Beginning of September 2025, the CRM Magazine published its 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards on Destination CRM. This year, the awards nominate five outstanding companies across eleven categories. As in recent years, CRM Magazine asked some renowned analysts to chose Industry Leaders for 2025 using a simple question: “If you had to recommend a CRM solution—whether an enterprise suite, contact center infrastructure, or a customer data platform—to a client, what would they choose, and why?”

And, of course, the analysts – being analysts – gave their answers. And good answers they are.

But this is not the topic of this post. 

What is it then? Glad you asked …

It is about the term “unified customer experience platform” and the corresponding award category. Looking at the winners and their corresponding descriptions, it turns out that there seems to be a clear dominance of customer service and contact center solutions in this area – with the exception of the honorary mention of Sprinklr, which has its origins in the social media sphere.

This dominance suggests that customer experience is somehow made equivalent to customer service. This shows quite some success of the narratives that CCaaS and customer service vendors are telling. This is especially true if very renowned analysts, who are in part thought leaders as well, follow it.

Which somewhat irks me. And it reminds me of how the term CRM got more and more appropriated by vendors of sales force automation, SFA, solutions, until CRM almost became synonymous to SFA, which it isn’t. And never was.

Again, this is not about the winners. They are great and very successful companies in their own rights. But, to me, customer experience platform is not equal to customer service or contact center. It is rather a term that describes a more holistic category. I’d argue that both, customer service and contact center are part of a customer experience platform – if there is one single solution that makes up this platform at all. Or can make up one.

Let’s decompose the term into its three main components, namely “unified”, “customer experience”, and “platform”. 

I want to start with customer experience.

Using the definition of Paul Greenberg, customer experience is “how a customer feels about a company over time”. Bruce Temkin defined customer experience similarly as “the perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization”. So, let’s just roll with these. 

Both, especially Temkin’s definition, are about multiple interactions. Neither limits the type of interactions. So, essentially, the customer experienced is a result of all interactions, across all channels and on all journeys customers are when interacting with a company. This is the complete customer life cycle. From a CRM point of view, this includes marketing, sales, and service. It also includes interactions with products or services themselves. 

What both definitions implicitly include is the notion of measurement; so, it needs an analytics component.

The basis for all of this is data, reliable data. Data that covers all (digital) interactions that a customer has with a brand, which makes up a customer profile.

This brings us to the term “unified”

Customers interact with companies on a variety of channels. In order to make this interaction data really useful, companies must work on creating a unique profile of a customer, i.e., harmonize or unify customer profiles from several, potentially disjoint sources, to become a single authoritative one that enables the reliable identification of a customer. 

The data coming from different sources also requires a governance process. How does the data need to look like, how can the underlying data structures be amended or changed, which data sources exist, and which take precedence, who owns it, who is able to change or interfere, how does data age? All these questions, and more, need to be answered.

Me being me, I will add that customer consent is an essential part of all this. 

For a customer to have an individual experience, this data needs to be activated and be supplied to the downstream systems with which the customer interacts. I’ll call this an engagement. This requires omnichannel capabilities, if not even the ability to be channel agnostic. The customer interactions often, if not mostly, need to be personalized, at least to some degree. In some instances, interactions also require real-time capabilities. This is necessary e.g., when engaged in a chat with a digital agent or a customer service agent, or even when a promotion shall be served to the web site. In other situations, timing requirements are less strict. 

To round this off, a notion of journey and journey orchestration is required. After all, customers are interacting with companies to get a solution to a problem or just some information. In any case, some steps, often across channels, are required to accomplish this. These steps need to be orchestrated to be most effective for both parties, customer and company.

Last, but not least, platform

According to Merriam Webster, a platform in a computer science sense is “an application or website that serves as a base from which a service is provided”. The service in this case is customer engagement with the goal of the customer having a good or better customer experience. Note, the systems do not “deliver” an experience. They allow the customer to have one.

