How SAP just changed the entire game with a single acquisition.
Sign of the CX times.
Buckle up kids, the next decade is going to transformational for all major business sectors as SAP manifests what could possibly by one of the most significant gamechangers we’ve seen since the commercialization of the internet.
For those of you following along you’re already aware that “the Experience Economy” is a thing. What’s crazy about the announcement of SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics is that they essentially, just cut off the entire advertising and marketing industry off at the pass.
Until now ad agencies held this place of value as a conduit to customers. Agencies mined culture, conjured relevancy for brands in the hearts and minds of consumers.
As of today, brands will systematically know more about customers than anyone else. This means they can engage, and grow customer lifetime value without a 3rd party. Not to mention this move, along with their other acquisitions, puts marketing attribution in the hands of the brand - something agencies hailed as the holy grail for decades and never quite realized.
This means.
Be prepared to see SAP become the Amazon of industry. This recent move combined with the aggressive investments around consumer expectations and purchase behaviors they garnered from their purchase of Concur to the acquisition of Abacus in 2016 linking attribution models to cx data, combined with their substantial footprint in the ERP space makes them poised to destabilize as agencies around the globe.
Just take a look at this spree of CX acquisitions:
As I’m an ad guy this is pivotal moment in my space, but when you look at SAP’s other acquisitions, you’ve got to imagine that they are poised to created the first of it’s kind, seamless CX thread across Supply and Demand. Just looking at the acquisition of manufacturing robotics, consumer experience, attribution, IoT, Cloud technology et al, and you have to assume they have everything in place to optimize every step of customer lifetime value.
Beyond the hype there are some very interesting signs that point to their insightful strategy. Take for instance their acquisition of Altiscale the big data Hadoop player. This moves tells us that beneath their optimization promise lies an avante guard vision of data sequencing that fundamentally reimagines how data relationships are defined. Get ready for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for brands….at scale.
Final thoughts.
Kudos to the team at SAP for this seminal move. It looks like Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce execs may have just been caught sleeping at the wheel unless they have a savvy ERP acquisition in the works to join the new era of the experience economy that I like to call C-suite Centricty.
The most important breakthrough in CX and Service Design This year. CX3
Despite our best efforts over the last 50 years to create the perfect service design blueprint, things are still a little cray. This all got a little worse about 5 years ago when CX reared it's head and introduced the customer journey into the Kaizen, LEAN manufacturing ecosystem that had been finally streamlined and grown into a mature practice of "Service Design".
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Flash forward to today where it's not enough for the CFO and COO to have the nexus of data that runs the organization. Now we have to incorporate the CTO and CMO. All of these Silos have to talk transparently to each other. The problem? They all speak different data languages.
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At Service Design Week 2018, Advisory Board Member Dennis Wakabayashi broke opened the door to a whole new era of C-Suite Centricity where AI and Machine Learning tools will rapidly unite the C-Suite visibility into customer behavior as a single unified view of the business and the customer at scale. Essentially introducing a harmony of demand and supply at scale using AI Tools.
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Although AI and Machine learning will do the data crunching that humans cannot, the real barrier is still HUMAN CENTERED and requires savvy design professionals, evangelists and practitioners to make Centricity and asset for your business.
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If you want to kick start your CX/Service Design transformation. Integer Group has more info and a scheduling app at: https://www.21chickens.com/ that can help you get going in the right direction.