鈥檚 value promises across geographies, cultures, and industries through immersive and memorable experiences. 51风流digital hubs can accomplish this across the entire customer journey with 51风流鈥� from the time we create awareness, to customer onboarding, to supporting customers with valuable solution and industry expertise, until we help customers realize the full value of the 51风流solutions they adopt.

AI-Powered, Human-Led Approach: Focusing on Digitally Native and Digitally Skilled Talent

In Formula One, decisions pivot on data. But it’s the team that uses their experiences to apply that data and simulate different scenarios to discover new ways to drive superior outcomes. Similarly, while data and AI technologies fuel decisions and actions in 51风流digital hubs, it’s human ingenuity that leverages the tech and data and elevates customer outcomes.

Just like the F1 teams, our hubs attract and employ only the best of the best, offering a high-energy working environment that thrives on intricate collaboration. The individuals who join us can gain immediate cross-role and cross-geography exposure, enabling them to become productive members of the team in record time. Continuous learning and pointed diversity, with gender parity in half of our digital hubs today, form the backbone of our digital culture, where everyone is treated with respect, skills are constantly honed, and different roles are seamlessly orchestrated to present a unified customer experience.

The rules change, and we have to as well. Every pit stop and each customer touchpoint is a chance to pivot in real time, refine, and go faster, helping 51风流customers and shareholders gain more value at exponential velocity and great volumes. This is the 鈥�3V鈥� promise of 51风流digital hubs and this is how we win the race!

Sam Masri is global head of Digital Hub, Customer Success at 51风流SE.

鈥淭he value, relevance, and velocity demanded from a cloud leader extend to both the solutions provided and the end-to-end customer engagement. Industry research shows that by 2025, four out of every five B2B customer engagements will be executed through digital channels,鈥� said Sam Masri, global head of Digital, Customer Success, SAP. 鈥淥ur customers need to achieve the business outcomes from their digital transformation much faster with streamlined interactions, reduced engagement complexity, and robust tech-enabled capabilities that make the buying journey agile, personalized, and memorable.鈥�

With operations spanning more than 10 sectors and 80 business units across Europe and the Middle East, ONEX Holding entrusted 51风流with its five-year digital transformation plan. For the 35 legal entities in its oil and gas division, ONEX adopted , among other solutions, complemented by to support its sustainability strategy. In six months from the initial digital contact, ONEX鈥檚 digital transformation journey was mapped out and the implementation successfully kicked off. Such velocity was gained through digital customer engagement with about 90% of the entire process being completed virtually, through SAP鈥檚 digital hubs in Cairo, Egypt, and Barcelona, Spain.

51风流digital customer engagement is executed via digital hubs, attractively located on five continents. The hubs are home to highly collaborative teams of diverse, digitally-native talent that help deliver end-to-end, virtual customer engagement services. By continuously applying AI and the latest technologies, these teams help drive our customers’ business outcomes at an exponential velocity while maintaining memorable and personalized customer experiences.

鈥淥ur experience with 51风流was frictionless and seamless,鈥� said Waqas Butt, ICT and digital transformation leader at ONEX Holding. 鈥�51风流digital engagement gave us an incredible jump start on our digital transformation and removed all the lags you typically experience with a traditional, in-person buying journey. With the immersive, tech-driven capabilities, we had access to the demo versions of 51风流solutions that had already been mapped to our KPIs, enabling us to experience what these cloud solutions could do for us in an engaging way and at our own pace.鈥�

鈥淭he best part of our experience was having immediate access to SAP’s 50 years of leadership in enterprise processes. We had SAP鈥檚 industry, solution, and value best practices at our fingertips, made available fast through digital modalities and powered by cutting-edge technologies,鈥� added Butt. 鈥淎lthough digital, the experience felt more like we were seated at the same table with top minds in 51风流who had profound knowledge of all the regions and sectors ONEX operates in, including energy, oil and gas, power generation, and even infrastructure management and investments.鈥�

Part of ONEX鈥檚 digital transformation journey includes the development of a new way of working, called 鈥淒igital Workplace,鈥� focused on embedding digital approaches into routine business processes to gain efficiencies and promote sustainability.

