Showing posts with label SAP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SAP. Show all posts

Thursday, January 14, 2021

How Capgemini Optimizes Contingent Workforce Agility Using SAP Fieldglass


Transcript of a
discussion on the growing importance of contingent workforces for businesses around the world to satisfy their skills and information technology needs.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Our next digital business innovation discussion explores the growing importance of contingent workforces. As more businesses look to external workforces and services to satisfy their skills and information technology (IT) needs, the ability to manage those workers and services is lagging.

Even as upward of 42 percent of workforce spend is now going to external workforces, many organizations lack visibility into the nature of that spend. As a result, they can’t manage the productivity, nor the risk.

Stay with us now as we hear from a contingent workforce expert at Capgemini on managing the processes that best procure and support talent and skills agility.


T
o learn more about making the most of a diversified portfolio of workers, please join me in welcoming Andreas Hettwer, Vice President and Group Procurement Category Director at Capgemini in Berlin. Welcome, Andreas.

Andreas Hettwer: Hello, Dana.

Gardner: Andreas, what’s driving the need for external workforce management -- and specifically the role of contingent workforce workers -- there at Capgemini?

Hettwer: We are a big company with roughly 250,000 employees worldwide. At Capgemini, as a consulting digital transformation company, we innovate and address the entire breadth of client opportunities in the evolving world of cloud, digital, and platforms.

And that means we have a huge variety of roles, skills, and capabilities that we need to deliver to fulfill all of these kinds of projects. There are constraints in both capacity and in the niche capabilities needed. Our contingent workforce is part of our strategic component of making sure that we deliver great projects to our clients. This is why we need a contingent workforce program globally.

Gardner: And is the use of IT skills and workers a leader in this field? Is there something about IT specifically that lends itself to a contingent workforce?

IT contingency makes progress

Hettwer
Hettwer: Yes. First of all, from the skills perspective, we are an IT consulting company and therefore this is our major skill set that we purchase from the market. But, again, the variety is huge and therefore we need to make sure that we address all of the different sources to make sure that we have the right capabilities and capacity ready.

Gardner: And how long has this been going on? How long have you been working to perfect and improve the use of such a contingent workforce?

Hettwer: Quite a long time. We began in 2016. At first, we knew our spend of contingent workforce but we didn’t have a clue really about the numbers -- the headcount or the tenure of engagements.

We didn’t know what kind of external capabilities we had acquired from the market, including the roles and skills. We didn’t even know anything about the fulfillment rate or how long it took to source the right capabilities. We didn’t know if we had missed some opportunities to deliver the right projects to our clients.

On the other side, we were not able to understand what we had paid for the individual roles, skills, and levels per country, and whether this was a good price compared to the market. We didn’t know if that helped drive competitive bids toward our clients or not. Given this environment, we decided we needed to change. This is why we then began our global program.

Gardner: Of course, human resources (HR) organizations have had systems of record and processes to manage ongoing, full-time workforces. But when things are project-based and ad hoc, like you are describing, they are often funded from a variety of different budgets and from different elements within the organization.

Keeping track of that is very daunting. Why do you view this less as a HR task and more of a procurement task? How does that help to bring a unified view of all of these different worker spends?

Hettwer: You raise a good point. There is always the question of who owns the contingent workforce. Is it procurement, HR, or maybe the business unit itself? Or is it maybe another function in the company?

It was important that HR had a big focus on our own employees, with our employer brand, and to make sure that we attract the right talent from the market to deliver to our clients with our brand and across our portfolio.

From our perspective, it was important that HR had a big focus on our own employees, with our employer brand, and to make sure that we attract the right talent from the market to deliver to our clients with our brand and across our portfolio.

Contingent workforce for us was a bit of a minor labor component. We are talking about 6 to 7 percent of the complete population of our delivery capacity globally. Therefore we mostly wanted to address cost and risk. Procurement took the lead and came back with the right problem statement, delivered a solution and created the right business case to get executive approval for the global program. That’s how it evolved. We began this program and now procurement owns it.

But again, it’s a good question. It could also be through a different function. But at Capgemini we evolved it and own it right now.

Gardner: Andreas, it strikes me that you are a better organization in terms of fulfilling your mission and supporting your customers when you can find labor best where it exists rather than where you wish it were. How flexible can you be with a contingent workforce? Is this literally an addressable market that extends all over the world? Has the COVID-19 pandemic opened people’s eyes to the potential for more remote and flexible workforces?

Hettwer: Yes, absolutely. First of all, the contingent workforce has increased in the market. If you look at different research -- and even from the Capgemini Research Institute -- you see that the number of contingent workforce participants has increased over the last few years, starting with North America but also in Europe, and even now in Asia-Pacific and in India.

