SAP Unveils 4 Qualtrics CX Offerings at Its Sapphire Now Conference

SAP today introduced Qualtrics CustomerXM as part of its SAP C/4HANA product suite and launched four Qualtrics customer experience products that combine experience data (X-data) with operational data (O-data) to help companies measure and improve core experiences for customers.

The new products, launched during SAP's 30^th annual Sapphire Now user conference in Orlando, Fla., include the following:

• SAP Qualtrics CX for Commerce, allowing companies to gather feedback about ease of use, website layout, mobile app experience and navigation, and personalization across all digital interactions. This solution combines Qualtrics’ CustomerXM digital and retail solutions with the SAP Commerce Cloud.
• SAP Qualtrics CX for Sales, allowing companies to assess the strength of their client relationships, improve sales productivity, and provide a premium sales experience. CX for Sales combines Qualtrics’ CustomerXM B2B offering with the SAP Sales Cloud to help organizations improve experiences across purchase, installation, support, and contract renewals.
• SAP Qualtrics CX for Customer Service, allowing companies to design and deliver seamless service experiences to customers across every support channel, including phone, chat, in-person, and digital. CX for Customer Service combines CustomerXM contact center solutions with the SAP Service Cloud so customer care teams can close experience gaps and provide personalized support to their customers over the phone and out in the field.
• SAP Qualtrics CX for Marketing, allowing companies to collect feedback to better understand their customer segments, target audiences, and customer behavior. CX for Marketing combines CustomerXM digital solution with SAP Marketing Cloud so marketing teams can build more effective automated campaigns that tie investments directly to the bottom line.

"To achieve break-through results, organizations need more than a system of record. They need a system of action designed to intelligently use both X and O data to improve customer experiences," Webb Stevens, vice president of Qualtrics Customer Experience, said in a blog post. "By bringing together Qualtrics and SAP C/4HANA, we are building the most complete and powerful customer experience platform, offering organizations the tools they need to build better experiences, better understand their customers, and adapt to their rapidly changing expectations."

And those expectations do change rapidly, according to SAP CEO Bill McDermott, who pointed out in his morning keynote today that there is a growing customer experience gap between what customers expect and what companies deliver. According to McDermott, who delivered his remarks to more than 30,000 conference attendees, that gap is a $1.6 trillion problem that results when frustrated consumers take their business elsewhere after bad customer experiences.

"We want everyone to remember their Xs and Os," McDermott said. "Experience management is the new frontier for the world's best-run businesses. I have never seen SAP more fired up to help our customers be a driving force for growth, innovation, and optimism."

Further emphasizing the customer experience gap, Ryan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, noted that though 80 percent of CEOs believe their companies provide great customer experiences, only 8 percent of consumers share that view.

"We live in the experience economy, where organizations are either intentionally racing to the top or unknowingly racing to the bottom," Smith said. "The difference between the companies that will win is they understand how X-data and O-data work together to tell the story of what is happening in an organization, why it's happening, and how to act in real time to deliver break-through business results."

Beyond its investment in the Qualtrics portfolio, which began in November when SAP acquired the company for $8 billion, SAP "continues to evolve to be the company that you need us to be," McDermott stressed. SAP, he said, has invested more than $70 billion in innovation since 2010.

Christian Klein, SAP's chief operations officer, said a big part of that investment lately has centered around artificial intelligence, analytics, cloud technologies, and product integrations with both SAP and non-SAP products.

"We're transforming SAP into an intelligence company," Klein said. "AI will remain a key focus on our development roadmap."

Klein expects that by the end of the year, SAP will have increased automation through AI by 50 percent, to have developed more than 70 business services on the SAP Cloud Platform, and to have greatly expanded SAP's C4/HANA and S4/HANA integrations. 

"When we introduced C4/HANA last year, it was about providing a single view of the customer on any channel," McDermott said.

Expanded Relations with Apple

SAP also used the Sapphire conference to announce an expanded partnership with Apple that will make CORE ML, Apple's on-device machine learning technology,  available as part of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. The next version of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK, available later this month, will enable businesses to create custom, intelligent iOS apps powered by SAP Leonardo. Machine learning models will automatically download to iPhone and iPad so apps can run offline and then dynamically update when connected to SAP Cloud Platform.

SAP is also expanding its app offerings to the Mac following the success of many apps for the iOS mopbile environment.

"Apple is on the rise in the enterprise," McDermott said. "Our customers love the unmatched security and ease of use iOS is known for and that it gives them a superior platform to build game-changing business apps. We have a strong partnership, and today's announcements show SAP's commitment to continue our innovation with Apple."

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who joined McDermott on stage for part of the keynote, was excited about the partnership. "Enterprise customers are seeing real business benefits when they use iOS. We are excited for SAP to extend these experiences further on iPhone and iPad, as well as bringing them to the Mac for the first time. This is an important milestone for our partnership, and we are thrilled to be working together with SAP to empower our customers with the world's most-trusted business process data on iPhone, iPad and Mac," he said.

The Sapphire conference also served as the backdrop for the launch of several integrations between SAP and OpenText applications. These include the following:

• OpenText Extended Enterprise Content Management for Engineering, available both on premises and in the cloud;
• OpenText Extended ECM for Microsoft Office 365, a cloud solution connecting Office 365 directly into SAP ERP, CRM and related business applications; and
• OpenText Information Extraction Service (IES) for SAP Solutions, offering users machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR) to capture and extract information from incoming communications.

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