VanillaPlus: hybris software, an SAP company, will be exhibiting at this year’s Mobile World Congress. What do you see as the key features of your attendance?
Carl Boeing: This year at the Congress, hybris will be showcasing the potential of its powerful customer engagement and commerce (CEC) portfolio of solutions. For example, at our booth visitors can see how a hyper-personalised, contextual customer journey – starting with a second-screen TV experience, and unfolding through the different stages of the purchasing cycle – can surprise and delight customers at every turn with highly personalised offers.
We’ll show how hybris can take a brand-building medium like TV advertising – a vital source of revenue for many CSPs – and use it to drive genuine consumer engagement. This results in more measurable conversion rates, as well as starting a contextual journey with the consumer across a range of different channels.
For example, imagine a CSP was aware that a consumer viewed a commercial advertisement or product placement in a show, and could use that information to engage that customer at the right moment and the right context to maximise both customer satisfaction and conversion. This is based on where the customer is, what they are doing, and even what they are planning next.
VP: What does that concept look like in terms of providing the experience to the user?
CB: Let me give you a perfect example of this coming to life: A customer makes an online restaurant booking based on a local TV advert. The CSP, who manages the TV service provision, knows the customer likes vampire movies because they’ve watched a dozen of them in the last week. A cinema close to the restaurant – also a customer of the CSP – is empowered to offer the delighted customer a discount for a date night vampire movie package that starts straight after dinner.
The key here is to turn big data into little data, and you can see in this example that’s exactly what hybris has delivered. hybris has seamlessly connected the user’s movie preferences with their location and time, correctly figured out that it’s a date night, and armed with this information connected the customer with the cinema to make a relevant, contextual offer.
It’s vital to note that this scenario only works because all of this takes place in real-time. In the notso-distant past it took organisations six months just to provide analytics on one element of this proposition. Now it’s coming together in the moment, allowing us to create targeted offers that deliver incredible experiences, not intrusive advertisements that disturb and annoy.
We also do this from a single platform, at speed. This enables offers to happen while the window of opportunity is still firmly open. Wait too long, and the user has already finished dinner and is busy drinking tequila in a bar somewhere else rather than spending money in the local cinema.
VP: It’s about 18 months since SAP completed the acquisition of hybris software, how are the two companies coming together?
CB: Combining SAP’s customer engagement solutions with the unparalleled omni-channel commerce capabilities of hybris, underpinned by the power of the SAP HANA platform, we are now capable of delivering a platform for businesses to engage their customers anytime, anywhere, from any device at any point in their journey. As you’ll see from our presence at the show, we’re very excited about what this means for the future of our company.
VP: That’s a big step forward. Are CSPs ready for this transformation in the way they engage with customers and generate money from these new ways of marketing?
CB: It’s clear that everyone is on a learning curve increasingly driven by the customer. hybris plays two roles as we partner with CSPs. The first is to inspire with possibilities, demonstrating what can be done today with SAP and hybris. The second is to reassure that regardless of what’s coming next for CSPs, we’ve built an agile platform that has the scalability, flexibility and capability to support an infinite range of future use cases.
These future use cases aren’t necessarily about CSPs selling more smartphones and data plans. That existing business model has reached maturity in many markets. Instead, the advantage for CSPs lies beyond the traditional telco technology stack, in the new, innovative services like machine-to-machine technology, precision marketing or smart homes. With the right technology partners, CSPs have the agility to seize the initiative and gain first-mover advantage.
VP: Is CSPs’ interest in this focused on protecting their traditional business or entering a new business by introducing new applications and services?
CB: Being able to engage customers in a meaningful, impactful way is vital because loyalty is fleeting. With general network and device parity and an evergrowing list of alternatives for communications and entertainment, customers will choose to do business with CSPs simply because they enjoy and value the experience being provided, not for old reasons we’ve relied on for so long such as brand loyalty or resonance.
CSPs also face internal pressures that are driving them to seek out new sources of revenue. The industry continues its colossal network arms race, pouring capital into networks to keep up with the voracious need for bandwidth. Think about what that means for the balance sheet – it’s a cashflow challenge to pour billions of euros of capex into today’s products while also investing in the carrierclass business of the future. That means CSPs need to monetise their investments at scale in shorter timeframes than ever before, and successful CSPs are betting on many new fronts simultaneously.
The new era of contextual engagement for CSPs is partly about targeting and sending the right message at the right time to the right customer, but it’s just as important to be ready when the request comes in from the customer themselves. Being able to offer a broad spectrum of products, and being able to offer them consistently across every channel and touchpoint is very important because if the CSP can’t provide the product or service the customer wants when and where and how they want it, they’re in trouble. The philosophical and technical shift from device-centric customer relationships to identity-centric customer relationships is essential for long-term retention, longterm value, and sustainable results.
VP: Given the complexities involved do you see this as a market that CSPs can lead in?
CB: CSPs have a short-term advantage. They’re in prime position, but the race has already started. CSPs have an acute awareness of their customers’ needs. In addition having upstream content and the advanced network capabilities to deliver this gives them a big advantage and potential to lead. CSPs have a window of opportunity to enable contextual experiences before competing industries can. That window is going to close pretty quickly, though, so CSPs need to get a move on.
VP: How do you see hybris software’s role developing?
CB: We see many CSPs, and organisations of all types, focused intensely on creating a better customer experience – but to what end? For many, that remains an open question; what are they going to do with all the eyeballs they attract to actually make some money? What is the desired outcome?
Answering that question is really where hybris’s strengths lie as a business. Together with SAP and our customer engagement and commerce portfolio, we can help CSPs sell more smartphones and data plans but, if they want to take their businesses to the next level, we can help extend their businesses into new areas too.
What really sets hybris apart is our omni-channel approach, which means we don’t restrict the customer experience to a particular path. What starts on a TV and goes to a tablet and then a smartphone and touches multiple parts of the CSP organisation can all be co-ordinated and handled consistently to deliver a contextual, relevant and satisfying experience to the customer, regardless of device, lifecycle stage, or channel.
It’s important for CSPs to have a single view of the customer but it’s doubly important for that customer to have a single view of the CSP. It’s vital that they get the same offer, the same answer and the same information at every turn. It needs to be one experience and if they do it right, customers reward brands with incredible loyalty.