The platform provides the scalability of the overall system. It also provides the APIs that are necessary to effectively and efficiently communicate with potential up- and downstream systems. Plus, it provides the foundation for storing and activating the data, so that it can be used for individual interactions. Technically, this is the strong analytical component that I referred to above, and which is also necessary for the journey orchestration component. As customer requirements change, the analytics component needs to be supported by an AI / machine learning solution.

And what does this mean?

In the first instance this means that the appropriation of the term unified customer experience platform by customer service and CCaaS vendors diminishes the value this type of platform can deliver. It also means that there is a sore lack of a definition. During the 2018 CRM Evolution conference, I spoke about rethinking CRM to become CEM. As part of this, I proposed a customer experience architecture, which I think is still relevant.

I defined this architecture an open platform that consistently receives customer signals and processes these data (legally) in a way that companies can serve customers with information that is relevant for them in context. One of the core objectives is to break down silos, department silos as well as data silos. Today, I will go a few steps further.

Unified Customer Experience Platform – a definition

A unified customer experience platform is an open software solution that enables businesses to engage in consistent and personalized interactions with customers, across all touchpoints and journeys, based on a unified customer profile.

This definition caters to all the points I discussed above. 

On checking, it is also quite close to the definition of a delivery CDP by the Customer Data Platform Institute. 

So, a unified customer experience platform might rather be a concept than a software category. This is actually what I do think.

But more importantly: What do you think?

The News

On September 14, 2022, Zendesk announced the release of its new customer sentiment and intent functionality: Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist. These new AI based solutions shall “enable businesses to triage customer support requests automatically and access valuable data at scale.

Intelligent Triage and Smart Assist are the next step in Zendesk’s vision to create accessible CX AI for companies of all sizes. The technology uses proprietary industry expertise and insights from trillions of customer data points and applies a vertical lens. This creates models custom to each business capable of identifying the intent, language and sentiment of each customer interaction.

This unique approach to applying machine learning creates more personalized and informed interactions to better serve customers. For example, specific inquiries, such as "I'm having problems with payment", can be automatically sent to an agent who is equipped to handle billing for a quicker resolution, while inquiries that include language written in all capital letters or in a sarcastic way will indicate a highly negative sentiment and be routed to the top of the queue.

The new capabilities include:

• Instantly route and prioritize revenue drivers, ensuring agents are working on business-critical requests
• Analyze distribution of requests so businesses can better plan operations, collaborate across departments and identify improvement opportunities supported by data for more efficient CX operations
• Automatically guide agents on how to best resolve a customer’s issue in real-time, understand context, recommend solutions, and improve coaching and training with valuable insights
• Continuously boost accuracy as the AI solutions receive feedback on predictions and recommendations
• Detect sensitive information automatically to meet compliance and security needs or extract confidential data like names, addresses, phone numbers, usernames, and financial info for use in workflows”

The bigger picture

Customer support is a very difficult business. All too often agents are not trained too well and service departments suffer from high turnover. On the other hand, customers expect to solve issues faster and faster. This drives a demand for efficiency. This gets underpinned by the current economic climate in combination with a worker shortage (although this shortage might also be self-inflicted by businesses). 

In general, AI has become an important ingredient in customer service and, more generally, CX solutions. The main use cases are ticket routing and assisting in solution search. While there are a number of chatbot solutions that base on an underlying AI, their performance often is not good enough to be really successful. Another challenge is that implementations regularly take considerable time. Therefore, the pressure on customer service departments through case deflection does not decrease enough.

My analysis and pov

As Cristina Fonseca, VP Product of Zendesk and co-founder and CEO of Cleverly, the company that got acquired by Zendesk in 2021 and that is behind this feature set explained to me, Zendesk was behind the competition. What Zendesk now does is automating the mundane tasks, therefore effectively relieving agents from time consuming tasks. The second part is that the solution comes with pre-trained models that make it ready to run in very short times. Doing the hard work and analysing that 80 percent of inquiries have the same intent across industries has been the key for this. Still, the built-in feedback loop that allows for constant company specific readjustment of the model, is important as there normally is no one-size-fits-it-all solution and there is a high likelihood for service requests changing in nature over time. This is also true for the revenue drivers prioritization of requests, which is likely to be at least industry-, if not business model and therefore company specific. I am curious to see how this works across industries.