We needed to address this accordingly with some kind of innovation. We therefore developed a global program to make sure that we gain the best contractors in the market and that we use them recurrently.

Looking to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen dramatic changes. Suddenly, more clients are open to remote work. Our own organization has been open to remote work. We at Capgemini were able in a few weeks to have more than 95 percent of our own population working remotely. That helped us to really change this work environment and to have more contractors working remotely. So this is something that we need to address further in the future.

Gardner: Yes, COVID-19 has been a motivator and an eye-opener as organizations go more digital, with the ability to use workers regardless of their location. That will become more prominent, I expect.

Andreas, when we use contingent workforces, what are the benefits? What has it done for you at Capgemini?

Remote work benefits

Hettwer: From our perspective, we have four major categories of benefits. The first one is business impact improvement. It’s about fulfillment, making sure that we have the right talent on board and that we can fulfill the needs of our clients. We can therefore make sure that the clients are happy and that our projects will be delivered on time with the right quality.

The second aspect is cost-optimization. It’s always a very challenging market, and we need to be very competitive. Whenever you need contractors, be it for niche or core capabilities to be embedded in our projects, we need to make sure we do it correctly, with the right pricing, so it’s a win-win situation. When we are competitive in using the right contingent workforce at the right price, then it’s also possible to deliver the best pricing for our client. So cost-optimization was a second big aspect here.


T
hird -- and not a negligible issue -- is risk mitigation. More and more labor laws are coming up right now. And there are many tax-related topics, too. So whenever we can gain more visibility, we can better control our contingent workforce. We can also be sure that risk associated with the use of that labor can be mitigated across markets.

And then the fourth benefit is process efficiency. Bringing in contractors, or services from our suppliers, needs to be seamless -- from getting the right capabilities in, to invoicing, approval, and all what’s necessary. And that must be very efficient, because in an organization like ours, which is global in roughly 50 countries worldwide, we need to have proper, seamless processes end-to-end. Otherwise it’s an administrative burden that you can’t afford.

Gardner: And how about the issue of speed and agility? Oftentimes when it’s a full-time position, it can take months, if not longer, to go through the process of defining the role, hiring, vetting, and onboarding. Is there something about contingent labor that increases the speed and agility when you are satisfying your customers on a project-basis?

Suppliers increase speed-to-hire

Hettwer: Yes, absolutely. And I think this is also the beauty of contractors. You really have the chance to reach out to the market to identify the right contractors on time. And this is also why contractors from time to time come in, because it’s much easier and quicker to get them in, up to the moment until we recruit maybe somebody permanently.

And, for sure, we do this through a preferred supplier base, and this is part of the service-level agreements (SLAs) that we negotiate with our preferred supplier base. This is the speed, quality, and the pricing aspect.

We also invested in our Freelancer Gateway by Capgemini. That means we are addressing contractors directly. We have created the possibility for contractors to check the opportunities that we have on the contingent workforce side and apply accordingly.

But we also invested last year in our Freelancer Gateway by Capgemini. That means we are addressing contractors directly. We have created the possibility for contractors to check the opportunities that we have on the contingent workforce side and to apply accordingly to be part of our extended workforce.

This is very beneficial because more contractors don’t want to go through an external third-party; they want to reach out to us directly. And for us it’s a benefit because we can create an external workforce. We want to build a recurring workforce so that we have a relationship with the contractor market and to make sure that the right people work for us regularly.

Gardner: Now, we mentioned that procurement is the force through which you are operating here, and you have been in procurement for many years. Tell us about your procurement background and why you think the procurement legacy and approach to managing processes and costs lends itself to a contingent workforce management.

Total workforce management

Hettwer: I joined Capgemini in 2004, quite a long time ago. Before I had been a consultant for different companies. And, to be honest, during the initial years it was an immature market. The contingent workforce had not really been addressed during this time. We really started from scratch.

Now, in 2020, things have changed completely. We have technologies. We have managed service providers. We have really mature organizations that can help. The technology has evolved dramatically.


For example, for our Freelancer Gateway, we use technology from partners like SAP Fieldglass. We use artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to make this attractive process as easy as possible. The technology can help so much right now; it helps dramatically.

And as HR is on one side focusing on the permanent labor, we are focusing on the contracting side, but we are merging our capabilities through our Capgemini brand. This is exactly where we want to go, and this leads us to total workforce management.

Gardner: How has the SAP portfolio, in particular Fieldglass, helped you get a more repeatable and understandable process and move toward total workforce management?

Hettwer: When we began in 2016, we needed the right technology to support this because we couldn’t do everything manually. We need to have the right solution. And during this time, for sure, we did proper request for proposals (RFPs) and checked the market. SAP Fieldglass convinced us because, first of all, the technology had the right functions about what we wanted. It’s really also an end-to-end solution.

