We are all striving to keep pace with the digital transformation, find the new technology that's right for us, and achieve that elusive “Omnichannel, Seamless and Ultimate Customer Experience”.
Yet, in all the turmoil, we may be missing one of the most important elements of the transformation process: bringing our internal teams with us. Before we can transform our digital prowess, we need to transform our corporate culture.
Last week we spoke with Siddarth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation at SAP. He argues that digital transformation is not preceded by technology but by people, and shares what SAP is doing to prepare for the future.
As a note, Siddarth will give the keynote at the Transformation of Search Summit in New York on 19 octobre. We touch on some of his views on the future of research in this conversation.ClickZ: Tell us a bit about where you stand and what you are working on.
Siddarth Taparia : I am responsible for all marketing from a transformation perspective: how we need to transform, what role technology plays in our transformation and behavioral changes we are working on.
SAP, as a company, has nearly 400,000 customers worldwide. We operate in over 100 countries and generate approximately $ 28 billion in revenue annually. We have one of the largest partner ecosystems, ranging from big tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon , to service partners like EY, to all of our hundreds of channel partners.
CZ: You have one of the biggest companies in this area. CommDo you understand which technologies are right for you? How do you structure your transformation?
ST : When I think of transformation, I don 't think of technology first.
It might sound a little counterintuitive because we are a tech company. And to this day, technology remains a tool that fuels transformation. But the transformation itself is about two things: business results and people.
When you put these things together, that's what drives the transformation.
Change is hard, often what we have found is that changing technology is the easiest part. Changing people's behavior takes a lot longer. We don't think of technology first. We think about the business results we are trying to generate. Then we think about the technology.
I strongly believe in what Peter Drucker said:"Culture eats strategy for breakfast". We can have the best strategy in the world. But to lead it to real change, we have to bring about cultural change - this is the hard part. Change management should by no means be underestimated.
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CZ: Can you give us an example how SAP is handling change?
ST : One of the big changes we're implementing right now is "How do we create a highly personalized experience for our customers when they arrive? "Technology works best when it disappears. We want to make sure that our technology is gone and that our customers have a great personalized experience.
For this to happen, we need to drive a lot of internal changes. We have to break down many silos between data sharing. We need to look at what we know about our customers from other sources and how we can integrate it. This often means that we have to change our internal processes.
In this case, we haveWe had to make sure that we think of the customer journey first - before we think of our internal organization and systems. We had to look at the journey and say 'this is where the customer comes to us, this is where they make some decisions, this is what the rest of their journey looks like, let's optimize them for that. »
Often, marketing teams are set up by certain structures: brand, events, advertising, digital. But it turns out the same customer comes to an event, watches an ad, goes to sap.com, and has a one-on-one conversation with a salesperson. We had to turn our systems and processes upside down to be able to integrate the data.
So above all we need to educate our employees on what we do and why. Right now, every SAP marketing employee can tell you what we mean when we talk about the customer journey. Then we think about how wecan work with employees to provide better connectivity between our own systems. How can we change our technology and our processes so that they are not visible to the customer, but accomplish what the customer matters: when I go to your website or go to an event, you know enough about me to pick up the conversation from where it left off last, so I don't repeat information or have an experience that doesn't concern me very much.
We have been working on this challenge for some time, especially with new technologies like AI and machine learning coming into play and playing such an important role in terms of delivering a much more personalized customer experience.
CZ: From a theoretical or strategic point of view, everything makes perfect sense. But from a technological point of view, can you talk about the measures you are taking? How do you find the right technology?
ST : It 's an ongoing journey for us - we are on it right now. We have almost daily conversations about how to streamline our processes, how to improve our CX, and how to use technology to achieve it.
Right now we're looking at how we can send less emails to our customers and instead naturally bring them in and find us when they need it.
None of us want more emails in our inbox. What is the combination of products? What is best for us to be found when customers are searching? We've looked at third-party solutions, emerging solutions, and in this case - we're lucky to be a tech company - our own products. Naturally, we have a content marketing strategy so that our content is relevant and can be found onGoogle to the point of need. Not proactively pushing it to inboxes, but ready to be found when the customer is looking for it. Once they find us, we can engage with them and continue to move their path forward.
If our goal is to improve the customer experience, what specific actions do we want to take? We want to move away from serving marketing messages like email and allow customers to come to us and engage where they need to be.
Next, we ask what kind of technology we need. This could turn into a broad discussion about whether we need to change our content marketing strategy or how we nurture our customers and provide them with the right information. Once we have identified these big blocks, we look at the specific technological elements.
Then the analysisprofitability builds itself. You say this is what we want to do, this is how we want to do it, and these are the technologies that we need to deploy it.
A big part of this is working with our business— operations, sales, customer journey front-end, and the leadership team to make sure what we do aligns.