Making these features available as part of the suite and not as an add-on is a smart move as it doesn’t change the pricing for existing enterprise edition customers and potentially drives more customers to choose this edition.

With this solution Zendesk gains an edge, albeit probably of temporary nature. Clearly, the company should continue on this path to maintain it, maybe adding coaching capabilities that help agents and supervisors to train themselves and each other. Additionally, if the solution works as expected, why not also using it for case deflection. After all, from a system perspective, it does not really matter whether an agent is guided on how to best resolve an issue or whether the customer him-/herself is guided. From a company perspective, it does. Fonseca maintains that the market is not yet ready for it. This is probably right as many chatbot implementations are rather underwhelming. Still, coming from a working solution can change this. In addition, Zendesk should add an explainability capability, although Fonseca maintains that this is not a priority as there is too much turnover. Still, a good deal of productivity improvement and efficiency will come from achieving a stable workforce. With an explainability component Zendesk can achieve two goals: first it helps coaching the agents and second it will increase the acceptance of the system. Untrained agents will more easily accept the system recommendations, effectively treating them as prescriptions. In which case they better be accurate. The confidence score that is already provided is a first step into this direction. 

CRM, in various incarnations, has been around since the 90s. If one counts in contact managers like Goldmine, then we are actually talking about the 80s. Some consider it a strategy, but whether it is or not, is a discussion that has been closed long ago.

Still, there is a lot going on. And I mean a LOT.

So, it is time to talk to someone who accompanies the industry since it was immature, someone who also contributed to shaping the industry and some of the solutions around.

So, we reached out to Volker Hildebrandt.

Volker is a fountain of information about where it comes from and where it is heading to. So, if you are interested in the current state of affairs and in the trajectory that the industry is likely to take, then listen in.

You will not regret it!

The CRMKonvos gang had the immense pleasure to chat with Ginger Conlon, CRM Playaz alumna and freshly minted Thought Leadership Director at Genesys.

Throughout her career, Ginger has seen and and gained more than a little marketing experience, looking more at the strategic angle than tactical execution. How to build brands and messaging around brands etc.

Some fascinating questions around these topics are: Who does own customer experience (besides everyone)? Or how to create win-win situations?

Listen to Ginger who opens up her in-depth experience for us.

This was good for a lively and insightful conversation, hopefully not only for us but also for our audience. And it is not only talk, Ginger also has the data.

Since about February or March of Anno Domini 2020 we regularly hear about how the Covid crisis is driving “digital transformation”. You now might ask yourself why I put this term into quotes. Bear with me for a minute, it’ll be explained …

For sure, this crisis is forcing many a company into enabling its employees to work remotely. It also forced some companies to at least temporarily close physical doors as supply chains and/or delivery of products and services are severely inhibited or even broken. We also see a lot of companies implement interesting hybrid strategies that bring what we thought of being decidedly offline experiences into the online world.

A good example for this trend are wineries that lost an important lead generation and sales channel with their temporary inability to host wine tastings in their cellars. Till now the opinion was that nothing can beat the experience of being down there in a wine cellar, surrounded by barrels of ageing wine, musty air, like-minded people and a connoisseur that explains the wines, their provenance and their characteristics.

Still, some of them have transformed the experience they deliver during wine tastings into a combination of offline and online experience. Wine gets selected by the customers, an appointment for the tasting is made, and the wine is wrapped into some nice packaging, along with some information, and sent to the customer. The tasting itself then is supported by platforms such as Virtual Wine Tasting, Tasting Room, or Cheerswithme. The experience might not be the same as at the winery, and it shouldn’t. Instead, it offers something that a pure offline event cannot offer, either: The ability to taste and try very different wines in a community, without leaving home, and supported by an expert, maybe even as part of an overarching event.

Another example: Some, mainly smaller local retail shops, looked into the Amazon playbook – on a far smaller scale, but still.

Not being able to allow customers into their premises, they started to place their phone number on the door to be able to accept orders while they were building their web shop, first as a stop-gap solution, then replaced by something more powerful. Delivery initially started as simple as using the owner’s car – again, to be replaced by something more powerful.