Secondly, we wanted a solution that has a global footprint. If you just come, for example, from North America, you don’t understand how Europe works -- or vice versa. It’s quite difficult. So we said we needed a global footprint with references in the different key regions. This was also why SAP Fieldglass was chosen because of this global footprint and the experience that they had. This really helped us in deploying our global program.

Thirdly, SAP Fieldglass was a strong provider with the right development capabilities because we wanted to be able to evolve. We didn’t want to have just one solution. We knew the technology would evolve and our program would evolve as well. Therefore, we needed to have a partner who can go with this program with us over several years. It’s not just a 12-month exercise, this is really something that needs to evolve.

And lastly, we needed somebody who could help us integrate a cloud-based solution into our IT systems landscape. It’s difficult when you have some cloud solutions and some on-premises solutions, you need to connect them accordingly. And that has worked. These were the reasons we selected SAP Fieldglass and since then we have worked very tightly together, and it works great.

Gardner: It seems like Capgemini is in a great position to be a leader in this field and to innovate because of your emphasis on IT, your understanding of systems, the need for flexibility, and your global footprint. You are an early adopter, but also a bellwether of where things can go with contingent workforce management.

How you have further innovated your Freelancer Gateway and trusted contractor programs?

Replace face-to-face trust

Hettwer: Like many others, we began with the contingent workforce functionality of SAP Fieldglass. This was the main purpose first of all -- to get this done. 

Then we moved to the next topic, which was delivery-based services, but this is more specific to areas where you have bigger spend areas to control. So you have to create governance.

But then we came to the direct-sourcing piece with our Freelancer Gateway to make sure that we use AI and automation to attract contractors directly and make sure that we have the best recurring extended workforce.

As I said, the pandemic was also an accelerator for this, and the use of remote contracting. And this is quite difficult because, remember, when you try to get contractors in, you need to do some interviewing. At a certain moment, people who seem to be good contractors and consultants who want to work for us would come on-site and we would get to know each other and then relationships start.

When you do these things remotely only, you never have a personal interaction with people, it's just video conferences. At a certain moment people need to have access to systems. Otherwise there is uncertainty about their capabilities and the security levels.

But when you do these things remotely only, you never have a personal interaction with people, it’s just video conferences. At a certain moment people need to have access to systems. If you don’t know these people, other than from the interview and the video conferences, there is uncertainty about their capabilities and the security levels.

This is why we needed to do something different, rather than just identifying and validating the contractors and then letting them work remotely. It’s about bringing in a level of trust that we have the proper qualifications and proper experience with people before they can work remotely for us.

And this is exactly something that we are figuring out right now. We are not completely done yet, but this is something that’s on the agenda as part of the “New Normal.”

Gardner: Andreas, when you have that digital, remote relationship rather than a more tactile, human relationship, you have to go on metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). You need data that’s verifiable and repeatable. And in doing so you develop a greater understanding of your workers, your contingent workers, and the work itself. 

Is there something about going to a data-driven, digital-type of engagement that will pay dividends when it comes to the greater understanding through data-driven and metrics-driven definitions of your process?

Hettwer: Yes. I think it’s a combination of both, right? On the one side you need to have the technology and the right data. But when we started thinking about the new right taxonomy -- to understand and identify certain roles and skills -- it’s very difficult. We created a rate card structure to make this happen, to begin to talk to each other and understand the roles and skills across North America or in China or maybe in India. But we know that there is a bandwidth of skills that can be categorized over there.

So, we needed to have certain technology to help us identify the capabilities of individuals, and on the other side, matching this with the job postings, with the needs that we have.

The technology helps us to make these kinds of matches, and all of this data will drive to even more AI to get proper and quicker matching so that the quality of this matching process will increase. And this is also why, for example, we are focusing on recurrently used contractors because it forms loyalty that will lead to a win-win situation between the external market and our clients. This is exactly where we want to go. 

Gardner: And I certainly understand that building those taxonomies and creating the way in which you would measure the quality of the relationship for both parties is an ongoing process. But so far, just using the contingent workforce management and SAP Fieldglass to this point, tell us a little bit about what you have gotten.

Are there metrics of success, or key indicators that you can point to that demonstrate a return on investment or a rationale for why this makes sense?

Measures of success

Hettwer: Yes. First of all, we needed to have the spend coverage of 85 percent in a reasonable time. It took us some time to get there, but we are right now at the 85 percent. We recently went live in India with fully integrated solutions, and now we are at this level there, too. 

For sure, there are different countries still where we have not full coverage yet, but we do it with a light version of the solution so we at least have the chance to identify individual external workforces.

