Accenture Interactive and
SAP Hybris announced on Wednesday a partnership to create a new platform that allows users to create and manage end-to-end contextual and end-to-end customer experiences, marketing, e-commerce, and offline shopping for customer service and support. fidelity management.
The common platform will target B2C and B2B companies in retail, telecommunications and resources.
This will help businesses
- discover aspects of their commercial offer that have an impact on the customer experience;
- identify the impact of their current technology on how people live their brands, their offers and their services; and
- act quickly based on the platform's ability to create, launch and harmonize experiences across channels that generate tangible business results.
"Customized experiences for customers in all aspects of their business interaction are a big challenge for many businesses, especially those with disconnected business, service and marketing relationships," notes Rebecca Wettemann, Vice President. of Nucleus research.
"We have discovered that disconnected data sources and silos are one of the biggest challenges companies face in achieving their customer experience goals," she said. at CRM Buyer.
Accenture Interactive conducted pilot projects with retail customers using a preliminary version of the platform, and early results indicate that sales have increased to 30%; operating costs decreased by almost 25%; and the return on investment has gone up to 700%.
"There are good pilots in place, and the experiments are convincing," said Ray Wang, senior analyst at Constellation Research.
However, "the challenge is to orchestrate all these points of contact", he told CRM Buyer, "and above all to implement digital marketing techniques according to key criteria: attribution, optimization of conversion rate, lead scoring and SEO., among others. "
The constituents of the new platform
The common platform will combine several proven B2C and B2B business applications: SAP Hybris solutions; SAP-based solutions
Leonardo technology; and Accenture Interactive's data-driven personalization solutions.
Its duties will include customer analysis, content management, user experience design, marketing, customer service, omnichannel management and customization.
"There is a lot to build in Leonardo for that he supports all the requirements of modern trade organizations," Wang said.
The platform will use existing client applications and point solutions, integrating them as needed.
The key is "not only how SAP and Accenture can accelerate the delivery of solutions to customers, but how they can provide solutions flexible enough to adapt to consumer preferences and competitive challenges," said Wettemann of Nucleus.
"For customers in a cloud world, expectations are quick deployment times and a more iterative approach, rather than big-bang," she warned.
Granular microservices
The joint platform will provide future customers with a highly targeted consumer microservice platform called "SAP Hybris as a Service", aka "YaaS", observed Holger Mueller, Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.
YaaS will allow users to "compose their e-commerce solutions according to market differentiation needs," he told CRM Buyer.
"The ability to reuse granular microservices in a PaaS environment that is also used in a SaaS platform such as SAP Hybris is valuable to businesses because these microservices are more supported than, for example, an API platform. pure ". outside.
Upcoming competition
The main competitor of the Accenture SAP Hybris offering comes from Salesforce via its link with Demandware, and from Oracle through ATG (Oracle's Web Commerce Platform), Wang said.
"A certain level of competition comes from IBM Interactive, which does a lot of custom work on IBM software and other tools," he added.
Constellation "is expecting to see more deals like this over the next 12 to 18 months," Wang predicted. "Organizations such as Deloitte, Sapient Razorfish, and IBM Interactive have been involved in many transactions, with software companies in the commerce, marketing, and experience space looking for close partnerships with service agencies. design and creative organizations. "
Richard Adhikari has been a reporter at ECT News Network since 2008. His fields of intervention are cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, the software development, the central and midrange computer. and the development of applications. He has written and edited for many publications, including Information Week and Computerworld . He is the author of two books on client / server technology.
Email Richard.