SAP Takes 1,000th Customer Beyond CRM, Connecting Sales and Service Processes in the Cloud

WALLDORF, Germany, Oct. 3, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it has achieved a milestone for its SAP® Hybris® Cloud for Customer solution, signing on its 1,000^th customer to help organizations deliver seamless customer experiences across all channels. This most recent customer, Denmark-based construction company Møller & Co., has implemented the cloud-based SAP Hybris offering to gain a comprehensive view of customer data and drive sales.

"With the rise in digital customer engagement, our sales and service teams have access to more data than ever before," said Rikke Møller, director, Møller & Co. "For us, it was absolutely critical to have a holistic view of our customers. With SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, we can bridge the data gap and engage with our customers in a much more meaningful way."

The Need for Personalized Customer Engagement
The customer base for SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer has grown 73 percent year-over-year between second quarter 2015 to end of second quarter 2016, connecting the sales and service processes of new brands including U.S.-based Sealed Air Corp., a leader in food safety and security, facility hygiene and product protection. Also this year, the solution saw several enhancements, including improvements to its user interface, integrations, analytics and reporting, as well as mobile capabilities. With SAP entering the cloud five years ago, the business has experienced a surge in demand.

"Today's sophisticated customers present new challenges as well as new opportunities for Sealed Air's businesses," said Naveen Kandasami, global IT director, Business Partnership & CRM Strategy at Sealed Air. "As a consequence, we are moving away from transactional sales including quotes focusing on product features, availability and price toward a knowledge-based, customer-centric, solution-selling capability powered by our own deeper customer knowledge and market insight. SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer will drive a 360-degree view of customer account activity as well as prospects for all Sealed Air commercial teams. This solution will help us deliver on our mission to reimagine the industries we serve."

Customers today want to deliver personalized customer engagements but are often challenged to do so by the limitations of their traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Through offerings that connect sales, service, marketing, commerce and billing, SAP Hybris solutions arm businesses with a holistic view of customers to drive personalized, one-to-one interactions. SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer in particular brings sales, customer service and social CRM together, enabling teams to form powerful personal connections that drive engagement in person, on the phone, online, on social media, and via mobile devices.

"The customer journey is more complex than it has ever been — it doesn't end when a customer hangs up the phone, walks out the door, or checks out online," said Jamie Anderson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, SAP Hybris.* "Legacy cloud CRM solutions simply cannot account for the influx in data or meet modern customer expectations. So it doesn't matter if you are running a small or large business, the need for an enterprise-scale simplifier for this complicated, end-to-end business process is the same."

Other companies such as Vestas Wind Systems have also recognized the importance of personalized customer engagement and have chosen SAP Hybris cloud-based technology. Vestas Wind Systems is a company headquartered in Denmark that builds, sells and maintains turbines that enable utility companies globally to generate power from wind. Its sales and service employees rely on SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer to better understand customer requirements, increase its spare parts business, achieve a higher closing rate for service contract renewals and improve customer response times leading to a better customer experience.

SAP Simplifies the Customer Journey
As organizations compete to win over customers' loyalty and wallets, there is an increasing priority on customer satisfaction. However, recent research from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and SAP Hybris indicates that this is easier said than done. The data shows that marketers have a limited view of their customer base — with just over 50 percent of respondents working on systems to extend marketing's view of the customer to include insights from all impact and interaction points in the customer journey. Additionally, 96 percent admit that they are not powering every interaction in every channel with real-time, personalized experiences.

In 2015, SAP responded by announcing its vision to simplify the front office through innovative technologies that seamlessly connect to the back office — linking people, inventory, supply chain, pricing and customers together. Within just three years of its acquisition by SAP in 2013, SAP Hybris has experienced strong momentum across all areas of its portfolio of customer engagement and commerce solutions, ranging from marketing, billing, commerce, sales and service. SAP Hybris took its message on the road with a "Beyond CRM Truck Tour," traveling to destinations across 11 countries in Europe. The truck will be touring throughout the Americas in 2017.

To learn more about SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, visit our website, and view the customer video.

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and SAP Hybris at @saphybris.

About SAP Hybris Solutions
SAP Hybris solutions provide omnichannel customer engagement and commerce software that allows organizations to build up a contextual understanding of their customers in real time, deliver a more impactful, relevant customer experience, and sell more goods, services and digital content across every touch point, channel and device. Through customer data management, context-driven marketing tools and unified commerce processes, SAP Hybris solutions have helped some of the world's leading organizations to attract, retain and grow a profitable customer base. SAP Hybris software for customer engagement and commerce provides organizations with the foundation, framework and business tools to create a holistic customer view across channels, simplify customer engagement and solve complex business problems. For more information, visit www.hybris.com.

*SAP Hybris is a new brand name launched in January 2016 to represent the SAP solutions for customer engagement and commerce as well as the offerings, employees and business of acquired company hybris AG, which continues to be a stand-alone legal entity until integration with SAP is complete.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device — SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable approximately 320,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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For more information, press only:
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