A second measure that is very important for us is the fulfillment rate. We are now at 80 percent of fulfillment rate on eligible demand. “Eligible” means there is always some kind of demand in the contractor environment that cannot be filled because it’s not needed anymore or it’s maybe that some things change and that means our own people can take care of this one.

So this is why we always say “eligible” demand is something that really needs to be fulfilled and here we are at 80 percent. And I think this is quite good, and we are further ahead of where we were some time ago. 

Another metric is the quality of job postings and aging, because if you have a job posting for contingent workforce that is in your system for 12 months, it just dilutes the KPIs and nobody is working on it anymore anyway.


W
e are right now at a level of below 30 days. That means whenever something is not filled within 30 days, it needs to be rechecked as to whether or not it is still needed, which means we always have proper demand so we can perform better toward our business goals.

Also quite important is time to fill positions; we have decreased this significantly. Currently we are on below 10 days from the job posting until the creation of the work order. So that means whenever there is really high demand for contracting site, we are able to fill this within 10 days. And, as you mentioned earlier, this is much quicker than recruiting people from the external market.

For sure, this will change with the “New Normal” because we have the possibility of a global remote workforce. There will be changes in what we need externally and what needs to be delivered from the internal side, and this is something that will evolve over the next weeks and months.

Gardner: And, of course, a very important measure of success these days is the perception of the customer -- the customer experience. Have you gotten any feedback as to how well your support of contingent labor works from your customers’ vantage point?

Hettwer: Yes, exactly. For sure, everything is client-driven for us. This is most important and there are some environments where you are not allowed to go with an external workforce. Others think more about the delivery-based environment and there we need to make sure that the right teams are available to deliver what we have promised.

There is always the question about if the contingent workforce needs to be engaged, and how can you ensure you select the right people, that you have the right suppliers in place, and that you are able to deliver what you are promising.

When we came up with our approach and showcased the suppliers -- the client base was very impressed. We even go out to our clients’ site, explain what we do, and how we do it. We even have clients thinking about how to adopt this contingent workforce management approach internally. So I think this is the best thing, if clients ask us to do similar things for themselves.

Gardner: Of course, those clients would let you know pretty quickly if things weren’t working out and so you have the ability to be reactive and agile as you adjust. It’s a feedback loop.

Before we end, Andreas, let’s look to the future. We mentioned the idea of establishing trust and understanding, the relationship and the qualitative and quantitative value of work, but it seems to me that what we are talking about as contingent workforce expands is really a redefinition of a corporation or a business. The barriers of that business become fuzzy, even permeable.

Do you see the nature of business changing as we look to less of a walled garden and more of an expanding universe of skills?

The future is not fuzzy

Hettwer: Yes, I would say so. As I said, we call it global resourcing or global capabilities, and this is exactly where it will lead. It’s not that everything can be done remotely, but it will increase, and this will give us opportunities -- not only Capgemini – but also more from our contractor side. And this is exactly the right thing to address right now because only when we have the right people in place -- when we have the right contractors in place -- then we can do these kinds of things.

There will always be some deviation, right? As you see, more and more tax regulation will come, more and more labor laws will come in the different countries. And this needs to be addressed. There is a difference between external services and internal services, and this needs to be addressed.

I think it will not be as fuzzy as it looks initially so that you can’t differentiate anymore between an employee and a temporary contractor. It will always be a differentiation there from my perspective because of all these kind of tax, legal, and statutory requirements. But you can do things in a more homogeneous and more aligned way -- and this is exactly what it will lead to.

Gardner: What advice would you share with others who are interested in increasing the amount of contingent workforce utilization and management?

Hettwer: There is so much to learn that I could talk for hours. But the first thing that I have is whenever you want to start some kind of contingent workforce program, think about the pain points in your company.

Is it compliance risk? Is it a cost issue? Is it a fulfillment issue? What are the pain points that you have in your organization and start from there, create, then solutions, and then finally a business case. Because without a business case that is not approved by the senior business you will never succeed. So that is my first recommendation.

Whenever you want to start some kind of contingent workforce program, think about the pain points in your company. Start from there then create solutions and finally a business case. Without as business case approved by the senior management you will never succeed. 

The second one is getting clarity from the executive level about who owns such a program. This links very much to the questions that you had earlier; is it procurement, is it HR, is it somebody from the business? But there needs to be an owner, because otherwise you start a program and then you immediately start fighting about who owns it, right?

The third aspect is, if you want to go in such a global program, what about the governance? You need to have the right stakeholders in place. First of all, to get their buy in, and secondly, it’s about crowd intelligence. You are never the one who has the knowledge about everything. So if you get the right people on board from the different countries, from the different functions, then you will have all the intelligence that you need to create a program.

