Guest: Ritu Bhargava (LinkedIn)
Company: SAP (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk @ SAP Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference Orlando

Personalization in context is becoming increasingly important. While companies want to cater to their customers’ unique needs, they have the problem of maintaining the full back-office operations, manufacturing, the procurement supply chain, finance, and human capital management. SAP leverages its 50-year industry expertise to connect and use data from all these components to create powerful customer experiences.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk recorded at the 2023 SAP Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference Orlando, Swapnil Bhartiya catches up with Ritu Bhargava, President & Chief Product Officer, Industries & Customer Experience at SAP, to talk about the company’s latest offerings, particularly in the areas of customer experience and sustainability.

Product announcements:

• SAP Customer Experience (SAP CX) is now entering the market of industry-tailored applications, catering to unique needs in retail, consumer product, automotive, utilities, health sciences, and more.
• SAP Digital Assistant, a proprietary AI model technology that sits on top of any application that you use in SAP, brings contextual and operational data together to power experiences.
• SAP Recommerce, a solution for a sustainable circular economy.

Key insights from this video interview:

• For SAP, customer experience is not just about the front office, the order process, or the service process. SAP CX uses the data from inventory, the supply chain data, and the operational processes to power that experience. For example, if someone wants to buy a t-shirt online, SAP CX looks at the following: How much inventory is available? What is the supply chain looking like? What is the lead time for the delivery? This connectivity, operability, and intelligence of the systems is a differentiator.
• Customer experience should be the same, agnostic of the channel that you are operating it, i.e., it’s omnichannel and seamless. The customer should be able to chat, go in the store, and can continue from there. Unfortunately, these experiences are still siloed and not connected.
• Every industry is transforming, and every transformation is a digital transformation. Every application is increasingly going to be an AI app, agnostic of industries. Every industry wants to be intelligent and meet the customers where they are.
• Data alone is nothing. What can data do for you? What can it make? How can it make your life more efficient? How can it surface productivity at every touchpoint? That’s why generative AI has hit home so quickly. It made data useful.
• SAP is in a very unique position to talk about sustainability because it has the green ledger and the end-to-end visibility of data and business processes. Its solutions foster sustainability, from the back office as a track-and-trace, the customer experience, to the way goods can go back into the system as part of the reuse/reduce/recycle aspects of commerce.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.