Customer service alone is not enough for modern customers who are used to being the center of attention. Now, they expect much more than the resolution of their problems. Namely, they expect businesses to predict their needs, tap into their issues, and offer them a decent variety of alternate solutions. On a personal level, customers expect the brand to initiate contact, express sympathy for their inconvenience, and contribute to establishing a strong emotional connection.
In short, they are looking for not just customer experience but an overarching customer care. If a company delivers this, in return it can harvest bounties grander than customer retention: satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
Customer care is a complex set of measures aimed at creating a personalized, responsive and proactive environment. Getting it up and running used to be a hard job that required a plethora of disparate tools – until SAP C/4HANA, also known as SAP Customer Experience, was introduced.
Previously marketed as SAP Hybris, the software was reinvented in 2018 as a suite of four Service Cloud solutions – for commerce, marketing, customer service, and sales – with a single UI, data model, and the underlying AI named SAP Leonardo. The key goal of the updated platform is to deliver a 360-degree customer view – the number-one prerequisite for outstanding customer care. So today we will have a good look at what’s under the hood of this advanced AI-powered solution and how it can promote customer care enablement.
Be Wherever Customers Need You
Gone are the times when the tried-and-true phone sufficed as the only medium of support; even adding a chatbot to the website won’t save the day anymore. According to Salesforce, modern customers use up to ten channels to communicate with a company, which means that your service teams must be accessible via nine of them at least – from 24/7 chatbots to social media and WhatsApp – to keep up.
Customer care implies not only omnichannel support but also deep personalization of all customer interactions. The research by Zendesk shows that 42% of consumers blame their bad experience on being forced to explain the problem to each new support rep over and over again. The customers of today won’t tolerate being treated like an ID number, and in the majority of cases will leave after the respective experience.
Beyond that, customers hate being bothered for nothing but would greatly appreciate if brands predicted their future needs and sent valuable notification and suggestions. For example, this could be a reminder from a contact lens retailer that their customer’s current product will expire in five days, together with the reorder link attached.
All this may seem like a hard challenge to shoulder in one go, yet SAP Service Cloud from the SAP C/4HANA suite provides the necessary features to cover today’s customer care requirements.
SAP Service Cloud
With SAP Service Cloud, you can orchestrate a seamless and holistic customer care experience. Integrated with the rest of the SAP C/4HANA suite, it provides support teams with an immediate access to all the customer information available in the system, from warranty documentation on purchases to transaction history. The solution puts an end to information silos, which have been traditionally obstructing support reps’ performance, and provides them with the vital context to personalize customer interactions.
SAP Service Cloud also includes an AI chatbot available 24/7 to answer customers’ questions and resolve their problems. Thanks to advanced natural language processing capabilities, the bot renders near-human communication, so the conversation feels natural to the customer. The AI can also take uncomplicated or routine actions in real time, but if the situation requires a live agent’s involvement, it will automatically transfer the task and the full conversation history to the appropriate support representative so that no context is lost.
SAP’s artificial intelligence system Leonardo is a very potent instrument, and the company has a lofty agenda to adapt it for proactive customer support. According to Jens Trotzky, Head of AI Technology for SAP Support, the work is already underway. The company’s AI experts are collaborating on “highly support-specific innovations” that are aimed at improving the relevance of automated customer interaction and strengthening brands’ credibility with their customers.
Help Customers Help Themselves
Until recently, self-service has been a blatantly overlooked aspect of customer care. Meanwhile, the internet and smartphones made consumers more independent and accustomed to getting information and answers in just a few clicks. As a result, customer support expectations changed drastically: now customers want the opportunity to solve product or service issues via self-service portals.
The best thing about self-service portals is that they prove to be cost-effective to businesses. Do-it-yourself support costs very little compared to live support service. All this makes self-help a win-win solution that responds to customers’ behavior tendencies and curbs customer support costs. With that in mind, let’s explore what customer self-service capabilities SAP C/4HANA has to offer.
SAP Knowledge Central by MindTouch
Knowledge Central is a third-party SAP tool for setting up both internal and customer-oriented knowledge portals. Flawlessly integrated into SAP C/4HANA, it allows companies to deliver high-quality illustrative self-help materials and neatly organize them into an accessible knowledge hub. This tool offers advanced features such as content ranking and natural language search, which significantly reduces customers’ effort and drives their loyalty.
SAP Jam Collaboration
SAP Jam Collaboration is a more multi-faceted solution than the previous one. Apart from providing the ground for a SAP Service Cloud-integratable knowledge base, it gives customers content contribution and discussion options. Letting your audience tell their stories or voice their concerns is a great way to demonstrate you care about what they have to say.
To Wrap It Up
Straightforward, one-size-fits-all customer support has no place in today’s environment where customers expect highly-personalized and innovative care. Customer care is indeed a more demanding activity to arrange and maintain, but offers a viable competitive advantage as a payoff.
SAP С/4HANA offers an all-in-one solution to the challenges of providing personalized customer experience and is especially favorable for customer care setups. Each tool outlined in the article serves its individual purpose, but all of them are cross-integrated within a solid corporate ecosystem and can be accessed from a single interface. So, if you have decided to transform your customer support strategy into the next-generation customer care, it’s worth considering the SAP С/4HANA option.