Then, you need to make sure that you have proper steering committees in place, because there will always be discussions and escalations, so make sure that you don’t get only the approval from the executive committee but also that you have regular decision points where these kinds of things will be discussed and decisions will be taken.

And last, but not least, prioritize. You will never be in the position to have a global program and make sure that in 12 months you have covered the globe; this will not happen. So, prioritize, make sure you start where you have the biggest pain points, you start there because initial success creates demand for deployment and will lead to its acceleration. So get success as quickly as possible in areas where really success is needed, talk about this one and that will help you really to accelerate.

Gardner: Well, very good, I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on the growing importance of contingent workforces. And we have learned why managing those workers and services better enables businesses to further leverage external workforces and services to satisfy flexibly their growing skills and IT needs.


So a big thank you to our guest, Andreas Hettwer, Vice President and Group Procurement Category Director at Capgemini. Thank you so much, Andreas.

Hettwer: You are welcome. Thank you very much.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect digital business innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator throughout this series of SAP-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please do come back next time, and feel free to share this information across your IT and business communities.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP.

Transcript of a discussion on the growing importance of contingent workforces for businesses around the world to satisfy their skills and information technology needs. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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Thursday, December 10, 2020

Why Customer Experience Management Has Never Been More Important or Impactful


Transcript of a discussion on discerning customer preferences to best fulfill customer wants and needs and inform digital business imperatives.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

Our next digital business innovation discussion explores how companies need to better understand and respond to their markets one subscriber at a time. By better listening inside of their products, businesses can remove the daylight between their digital deliverables and their customers’ impressions.

Stay with us now as we hear from a customer experience (CX)  management expert at SAP on the latest ways that discerning customers’ preferences informs digital business imperatives.

To learn more about the business of best fulfilling customer wants and needs, please join me now in welcoming Lisa Bianco, Global Vice President, Experience Management and Advocacy at SAP Procurement Solutions. Welcome, Lisa.

Lisa Bianco: Hey, Dana, thank you so much for having me join such an incredible program. I am so happy to be here.


Gardner:
Let’s look back and get some context. What was the catalyst about five years ago that led you there at SAP Procurement to invest in a team devoted specifically to CX innovation?

Bianco: As a business-to-business (B2B) organization, we recognized that B2B was changing and it was starting to look and feel more like business-to-consumer (B2C). The days of leaders dictating the solutions and products that their end users were going to be leveraging for day-to-day business stuff -- like procurement or finance – we found we were competing with what an end-user’s experience would be with the products or applications they use in their personal life.

Bianco
We all know this; we’ve all been there. We would go to work to use the tools, and there used to be those times we would use the printer for our kids’ flyers for their birthday because it was a much better tool than what we had at home. And that had shifted.

But then business leaders were competing with rogue employees using tools like Amazon.com versus SAP Ariba’s solution for procurement to buy things for their businesses. And so with that maverick spend, companies weren’t having the same insights that they needed to make decisions. So, we knew that we had to ensure that that end-user experience at work replicated what they might feel at home. It reflected that shift in persona from a decision-maker to that of a user.

Gardner: Whether it’s B2B or B2C, there tends to be a group of people out there who are really good at productivity and will find ways to improve things if you only take the chance to listen and follow their lead, right?

Bianco: That’s exactly right.

Gardner: And what was it about B2B in the business environment that was plowing new ground when it came to listening rather than just coming up with a list of requirements, baking it into the software, and throwing it over the wall?

Leaders listen to customer experience

Bianco: The truth is, better listening to B2B resulted in a centralized shift for leaders. All of a sudden, a chief procurement officer (CPO) who made a decision on a procurement solution, or a chief information officer (CIO) who made a decision on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, they were beginning to get flak from cross-functional leaders who were end-users and couldn’t actually do their functions.

In B2B we found that we had to start understanding the feelings of employees and the feelings of our customers. And that’s not really what you do in B2B, right? Marketing and branding at SAP now said that the future of business has feelings. And that’s a shock. I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to leaders who say, “I want to switch the word empathy in our mission statement because that’s not strong leadership in B2B.”

The truth is we had to shift. Society was shifting to that place and understanding that feelings allow us to understand the experiences because experiences were that of people. We can only make so many decisions based on our operational data.

But the truth is we had to shift. Society was shifting to that place and understanding that feelings allow us to understand the experiences because the experiences were that of people. We can only make so many decisions based on our operational data, right? You really have to understand the why.

We did have to carve out a new path, and it’s something we still do to this day. Many B2B companies haven’t evolved to an experience management program, because it’s tough. It’s really hard.

Gardner: If we can’t just follow the clicks, and we can’t discern feelings from the raw data, we need to do something more. What do we do? How do we understand why people feel good or bad about what they are doing?