They evolved their business model.

Other companies that I look at, support their service centre by implementing a conversational AI, starting with simple self-service and marketing scenarios, planning to extend these into more sophisticated ones.

Yet other ones are optimizing their quotation process by extending the scope of their existing sales force automation system from opportunity, account, contact and activity management into the quotation process, therefore reducing technology breaks.

These are four very different examples of actions taken by four very different types of companies.

And now we are coming back to “digital transformation”.

Are these companies undergoing a digital transformation after all?

And even more broadly: What is a digital transformation after all?

These are interesting and important questions.

And not simple to answer, let me tell that.

To begin with, let me do some definition work, for the sake of clarity.

Does it matter to define?

Sure as! And here is why.

A little communication theory – or is it information theory?

Well, actually communication theory is a subset of information theory, but this is not the topic of this excursion.

Both are pretty complex topics that I am going to simplify quite a lot to make my point.

Communication is mostly about the mutual exchange of information between a sender and a recipient. They use a communication channel, and they both have their own frame of reference, which they use to encode and decode messages.

Sounds pretty techy, doesn’t it?

So, let’s look at people. Important communication channels to convey information between two people are the written and the spoken word. The words are encoded in a language, say, English. All of us have a different command of this language, even if we are native speakers. English is not equal to English. Means the channel (written or spoken word) itself does not guarantee that the meaning that the speaking person wants to transport is what the listening person hears.

If that wasn’t already enough: The frames of reference of our two people are defined by many things, including their upbringing, their culture, origin, gender, the relationship they share, even their mood. Let’s call this their contexts.

Most people share parts of their contexts; this means their contexts are not mutually exclusive – luckily, or else communication would be impossible. However, these contexts differ. This, in turn, means that, even if the listening persons hears exactly what the speaking person says, it will likely be interpreted differently.

The result? The result is a misunderstanding.

One way to reduce the likelihood of misunderstandings is to define terms. Scientists are doing this all the time. All for the sake of being precise.

People use the same terms all the time.

So, yes, definition matters.

Back to the topic

Many people, including myself, are talking about businesses undergoing digital transformation. I am convinced that none of us has the same picture in mind when we are using this term, or digitalization, or the slightly shorter one that is digitization. We sometimes even use them interchanging.

But are they the same?

Let’s dig into it and see – and start with what Wikipedia has to say, coming to an own definition, if necessary.

And trust me, it is necessary. Wikipedia relates digitization to information only, digitalization to industries and organizations, and digital transformation to whole societies.

This is not exactly helpful in the context of businesses, as it means that a business cannot undergo a digital transformation – unless one looks at it as a society, which is probably too bold.

So, here we go. Let’s keep the notion of customer experience in mind and define!

Digitization

Wikipedia defines digitization as „the process of converting information into a digital (i.e. computer-readable) format, in which the information is organized into bits. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or signal (usually an analog signal) by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples”.

Well, that’s quite a chunk, but in line with what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says. So, let’s digest it and reduce it to its core.

Digitization is the process of converting analogue information into a computer readable format.

A good start; it gives the what but is missing the why. The definition is about data, not process, therefore the reason for digitization is process efficiency.

Therefore, my definition of digitization:

Digitization is the process of converting analogue information into a computer readable format with the goal of improving existing processes.

Or in other words: Digitization is about doing things better.

Digitalization

Interestingly enough, Wikipedia redirects digitalization to digitization, suggesting that these terms mean one and the same. On the other hand the term digitalization is covered to some extent in the article about digital transformation. According to that article digitalization is a “technologically-induced change within industries, markets, and branches” that “has enabled new processes business models services ”.

The OED relates digitalization to “the adoption or increase in use of digital or computer technology by an organization, industry, country, etc.”.

This, again, is in line in the sense that digitalization seems to be about process. These processes can rely upon digitalized data but also on (natively) digital data. If they create data, it will be digital. So:

Digitalization is the use of computer technology on top of computer readable data to create new processes that provide better business outcomes than the original ones or that have not been possible at all without the use of computer technology.