鈥淒igital transformation is not a transaction; it is a partnership in which both parties need to be like-minded. When we finally shook hands in person with the 51风流digital customer engagement team, we did it because we spoke the same language 鈥� we both understand the power of starting a digital transformation, digitally. We know we are in good hands on our path to redefine how ONEX runs,鈥� stressed Butt.

鈥淭he relationship between ONEX and 51风流is a beautiful example of how virtual immersive engagements can enable and scale human relationships and interactions, not diminish them. We call this human-led, digitally-powered customer engagement with a mandate of ensuring that all 51风流customers have the same path to success with SAP, regardless of where they are or when they needs us,鈥� concluded Masri.

Edina Manuel is part of Digital, Customer Success at SAP.

鈥淚f you have your consumers 鈥� in our case 鈥榝ans鈥� 鈥� benefit at the heart of everything that you do, everyone is going to win,鈥� Josh Ehren, Gibson Brands global head of Direct-to-Consumer, told 51风流at NRF 2023. 鈥淚t is not just a technology that goes into it; it is an understanding of how you communicate.鈥�

communications strategy is playing lead, informing how tech enables its fan engagement, Ehren stated after a fireside chat with , now part of SAP, at SAP鈥檚 booth. And the Nashville-based guitar manufacturer鈥檚 fanbase extends beyond its legendary Les Paul collab and into its family of brands that include amps, pedals, , and more.

鈥淲e have the most amazing, loyal, obsessed fans for our instruments and for our brands,鈥� Ehren said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 our job to make sure that we connect with them in the ways that they want to connect with us 鈥� and [in] an easy way for them.鈥�

This is where technology joins the band.

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When Tech Plays Rhythm

Technology helps Gibson understand what each fan wants, what makes an individual鈥檚 journey unique, and how fans interact with the brand, according to Ehren. And fan journeys can range from a noob who has never touched catgut all the way to an artist who makes her living strumming six strings.

鈥淭hat is a massive span of different individualized types of fans that we connect with,鈥� Ehren said in an . 鈥淲e take that information, and that鈥檚 how we can actually craft how we stay connected with them.鈥�

This might mean inviting the aforementioned novice to a try a lesson via or to watch a video on , according to Ehren. Or it could include recommending select accessories to an artist for a specific guitar in his quiver.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 really how we are utilizing that [tech] to connect,鈥� Ehren said. 鈥淲e go through all the way to the end of that spectrum.鈥�

Gibson wasn鈥檛 the only brand at NRF singing the praises of a strategy/tech duet. Other retailers also see tech-driven engagement as essential for growth.

Everything from A to G

Before the pandemic, American home improvement retailer Lowe鈥檚 Companies Inc. updated its legacy e-commerce platform, according to Chairman and CEO Marvin Ellison. Similar to Gibson鈥檚 broad customer spectrum, Mooresville, North Carolina-based Lowe鈥檚 serves everyone from full-time contractors to a new homeowner鈥檚 first do-it-yourself (DIY) project.

鈥淚f we had not made those investments in retail fundamentals, it would have been a catastrophically bad environment for our customers and for us as a company,鈥� Ellison said during . 鈥淲e put the investments in place…continuing to grow our online and omnichannel capabilities, merchandising, selection 鈥� making sure we serve our pro and DIY customers at the highest possible level.鈥�

Such savvy use of tech and data can help organizations ensure they鈥檙e serving all segments of their customer base, as Gibson鈥檚 Ehren noted. He advocates for both internal stakeholders and those across Gibson鈥檚 vast dealer network to let the data tell them what is and isn鈥檛 working.

鈥淭hat data is really going to help us understand: Are we connecting with our fans? To what extent are we connecting with our fans? Is it working?鈥� Ehren said. 鈥淭hat will inform our road map. That will inform how we optimize…Data is absolutely imperative in everything that we do.鈥�

This includes how Gibson meets customer experience challenges, especially those that are even bigger than competing for share-of-wallet.