Bianco: We get over that hurdle by having a corporate strategy that puts the customer at the center of all we do. I like to think of it as having a customer-centric decision-making platform. That’s not to say it’s a product. It’s really a shift in mindset that says, “We believe we will be a successful company if our customers’ feelings are positive, if their experiences are great.”

If you look at the disruptors such as Airbnb or Amazon, they prioritize CX over their own objectives as a business and their own business success, things like net-new software sales or renewal targets. They focus on the experiences that their customers have throughout their lifecycle.

That’s a big shift for corporate America because we are so ingrained in producing for the board and we are so ingrained in producing for the investors that oftentimes putting that customer first is secondary. It’s a systemic shift in culture and thinking that tends to be what we see in the emerging companies today as they grab such huge market share. It’s because they shifted that thinking.

Gardner: Right. And when you shift the thinking in the age of social media -- and people can share what their impressions are -- that becomes a channel and a marketing opportunity in itself. People aren’t in a bubble. They are able to say and even demonstrate in real time what their likes are, what their dislikes are, and that’s obvious to many other people around them.

Customer feedback ecosystem

Bianco: Dana, you are pointing out risk. And it’s so true. And this year, the disrupter that COVID-19 has created is a tectonic shift in our digitalization of customer feedback. And now, via social media and Twitter, if you are not at the forefront of understanding what your customers’ feelings are -- and what they may or may not say -- and you are not doing that in a proactive way, you run the risk of it playing out socially in a public forum. And the longer that goes unattended to, you start to lose trust.

When you start to lose trust, it is so much harder to fix than understanding in the lifecycle of a customer the problems that they face, fixing those and making that a priority.

Gardner: Why is this specifically important in procurement? Is there something about procurement, supply chain, and buying that this experience focus is important? Or does it cut across all functions in business?

Bianco: It’s across all functions in business. However, if you look at procurement in the world today, it incorporates a vast ecosystem. It’s one of those functions in business that includes buyers and suppliers. It includes logistics, and it’s complex. It is one of the core areas of a business. When that is disrupted it can have drastic effects on your business.


We saw that in spades this year. It affects your supply chain, where you can have alternative opportunities to regain your momentum after a disruption. It affects your workforce and all of the tools and materials necessary for your company to function when it shifts and moves home. And so with that, we look from SAP’s perspective at these personas that navigate through a multitude of products in your organization. And in procurement, because that ecosystem is there for our customers, understanding the experience of all of those parties allows for customers to make better decisions.

A really good example is one of the world’s largest consulting firms. They took 500,000 employees in offices around the world and found that they had to immediately put them in their homes. They had to make sure they had the products they needed, like computers, green screens, or leisure wear.

They learned what looks good enough on a virtual Zoom meeting. Procurement had to understand what their employees needed within a week’s time so that they didn’t lose revenue deploying the services that their customers had purchased and rely on them for.

Understanding that lifecycle really helps companies, especially now. Seeing the recent disruption made them able to understand exactly what they need to do and quickly make decisions to make experiences better to get their business back on track.

Gardner: Well, this is also the year or era of moving toward automation and using data and analytics more, even employing bots and robotic process automation (RPA). Is there something about that tack in our industry now that can be brought to CX management? Is there a synergy between not just doing this manually, but looking to automation and finding new insights using new tools?

Automate customer journeys

Bianco: It’s a really great insight into the future of understanding the experiences of a customer. A couple of things come to mind. As you look at operational data, we have all recognized the importance of having operational data; so usage data, seeing where the clicks are throughout your product. Really documenting customer journey maps.

If you automate the way you get feedback you don't just have operational data; you need to get that feelings to come through with experience data ... to help drive to where automation needs to happen.

But if you automate the way you get feedback you don’t just have operational data; you need to get the feelings to come through with experience data. And that experience data can help drive where automation needs to happen. You can then embed that kind of feedback-loop-process in typical survey-type tools or embed them right into your systems.

And so that helps you understand some areas where we can remove steps from in the process, especially as many companies look to procurement to create automation. And so the more we can understand where we have those repetitive flows and we can automate, the better.

Gardner: Is that what you mean by listening inside of the product or does that include other things, too?

Bianco: It includes other things. As you may know, SAP purchased a company called Qualtrics. They are experts in experience management, and we have been able to move from and evolve from traditional net promoter score (NPS) surveys into looking at micro moments to get customer feedback as they are doing a function. We have embedded certain moments inside of our product that allow us to capture feedback in real time.

Gardner: Lisa, a little earlier you alluded that there are elements of what happens in the B2C world as individual consumers and what we can then learn and take into the B2B world. Is there anything top of mind for you that you have experienced as a consumer that you said, “Aha, I want to be able to do that or bring that type of experience and insight to my B2B world?”