In brief: Digitalization is about doing better things.

Digital Transformation

According to Wikipedia, digital transformation is “the use of new, fast, and frequently changing digital technology to solve problems”.

Now you know it, don’t you? At least you now know why this article is flagged for having multiple issues … by the way, quantum computers are ruled out by this definition, as they are not working digitally.

So, let’s have a look at what the Gartner Group says: A “digital business transformation is the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new business model”.

What the Gartner definition makes clear is that digital (business) transformation is not about implementing technology but about transforming the whole business: It is a business transformation that is targeted at creating new business models, and being able to adapt to a changing environment. Abstracted away from businesses, the results of a digital transformation are new and different outcomes. To be able to get these new and different outcomes, the  transformation builds on the power of computers, algorithms, and data. To be possible, a digital transformation requires an outside-in view, while technology is a mandatory enabler. Digital transformation inherently is disruptive.

Looking into this, my definition of digital transformation is:

A digital transformation is an organizational transformation that covers organization, values, culture, mission and vision, using an outside-in view. It is enabled by computer technology. Through this combination, the organization can provide new solutions for problems or solutions for problems that could not be addressed before.

In brief: Digital transformation is about doing entirely different things.

Now, back to the original question

Does the Corona-crisis accelerate digital transformation?

Looking at the definitions of digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation, the answer is a clear no.

Let’s summarize:

• Digitization: Doing things better.
• Digitalization: Doing better things.
• Digital transformation: Doing entirely different things.

What companies are dealing with are digitization and digitalization, being able to do things or do them better.

A digital transformation is a complete reinvention of the business, which is disruptive in nature. While a few might choose this way, the majority does not.

Final thought: Which opens the door for disruptors …

What do you think?

The News

On October 1^st, 2020 SAP announced its intent to acquire Emarsys, a leader in the personalization area and omnichannel customer engagement management specialist. The transaction is expected to be completed in Q2/2020 and still subject to regulatory approval. The purchasing price is not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Emarsys was funded with $55.3M US by Vector Capital in two funding rounds 2015 and 2016. Not being a financial analyst, I would expect a purchasing price of north of $ 500M US.

Emarsys positions itself as a customer engagement platform that combines omni-channel automation, personalization, loyalty management and reporting/analytics. The company has more than 1,500 customers, makes about 2/3 of its revenues in the EMEA region and has a pretty strong partner network including technology and agency partners. Key commerce integrations include Adobe (Magento), Salesforce, Shopify and, of course SAP Commerce. On top of this, the platform brings prebuilt industry specific use cases and analytics into the fold.

According to Christian Klein, CEO SAP, “once the transaction closes, SAP will enable brands to connect every part of their business to the customer, including experience data. We will deliver a portfolio for a ‘commerce anywhere’ strategy allowing for hyperpersonalized digital commerce experiences across all channels at any time”. Bob Stutz, president SAP Customer Experience, adds that “with Emarsys technology, SAP Customer Experience solutions can link commerce signals with the back office and activate the preferred channel of the customer with a relevant and consistently personalized message, allowing customers the freedom to choose their own engagement”.

The bigger Picture

The ability to segment in real time becomes more and more important, especially with increasing e-commerce and what I would dub commerce anywhere. It is key to be able to serve the right information, regardless of the communications channel, in milliseconds rather than seconds, using a database of millions of customers. The increasing trend towards headless commerce solutions as well as commerce functionalities built into store apps and messenger style or social media apps are a good indication of what is required.

This not only requires the ability of personalization at scale (which Emarsys delivers) but also to decide in real time where the interaction needs to take place, in other words, real time interaction management and customer journey orchestration (which is not the strong suit of Emarsys).

Looking from another angle, the overall CX business becomes more and more platform oriented, with currently four major platforms being around (Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP), and Salesforce being the dominant player in the CX game, with some other players interfering on the last mile, e.g. Facebook, WeChat, Alibaba, or ByteDance.

