Mary Javierre He has been working at SAP for more than 20 years. In his long professional career within the company, he has been able to work in all kinds of areas, from the commercial field, managing accounts for large clients such as El Corte Inglés or Inditex, to software development.
Since June 2021, he has led the area of Customer Experience, one of the most strategic and fastest growing areas within the company’s business in recent years. Javierre tells us that it is “very happy“In this new position that, in addition, makes her especially excited about the moment in which we find ourselves and for being a”natural evolution of my career”.
During the interview, the new Head of Customer Experience at SAP Spain has shared with us some of the trends in the sector, the objectives that have been set and what tools they currently have in SAP.
EcN: What are your goals for the end of the year?
MJ: I started in the middle of the exercise, therefore, many things were already raised. For example, the team was half formed, the strategy was already developed, the objectives were already set, etc.
For my part, I have proposed, first and foremost, to reach the figures that had been set at the beginning. The second has been to complete the team, something that until mid-October I have not achieved. I have managed to form a very diverse team where there are 50% women and a great diversity in age, cultures and different segments. This has also made me very happy, because we are taking diversity to the highest level of a European company in Spain.
Finally, I want to transform some aspects such as the partner channel, which for SAP is very important, and I want to continue promoting it with specialized partners, and other larger and more generalists. The goal is for us to earn your trust.
EcN: What trends in Customer Experience can we currently find in the market?
MJ: E-commerce has completely changed the experience of customer experience for the pandemic. All citizens have changed our behavior with brands and, above all, the way we buy.
SAP has tried to objectify these feelings that we all have and has commissioned some studies that have yielded very interesting results. On the one hand, it has been seen that baby boomers (people who were born before 1965) are the ones who have increased the use of the Internet and purchases through the online channel the most. While the millennials (the youngest) were already e-commerce users and in their case they have increased the use of social networks.
However, the most interesting thing is that post-pandemic, a fairly high percentage of baby boomers will maintain their current use of e-commerce. This means that we have a very high percentage of new customers who are older and have greater purchasing power. For this reason, brands have to work to get closer to these consumers in the online channel as well and continue to retain them.
EcN: What would be the best strategies to retain this group of people?
MJ: Technology is getting closer to our potential and real customers every day, that is, our days are built around our mobiles, laptops, etc. What the customer wants right now is to have the ability to buy wherever he is. Let the stores be where he is.
But also the pattern of behavior changes. Before e-commerce developed customer journeys, but now no patterns are followed because the Consumers start a purchase or an inquiry from the phone and finish it in a physical store or vice versa. That pattern of behavior no longer exists. There is freedom in the purchase decision.
That is why it is important that companies have technological platforms to help them in this process and because we do not know what will happen next. Nobody expected the pandemic… That is why it is important that companies invest in technology that is capable of modifying and adapting to the workflows of the future.
EcN: What do you think are the best practices in the customer experience area?
MJ: Now it is difficult to define a strategy because, as we mentioned before, clients are becoming freer and more difficult to define what they are going to do.
To develop a strategy for customer experience you need data and you have to put the customer at the center of that strategy. In addition, by having them at the center of the strategy I mean not only that the data is visible to the front-office, but they should also be for him back-office, because it is necessary to begin to eliminate these gaps that were traditionally. We have to:
– Put the customer at the center,
– Share data throughout the value chain,
– Be able to have a CRM, a relationship with the client, that is relevant and completely personalized. This is what we call hyper-personalization so that everything I offer the client is relevant to him. And for that I need to learn from him, something that is possible thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
– The customer everywhere or customer everywhere It is very relevant and that is why it is important to work with our CRM for the after-sales, since we want to make our clients be true fans of the brand and we need all our areas to have all the relevant information about the client, in case they need help after the purchase is complete. This can turn customer service into a new sales channel.
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are essential to learn from the client and that is why at SAP we are making a strong investment to improve this learning capacity that our tools of customer experience. Customer service software programs are integrated with CRM because we believe that customer information really has to be available to everyone.
If we do all this and we are able to even predict what our customers are going to do in the future, they will stay and continue to buy, increasing their average ticket, which is the goal of any brand.
EcN: What role does customer experience play in SAP? What are we going to see in this area in the coming months?
MJ: As a novelty, although the market has known it for a long time, but it is beginning to be seen now in Spain, there is our platform Emarsys.
Emarsys is an omnichannel customer engagement platform, a very powerful tool with a price and a timing implementation of projects that makes any size of company capable of using it and starting it up very quickly. In this platform we can link all the information of our e-commerce and we can perform actions on customers in a fast and personalized way, because it is capable of connecting the front-office with the back-office from SAP. By being able to connect these two parts, companies can provide a hyper-personalized offering to each customer.
The trend is that the customer wants the brands to have information about him, but always the information that the customer himself decides, and it is important to be transparent and allow consumers to know the data that the company may have about them and what they use it for. .
Returning to that union of front and the back officeWith SAP tools and customer data, you can get to know the impact that an ecommerce or marketing action is having directly on the income statement. This is a total break with traditional business and I can say that SAP technology is the only one that can do it.
We have been with them for a short time, but around 20 billion messages are being generated per month through Emarsys around the world.
EcN: European legislation is becoming more serious in terms of data protection, what effect is this having for e-commerce?
MJ: It is quite a controversial issue, that is why we developed a tool, SAP Customer Data Platform, which allows us to manage customer data and is gaining more and more popularity in the market.
It is an environment in which all customer data is stored: its own, that is, what it offers you when it relates to your e-commerce and data on their behavior on social networks. I can have structured or unstructured information about the client. And the tool allows me to make all this information available to the different technological solutions, whether they be customer experience or other areas. In addition, this tool is supported by European legislation, therefore, the consumer can decide what type of data he wants to be stored on him, which he wants to be eliminated by the right to be forgotten and, most importantly, how he wants it to be communicate with him.
EcN: What are SAP’s competitive advantages over other companies?
MJ: In summary we could say that SAP has an offer for e-commerce or for the customer experience exceptional. The arrival of Emarsys has given us the ability to integrate your marketing and CRM o Marketing Cloud and Commerce to have a super powerful offer.
As I said, the possibility of doing an online analysis and the impact it has on operations, that is, on finance or logistics because logistics is essential in ecommerce. Being able to have all this information integrated is unbeatable.
With regard to logistics, the pandemic has not only changed commerce, but also logistics. The dark stores because it was necessary to expedite deliveries. And now the companies have large warehouses where they have the stock and others of proximity.
Finally, companies that can integrate the front and the back-office there is only SAP. This is a great competitive advantage that more and more companies that opt for our solutions are taking advantage of. This recognition is driving SAP’s growth in the field of customer experience and the reason why I became part of the team.