Customer service is king in B2B

Bianco: Yes, you know what happened to me just this week as a matter of fact? There is a show on TV right now about chess. With all of us being at home, many of us are consuming copious amounts of content. And I went and ordered a chess set, it came, it was beautiful, it was from Wayfair, and one of the pieces was broken.

I snapped a little picture of the piece that had broken and they had an amazing app that allowed me to say, “Look, I don’t need you to replace the whole thing, it’s just this one little piece, and if you can just send me that, that would be great.”

And they are like, “You know what? Don’t worry about sending it back. We are just going to send you a whole new set.” It was like a $100 set. So I now have two sets because they were gracious enough to see that I didn’t have a great experience. They didn’t want me to deal with sending it back. They immediately sent me the product that I wanted.

I am, like, where is that in B2B? Where is that in the complex area of procurement that I find myself? How can we get that same experience for our customers when something goes wrong?


When I began this program, we would try to figure out what is that chess set. Other organizations use garlic knots, like at pizza restaurants. While you and your kids wait 25 minutes for the pizza to be made, a lot of pizza shops offer garlic knots to make you happy so the wait doesn’t seem so long. What is that equivalent for B2B?

It’s hard. What we learned early on, and I am so grateful for, is that in B2B many end users and customers know how difficult it is to make some of their experiences better, because it’s complex. They have a lot of empathy for companies trying to go down such a path, in this case, for procurement. 

But with that, what their garlic knot is, what their free product or chess set is, is when we tell them that their voice matters. It’s when we receive their feedback, understand their experience against our operational data, and let them know that we have the resources and budget to take action on their feedback and to make it better.


Either we show them that we have made it better or we tell them, “We hear what you are saying, but that doesn’t fit into our future.” You have to be able to have that complete feedback loop, otherwise you alienate your customer. They don’t want to feel like you are asking for their feedback but not doing anything with it.

And so that’s one of the most important things we learned here. That’s the thing that I witnessed from a B2C perspective and tried to replicate in B2B.

Gardner: Lisa, I’m sensing that there is an opportunity for the CX management function to become very important for overall digital business transformation. The way that Wayfair was able to help you with the chess set required integration, cooperation, and coordination between what were probably previously siloed parts of their organization.

That means the helpdesk, the ordering and delivering, exception management capabilities, and getting sign-off on doing this sort of thing. It had to mean breaking down those silos -- both in process, data, and function. And that integration is often part of an all-important digital transformation journey. 

So are you finding that people like yourself, who are spearheading the experience management for your customers, are in a catbird seat of identifying where silos, breakdowns, and gaps exist in the B2B supplier organizations?

Feedback fuels cross-training

Bianco: Absolutely. Here is what I have learned: I am going to focus on cloud, especially in companies that are either cloud companies or had been an on-premises company and are migrating to being a cloud company. SAP Ariba did this over the last 20 years. It has migrated from on-premises to cloud, so we have a great DNA understanding of that. SAP is out doing the same thing; many companies are.

And what’s important to realize, at least from my perspective -- it was an “Aha” moment -- is that there is a tendency in the B2C world leadership to say, “Look, I am looking at all this data and feedback around customers. Can’t we just go fix this particular customer issue, and they are going to be happy?”

Most of the issues our customers were facing were systemic. There was consistent feedback about something that wasn't working. We had to recognize that these systemic issues needed to be solved by a cross-functional group of people.

What we found in the B2B data was that most of the issues our customers were facing were systemic. It was broad strokes of consistent feedback about something that wasn’t working. We had to recognize that these systemic issues needed to be solved by a cross-functional group of people.

That’s really hard because so many folks have their own budgets, and they lead only a particular function. To think about how they might fix something more broadly took our organization quite a bit of time to wrap our heads around. Because now you need a center of excellence, a governance model that says that CX is at the forefront, and that you are going to have accountability in the business to act on that feedback and those actions. And you are going to compose a cross-functional, multilevel team to get it done.

It was funny early on, in our receiving feedback that customer support is a problem. Support was the problem. The support function was awful. I remember the head of support was like, “Oh, my gosh. I am going to get fired. I just hate my job. I don’t know what to do.”

When you look at the root cause you find that quality is a root-cause issue, but quality wasn’t just in one or another product -- it was across many products. That broader quality issue led to how we enabled our support teams to understand how to better support those products. That quality issue also impacted how we went to market and we showed the features and functions of the product.

We developed a team called the Top X Organization that aggregated cross-functional folks, held them accountable to a standard of a better outcome experience for our customers, and then led a program to hit certain milestones to transform that experience. But all that is a heavy lift for many companies.

Gardner: That’s fascinating. So, your CX advocates -- by having that cross-functional perspective by nature -- became advocates for better processes and higher quality at the organization level. They are not just advocating for the customer; they are actually advocating for the betterment of the business. Are you finding that and where do you find the people that can best do that?