My Analysis and Point of View

This acquisition came as a kind of a surprise for me as I did (and do) not see much of a chance for SAP to become one of the top two players in the marketing segment. My glass ball must have been slightly fogged up. Based upon this, the game plan that Bob Stutz has in mind, must be different.

Still, my first reaction was of the ‘what the …’ variety, especially as SAP already owns a functionally strong marketing solution. On the other hand, the SAP Marketing Cloud has a few drawbacks: It is strongly underrated and not cloud native, which admittedly is more a problem for SAP than for customers. In addition it lacks Emarsys ecosystem and has a strong focus on connectivity to SAP. Emarsys fixes most of this and already brings integrations into SAP Commerce and SAP Conversational AI. In addition, if played properly, Emarsys can remain a bridge head for SAP into accounts that are not using SAP Commerce. In other words, similar to Qualtrics, Emarsys can open up doors into other vendors’ ecosystems.

And 1,500+ customers that come with Emarsys, is not a too small number, either.

On the flip side, SAP has to undergo another round of integrating third party software into its stack.

In addition, with the acquisition of Emarsys the future of the B2C flavour of SAP Marketing Cloud is in question now. This will make existing customers pretty nervous and will therefore require a good plan and good communication to existing B2C customers, of which some are pretty renowned.

Marshall Lager, a long standing CRM industry analyst, remarks that “every marketing automation system offers personalization, but they don't all do it equally well; too far in one direction and the messages are mistargeted, too far in the other and they become intrusive. The good news is that Emarsys has made personalization its focus, and bringing that expertise into SAP will be welcome. The not-so-good news is that SAP already has a number of marketing technologies at its disposal, and is still working on integrating them fully into its cloud, so this proposed acquisition adds that much more complexity to the equation.

German analyst Ralf Korb opines that "the acquisition was a surprise and cam faster than expected. Looking at past acquisitions the situation seems to have calmed down and integration seems to be on a good path. Esteban Kolsky and Bob Stutz and their teams are working hard on improving the already good reputation of SAP (which SAP also rightfully has in the CRM and CX areas) and strategic partnerships. In my point of view SAP has learned to first check in how far an offering fits to its strategy and actively supports customer needs (outside-in), which resulted in the going public of Qualtrics. I think that the Emarsys fit, be it human, contribution or added value for customers, is considerable. The delineation to existing offerings will be achieved by the team in a short time and likely, due to its proximity, in a more agile way than with other acquisitions. This way, SAP can offer a combination of best-of-breed cloud and on premise that does not confuse customers but opens up choice. 

This has been a year of change for SAP, what sports fans might call a rebuilding year. The addition of Emarsys seems like a smart choice, like adding a star player, but it remains to be seen how well it plays with the rest of the team.”

Another positive for SAP is that it now owns a loyalty solution again, after needing to rely on a partner solution for some time.

The caution of Emarsys not having “native CX support” lacking “native survey creation capabilities” that the Gartner Group names in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines is easily mitigated with SAP Qualtrics capabilities – given an appropriate pricing model.

Remains the question of SAPs upcoming Customer Data Solutions (aka CDP) that is supposed to be built around the SAP Customer Data Cloud and allegedly with a little help of a budding partnership with Thunderhead. Looking at Emarsys not being a strong RTIM player as per the Forrester Wave Real-Time Interaction Management of Q1 2019, I can see the following: SAP has understood that the customer journey is owned and controlled by the customer, not by the company the customer interacts with. Still, this journey needs to be orchestrated. This is where the strength of Thunderhead One lies. The Customer Data Cloud delivers the profiling, identity management and consent management parts. So, jointly, these three pieces of SAP software could deliver the what (the messaging as such) and the how and where (where to deliver it) in an orchestrated way, across channels.

This combination would be a true game changer.

I am now really curious about the next SAP Customer Experience announcements and what we are shown at SAP CX Live on October 14/15.

