SAP's Real-Time Social Insights To Revolutionise Customer Engagement

SAP AG announced the release of the SAP Social Contact Intelligence analytic application. Powered by the SAP HANA platform, the new application allows businesses to unlock sentiment and contact insights from both social media channels and internal, company-owned sources to better target and influence prospects and customers in a variety of ways.

Sales, marketing and customer service professionals today struggle to access and analyse the large amounts of internal customer data stored in disparate systems within their organisations as well as external social media data beyond the reach of their IT systems. Often they must rely on outdated information, which can cause them to miss out profitable cross- and up-sell opportunities, or incomplete information, which can lead them to rely on only gut instincts when making strategic decisions such as offering incentives to engage customers and prospects.

With SAP Social Contact Intelligence, marketing professionals can incorporate social sentiment insights directly into their campaigns to more easily identify and target prospects and influencers, and help drive incremental sales. Additionally, sales professionals can gain deeper insights into customers, allowing them quick identification of the most influential and relevant contacts at an account and service professionals can analyse product and service complaints from social channels to proactively identify trouble spots and take preventive measures.

SAP Social Contact Intelligence is part of the SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence solution, a set of applications powered by SAP HANA designed to enable real-time insight from customer data, which allows for highly personalised and targeted initiatives that can help grow both revenue and profit for organisations. SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence can leverage powerful text analysis and predictive engines within SAP HANA to bring the power of advanced natural language processing (NLP) and complex predictive algorithms directly to the fingertips of sales, marketing and service executives in an intuitive, practical and user-friendly way without the need for data scientists and PhDs.

“We saw an opportunity with SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence to influence our customers’ buying behavior and reduce product return rates,” said Michael Kuenzl, vice president of IT systems at HSE24, Europe’s leading home shopping retailer. “We sell over 1 million products to 8 million customers and estimate that decreasing our return rate by only one percent can lead to 7-digit Euro savings on the bottom line. SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence enables our marketing teams to uncover hidden trends that help drive product returns and build high-precision marketing campaigns to influence customers’ return behavior.”

SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence comprises four fully integrated offerings:

SAP Social Contact Intelligence, which allows organisations to leverage real-time sentiment and contact insights from social media and internal, company-owned sources to help identify and target the key influencers, generate new leads and opportunities, and improve overall service levels and customer loyalty.

SAP Audience Discovery and Targeting analytic application, which allows marketing managers to engage customers and help convert prospects by running advanced segmentations on large target populations and distilling insights into focused and personalised marketing campaigns.

SAP Customer Value Intelligence analytic application, which can give sales and marketing managers real-time customer insight into the true value of their customers, personalised recommendations for cross- and up-selling and closed loop execution.

SAP Account Intelligence mobile app, which offers mobile sales teams real-time customer insights and personalised selling recommendations that allow them to create target lists, increase the effectiveness of their sales visits and seize sales opportunities from anywhere.

“Customer segmentation models that took more than 12 hours to complete today can be run 985 times faster,” said Bernd Seidel, Business Solution Management, Thomas Cook AG. “That makes a big difference to our business users allowing them to experiment with different segmentation models and receive instant responses so they have the ability to build more personalised and targeted sales and marketing campaigns.”