Putting Customers First Ensures That Everybody Wins

鈥淚t starts with the share-of-time,鈥� Ehren said. 鈥淭o me, that鈥檚 the biggest hurdle.鈥�

The point of sale can鈥檛 be the end of a customer鈥檚 journey, according to Ehren. Gibson wants its fans to rock on 鈥� and on, and on.

鈥淚 care way more about getting over the hurdles of getting a share of their time because that means that I鈥檓 telling the right stories [and] connecting with them,鈥� Ehren said. 鈥淚f we can keep people playing…they鈥檙e happier, they鈥檙e engaged, and it works for us as well.鈥�

All of this engagement supports the entire business 鈥� regardless of where they buy, according to Ehren. His job as global head of D2C is to help them decide on the right products for their individual needs.

鈥淚f they want to understand a little bit more about this guitar, a little bit about more about this amp, etc., and then go to gibson.com or to the , or to one of our dealers 鈥� wherever they want to make that purchase 鈥� they are absolutely able to,鈥� Ehren said. 鈥淎nd I encourage it because, again, everyone wins.鈥�

Derek Klobucher is a video producer at SAP.

We鈥檝e seen how, in today鈥檚 fast-paced, digital-first world, the demands placed on sales and marketing teams are greater than ever and buyer expectations are at an all-time high. This makes successful account engagement critical.

The problem is that sales and marketing teams selling to businesses are often operating separately from each other, using siloed tech stacks to manage buyer engagement. Having disconnected systems brings about a host of technical, data, and process barriers that reduce speed to market, limit personalization, hinder growth and revenue, and, most importantly, degrade the customer experience.

On top of this, sales teams are having to navigate exceedingly complex sales cycles that often involve buying centers with distinct consideration sets and buyer journeys that extend across multiple digital and physical touch points. Meanwhile, marketers are being tasked to drive more revenue for the business, prove their impact, and provide more relevant one-to-one experiences 鈥� all with less budget and resources.

By introducing the account engagement option, we are helping . With our unified solutions, sales and marketing teams will be able to collaboratively execute account engagement strategies at scale, resulting in more seamless customer experiences and better business results.

Solving Common Challenges with a Unified Solution

Sales and marketing teams have their respective goals, but they also have shared goals of engaging and converting more customers, increasing customer lifetime value, and driving revenue for the business.

Through two-way native integration between and the account engagement option for 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement, sales and marketing teams can act upon a unified, single view of their accounts and business contacts. With a shared view of the customer, teams can better align their account engagement strategies to accelerate sales cycles, improve closure rates, and increase customer lifetime value. This ultimately helps solve the broader business goals of growth and revenue.

Collaborative account engagement has unique, positive benefits for sales and marketing teams respectively; whether you鈥檙e in sales or marketing, collaborative account engagement is all upside.

How 51风流Customer Experience Brings Value to Sales and Marketing Teams

How will account engagement help sales and marketing teams? What will it provide for businesses?

Teams using this option will be able to integrate with 51风流Sales Cloud, allowing them to bring together their data, process, and user experiences, and benefit from:

• Integrated, fully aligned sales and marketing account engagement
• Improved account segmentation and targeting
• Collaborative campaign development and execution
• More scalable, marketing-led, one-to-one sales interactions
• Pre-built strategies and tactics that accelerate time to market
• Real-time customer insights that drive real-time engagement
• Reporting and analytics to view and measure marketing鈥檚 impact on sales

Marketing teams will continue to benefit from the speed, simplicity, and scale that 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement offers them, while sales teams will gain improved collaboration and visibility into marketing campaigns without having to leave 51风流Sales Cloud, which means sales, marketing, and the whole business win.