Once we've done all of that, implementing this technology is the relatively easy part in this age day. The challenge is to work with people and educate them on new ways of defining things.
So, for example, sending fewer emails will improve the customer experience and get better results. There is always skepticism involved.
People say, "I send 1000 emails with a 1% open rate and we are getting some feedback." Why do I have to change it? The conversation at this point is as follows.te: "It may be working well today, but look at the trends: people are opening less emails, paying less attention to the information given to them, and using more search and social recommendations to find them. information they need. "
We must educate and empower our employees to follow the path with us.
And then, of course, one of the most important things is being able to deliver results: how did our messaging work before compared to our end-to-end personalization programs now?
CZ: Can you give any other examples of what SAP is doing to ensure that people are drivers of technological transformation, rather that reluctant to adapt it?
ST : Our leaders very much agree to ask, "Why are we doing this?" and always bring it down to a business goal. When we summIf we are able to explain it internally, we can usually explain it very well to our employees - it will generate leads, income etc.
Marketing changes completely almost every 18 to 24 months. The key is to involve employees in this journey.
At the moment we are implementing an intensive training program for our employees, so that they can develop their digital skills for the future. These skills change every 2-3 years, as the market changes very quickly. We not only want our leadership, but every SAP marketing employee to think about the skills of the future, the technologies of the future, and new ways of doing business to drive results.
Change requires a big change in culture and mindset.
In the old world, SAP sold software on premise. The customer would buy their own server, their own computers and deploy the softwareel. They would pay for the software once and use it forever. Now this model has completely changed. With cloud and SaaS, customers pay for a subscription - they basically rent it as they go, which is a huge change in the market.
From a marketing perspective, focusing on the point of sale is now just the first step in the customer journey. What was sort of the last step - the customer bought the software - became the first. Now they have to deploy it, they have to be productive on it and they have to keep using it or else they will go to your competition. They don't invest a lot in it and can just switch providers. Taking care of a customer after buying something from us is now extremely important for a company like SAP. This is a huge change in mindset for the employees, who now think of the whole cycthe life of the client.
We have launched an initiative called Customer First, thinking about how we can have customers for life. Where are our customers on their journey? Are they productive? Do they use it? Do they derive commercial value from it? It was a big change for us.
Again, our focus is on educating employees on what the new business model is and why it is changing, and what new technologies they need to think about.
Along with this, it also changes the internal KPIs and metrics we use to be successful. We're now thinking about how marketing contributes to customer adoption and lifelong value. KPIs, employee mindsets, the technologies we use and the processes we follow internally all need to evolve. This is a big change that we have made internally in marketingover the past two years.
CZ: Research is obviously a key channel to be able to pick up customer signals without sending a bunch of emails. What do you think of the changing role of research and the role of research as part of a larger marketing transformation?
ST : For me, research is the most important starting point for any conversation you are going to have with a client in the future. Forget B2B and corporate technology, the business in which we are. In our personal life, if you are thinking about buying a new exercise machine or a new book, where do you go? You go to Google, or Bing, or DuckDuckGo , or whatever your favorite search engine is. This is the starting point for the customer diary Today.
From our perspective, it's extremely important to think about how we present ourselves in searches. We have a lotinvested in paid search , but we're also thinking of SEO for our own content. Our content strategy is heavily research-based. We make sure that our content, thought leadership, research and the work we do end up being seen by customers. To do this, you have to use search.
This is the ultimate editorial of our time. If you didn't show up on the first page of Google search results, you might as well have called it someday and gone home because your customers will never see it. From our perspective, one of the most important things is to make sure that each of our products shows up in the search results for their categories. We make sure that our owned, earned and paid efforts align with our research strategy. This is a change that has been around for several years. We work with Google, Bing and aothers. Search engines have been very relevant to us for over five years now in terms of thinking about search as a logical starting point in the customer journey.
CZ: Like things like increased voice search , for example, what's your take on that?
ST : I think of it in two parts. Already in the past two years, with a large volume of search shifting from desktop to mobile, the relevance of the number of search results has become much more important. You can see maybe fifteen results on your desktop, but you only see five on your mobile. This is point 1. Point 2 is that when you then switch to voice it goes from five to maybe a result.
Not only must you have a proactive search engine strategy, you must also have a very proactive branding strategy.
As a company, we areone of the most valuable brands in the world, the 17th most valuable according to the latest brand rankings. We are one of the most valuable brands in Europe. It helps us stay out of the crowd. It helps us to be recognized.
The voice search is very relevant. We think about it every day. The number of results decreases and people are interested in less things.
A combination of a more proactive search strategy and a stronger brand - we've gone from 21st to 17th place this year alone - both of these contribute to our ranking. Some people see our results and cannot tell the difference from one company to another. As consumers, we tend to go for brands that are recognized, trustworthy and have been in the industry for a long time. The value of the brand should not be underestimated in our time.
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