What we know and can observe

• SAP is strong with B2B customers. Manufacturing, but also CPG companies are some of the biggest customers.
• In the CX area, SAP is not particularly strong in with its Marketing Cloud (although the software is underrated in my eyes)
• With SAP Commerce, SAP owns one of the leading E-Commerce solutions.
• The Sales- and Service Clouds are pretty strong and do not need to hide.
• Growth in the Sales Cloud seems to be declining.
• The Sales- and Service Clouds are functionally adjacent to SAP’s core business, which is the ERP aka Digital Core. Marketing is not.
• SAP is investing in the service area, especially in S/4. The customer service module in S/4 is also essentially the former CRM Service.
• One of the four core processes that SAP has defined is lead to cash, which includes a lot of Commerce Cloud and Sales Cloud, augmented by quite some ex Callidus (CPQ, Commissions) and some Marketing Cloud.
• SAP CPQ, the former Callidus CPQ has been moved organizationally towards the ERP group.
• A good part of the on premise SAP CRM Sales and Service have been made part of S/4HANA.
• SAP has invested a lot into integrating the acquired solutions into the own software; this to an extent that made customers worried about the further roadmap.
• SAP has created a number of microservices on the SAP Cloud Platform that resemble business objects, in particular the business partner and with SAP Graph has introduced a business object orientated access model for its solutions, which abstracts away from the actual data layer.
• The Commerce Cloud is undergoing some modularization and the storefront is getting disjoint with Spartacus; this essentially creates a headless commerce solution, which goes beyond E-Commerce but makes commerce channel agnostic.
• In a recent investor interview (to which I wasn’t invited, so I took the quotes from a cloudwars post by Bob Evans), SAP CFO Luka Mucic made a few interesting statements about the SAP CX stance:
  • So, first of all, customer experience is absolutely a key market in which we want to be a significant player but with a focus on those categories where we clearly see that there is potential for SAP to be a strong #1 or #2 player.
  • There is a very obvious one in which we are leading the market and that’s the whole area of experience management, where we have Qualtrics, which is the category leader and that we are truly excited about and we are obviously looking at a partial IPO of Qualtrics to even further exemplify and magnify our growth opportunities.
  • The other area as I mentioned before is e-commerce, where we have with Hybris a very strong cloud fit that is growing in the high double-digits and that is in huge demand these days in particular with the challenges introduced by COVID. We think this is one of the core investment priorities for many companies around the globe.
  • And then also areas like customer data cloud, for example, where we also have a leading solution that can help customers manage the GDPR and triggers a digital sales motion in a way that is conducive to consumer preferences.
  • In others that from our perspective more translate into commodity markets where the growth rates are coming down and admittedly there is clear market leadership by others, we might look also at one or the other partnership opportunities. And in the meantime of course we see that the rising tide lifts many boats in many of those areas and so we will continue to look practically at an opportunity to participate in this growth.
  • But we don’t necessarily see it as an area in which we would dramatically double down on our investments. But clearly, CX remains a critical pillar of our cloud strategy, just in a little bit more of a focused sense.

• Not surprisingly, the CX team is incredibly busy.
• There seems to be considerable effort spent into re-platforming the CX suite, moving it away from the underlying Netweaver, making it cloud native software.
• The team is building something that they are calling a Customer Data Platform ++. This CDP seems to be built around the Customer Data Cloud as part of its core.
• SAP has moved a few of its main business objects and engines into the SAP Cloud Platform and/or is breaking them down into micro services.
• A strategic partnership with Thunderhead seems to be evolving, which is not overly surprising after Thunderhead’s partnership with Salesforce cooled down sudden- and rapidly and with Bob Stutz being the one who initiated the partnership at Salesforce
• There is some B2B marketing functionality that currently makes its way into the Sales Cloud.

And now you surely ask yourself where all this does lead to?

And finally, some suggestions

#BeyondCXM. To turn customers and employees into fans as a possibiility to achieve sustainable business is what Ralf Korb and Thomas Wieberneit as hosts discussed with Dr. Winfried Felser and Marc Schmid, CEO of Novadoo.

Sometimes the magic of customer experience if found beyond normal processes and classic expectations and therefore individual, consumable, experiences.

This happens especially if one offers a genuine and heartfelt 'Thank you' and with that creates an emotional bondo or relationship with the customer, instead of just a transactional one.

The News

The Bigger Picture

My Analysis and PoV