Learn More About the Benefits of Collaborative Account Engagement

51风流Customer Experience is all about helping businesses make each customer experience they deliver matter. It is also about providing integrated solutions that drive customer growth and revenue at any scale. This account engagement option propels us further on this path by helping businesses achieve their business-critical goals while also enabling sales and marketing teams to work smarter, more efficiently, and more collaboratively to deliver exceptional experiences.

To learn more about the power of collaborative account engagement, read “.” And to learn more about how the account engagement option for 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement helps clients accelerate performance and generate more revenue, .

Joanna Milliken is CEO of 51风流Emarsys Customer Engagement.

Gratitude shapes the perspective we all need to evaluate what truly matters most in our lives. Typically, it鈥檚 the people around us. At home and in our communities, we cherish our family and friends. In the workplace, meanwhile, it鈥檚 our colleagues and customers who cheer on each other鈥檚 successes and reinforce a sense of shared purpose.

For businesses grappling with the disruption associated with COVID-19 since last year, that shared purpose has been put to the test. Amid fractured supply chains, logjammed seaports, and uneven public health measures, an agile workforce has often meant the difference between maintaining operational continuity and falling short on promises made to customers. Business leaders seeking to extend competitive advantage in these uncertain times have had to rethink how to recruit and retain an agile workforce and 鈥� just as importantly 鈥� how to manage it to sow customer success.

In nearly every instance I鈥檝e observed since the coronavirus crisis began, businesses that adapt successfully to rapid shifts in supply and demand have relied on the contributions of highly skilled external talent, ranging from contingent labor and independent contractors to freelancers, consultants, and temporary staff. These non-traditional workers supplement the skills of their traditional counterparts by lending organizations the flexibility they need to instill resilience, ride out labor shortages, and come out stronger on the other side of the pandemic.

Just as external workers have proved crucial to enabling businesses to take steps toward recovery, cloud-based technologies have become increasingly essential to providing the visibility needed to manage these workers effectively. Research that external labor accounts for 42% of workforce spend overall. But even though 70% of business leaders indicate they use digital platforms for services procurement, only half as many turn to technology to help manage their contingent workforce. Thus, nearly two in three business leaders fail to capture significant value created by these vital workers. Yet the need to reap maximum value from them remains acute, particularly as COVID-19-related disruption tightens its grip on supply chains across many regions and industries.

Performance unmeasured equals value untapped and, ultimately, ambitions unrealized. Customer satisfaction typically rises or falls in direct relation to an organization鈥檚 agility and responsiveness to the accelerating pace of change. That鈥檚 why the external workforce is so consequential to strengthening operational interdependencies. It鈥檚 also why cloud-based platforms for managing this pool of talent deepen the resilience of businesses and their customers alike, even as ongoing disruption bears down on both. Visibility into the engagements of the external workforce 鈥� as well as into other core, increasingly integrated operational processes 鈥� improves an organization鈥檚 predictive capabilities, restores regularity to its trading patterns, and augments its ability to meet or exceed customer expectations.

For nearly two years, the external workforce has played an indispensable role in keeping commerce flowing 鈥� and customers satisfied 鈥� across all industries. Some of the most vivid examples include those associated with infrastructure critical to us all: the nurse practitioner who, pulling a double shift, renders aid to the ill and lends comfort to anxious loved ones; the truck driver who, passing fewer open petrol stations than there used to be, replenishes remote grocers with fresh produce; the safety engineer who, after reminding her children to turn in their homework online, works the night shift at the nuclear plant to ensure the lights stay on for millions.

As we raise a glass this holiday season, acknowledging the many people in our midst for whom we鈥檙e grateful, let鈥檚 be sure to include a special word of thanks for the external workers who鈥檝e made our lives fuller, safer, and healthier 鈥� and for the technologies that magnify the favorable outcomes of their sacrifice on behalf of us all.

Thomas Bamberger is president of 51风流Customer Experience & Engagement.

鈥淔rom the beginning, we鈥檝e been focused on business management software and assisting efficiency, operational effectiveness, collecting information to run a business in a timely manner, and presenting data in a format that managers can use to make good decisions,鈥� he said.

However, Lamb also shared, 鈥淚n recent years, we鈥檝e become very conscious of how important it is to understand the customers鈥� journey and modify our processes and methodology to create not only consistent but delightful experiences as well.鈥�

Customer Success Defined

The 51风流North America partner works in competitive markets, including industrial machinery and components, life sciences, industrial , aerospace and defense, food and beverage, and high tech. Lamb pointed out that solution providers in these spaces are 鈥渙nly as good as your last project.鈥�

Furthermore, customers talk: 鈥淲ord of mouth is important in any business鈥� buying decisions. We set out to create engagements that are so remarkable that our customers are compelled to tell others.鈥�

That is the basis for VistaVu鈥檚 鈥淩ock Star鈥� initiative, which aims to turn clients into raving fans.

鈥淪uccess to me is our customers telling our story for us,鈥� said Lamb.

Taking Action at VistaVu

To deliver customer experiences that turn customers into advocates, it takes more than situational awareness and core competencies, according to Lamb. For VistaVu, it meant establishing new roles and teams.

From its inception, VistaVu had operated under a typical organizational chart: Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance. In 2018, however, Lamb opted to divide its delivery team into two units: Net New and Customer Success.

VistaVu created the new role of customer engagement executive (CEE) and now places dedicated services teams with existing customers 鈥� now a focus for more than two-thirds of the company 鈥� and established a separate sales and delivery team for net-new customers.

鈥淲ith a CEE, the goal isn鈥檛 about trying to sell something. It鈥檚 about creating an experience that is so valuable the client will want to go deeper with their relationship with us,鈥� Lamb said.

The Customer Success team achieves that in part by clearly setting expectations and delivering value.

鈥淓RP clients often under value the effort required in implementation while overestimating what can be accomplished,鈥� Lamb pointed out. 鈥淲e work with them to understand business objectives at the outset and set realistic expectations.鈥�

CEEs are also tasked with moving clients from solution stabilization to optimization phases to considering new ways to leverage their technology to achieve greater benefits.

鈥淐EEs look to understand upcoming customer needs and find opportunities to increase automation or improve decision making,鈥� Lamb added.

At first, the new approach was met with skepticism internally. Some wondered about the potential for missed revenue as the balance shifted more toward improving relationships. Ironically, Lamb attributes VistaVu鈥檚 growing success to the entire organization embracing the model.

鈥淚t鈥檚 working well,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e鈥檝e never been bigger, and Customer Success has never sold more. They don鈥檛 have quotas, but they find opportunities to help in every conversation.鈥�

Recurring revenue has grown substantially year over year 鈥� now 50 percent of the total business 鈥� and VistaVu鈥檚 business valuation has grown five times.

Rave Reviews, Radical Realizations

In addition to establishing its Customer Success team, VistaVu began using Net Promoter Score (NPS) to understand its effectiveness in delivering experiences that delight customers. It asks the standard NPS questions: 鈥淗ow likely are you to recommend our company?鈥� and 鈥淲hat can we do to earn a higher score?鈥�

It is important to note that VistaVu does more than collect this data; it acts on it. When some clients requested faster response times, VistaVu reached out to see how they define acceptable turnaround and began capturing related data on a weekly basis 鈥� and soon achieved and exceeded the expectations.

鈥淲e鈥檙e insatiable listeners,鈥� said Lamb. 鈥淲e鈥檙e doing everything we can to make sure all customer experiences are remarkably positive.鈥�

He explained that his company鈥檚 new organization has also changed the way they sell to net-new customers: 鈥淵ears ago, we sold to everyone. Today, we鈥檙e a lot more selective. One of the first questions we ask is if they have a chance to become a raving fan. The size of the check isn鈥檛 what matters. The relationship needs to be successful. That鈥檚 what fuels ongoing growth.鈥�

鈥淭oday we have over 50 percent of our client base that we can call to advocate and provide a reference for us,鈥� Lamb said. 鈥淏ut we never want to get complacent. We want all of our customers to be pillars of our reputation and potential sources of new business.鈥