Responsibility of active listening

Bianco: It’s not an easy task, it’s for few and far between. Again, it takes a corporate strategy. Dana, when you asked me the question earlier on, “What was the catalyst that brought you here?” I oftentimes chuckle. There isn’t a leader on the planet who isn’t going to have someone come to them, like I did at the time, and say, “Hey, I think we should listen to our customers.” Who wouldn’t want to do that? Everyone wants to do that. It sounds like a really good idea.

But, Dana, it’s about active listening. If you watch movies, there is often a scene where there is a husband and wife getting therapy. And the therapist says, “Hey, did you hear what she said?” or, “Did you hear what he said?” And the therapist has them repeat it back. Your marriage or a struggle you have with relationships is never going to get better just by going and sitting on the couch and talking to the therapist. It requires each of you to decide internally that you want this to be better, and that you are going to make the changes necessary to move that relationship forward.

It’s not dissimilar to the desire to have a CX organization, right? Everyone thinks it’s a great idea to show in their org chart that they have a leader of CX. But the truth is you have to really understand the responsibility of listening. And that responsibility sometimes devolves into just taking a survey. I’m all for sending a survey out to our customers, let’s do it. But that is the smallest part of a CX organization.


It’s really wrapped up in what the corporate strategy is going to be: A customer-centric, decision-making model. If we do that, are we prepared to have a governance structure that says we are going to fund and resource making experiences better? Are we going to acknowledge the feedback and act on it and make that a priority in business or not?

Oftentimes leaders get caught up in, “I just want to show I have a CX team and I am going to run a survey.” But they don’t realize the responsibility that gives them when now they have on paper all the things that they know they have an opportunity to make better for their customers.

Gardner: You have now had five years to make these changes. In theory this sounds very advantageous on a lot of levels and solves some larger strategic problems that you would have a hard time addressing otherwise.

So where’s the proof? Do you have qualitative, quantitative indicators? Maybe it’s one of those things that’s really hard to prove. But how do you rate customer advocacy and CX role? What does it get you when you do it well?

Feelings matter at all levels

Bianco: Really good point. We just came off of our five-year anniversary this week. We just had an NPS survey and we got some amazing trends. In five years, we have seen an even greater improvement in the last 18 months -- an 11-point increase in our customer feedback. And that not only translates into the survey, as I mentioned, but it also translates with influencers and analysts.

Gartner has noted the increase in our ability to address CX issues and make them better. We can see that in terms of the 11-point increase. We can see that in terms of our reputation within our analyst community.

And we also see it in the data. Customers are saying, “Look, you are much more responsive to me.” We see a 35-percent decrease in customers complaining in their open text fields about support. We see customers mentioning less the challenges they have seen in the area of integration, which is so incredibly important.

We see a 35-percent decrease in customers complaining in their open text fields about support. We see customers less challenged by integration, which is so incredibly important.

And we also hear less from our own SAP leaders who felt like NPS just exposed the fact that they might not be doing their job well, which was initially the experience we got from leaders who were like, “Oh my gosh. I don’t want you to talk about anything that makes it look like I am not doing my job.” We created a culture where we have been more open to feedback. We now relish in that insight, versus feeling defensive.

And that’s a culture shift that took us five years to get to. Now you have leaders chomping at the bit to get those insights, get that data, and make the changes because we have proof. And that proof did start with an organizational change right in the beginning. It started with new leadership in certain areas like support. Those things translated into the success we have today. But now we have to evolve beyond that. What’s the next step for us?

Gardner: Before we talk about your next steps, for those organizations that are intrigued by this -- that want to be more customer-centric and to understand why it’s important -- what lessons have you learned? What advice do you have for organizations that are maybe just beginning on the CX path?

Bianco: How long is this show?

Gardner: Ten more minutes, tops.

Bianco: Just kidding. I mean gosh, I have learned a lot. If I look back -- and I know some of my colleagues at IBM had a similar experience – the feedback is this. We started by deploying NPS. We just went out there and said we are going to do these NPS surveys and that’s going to shake the business into understanding how our customers are feeling.

We grew to understand that our customers came to SAP because of our products. And so I think I might have spent more time listening inside of the products. What does that mean? It certainly means embedding micro-moments, of aggregating feedback, in the product to help understand -- and allows our developers to understand what they need to do. But that need to be done in a very strategic way.

It’s also about making sure that any time anyone in the company wants to listen to customers, you ensure that you have the budget and the resources necessary to make that change -- because otherwise you will alienate your customers.

Another area is you have to have executive leadership. It has to be at the root of your corporate objectives. Anything less than that and you will struggle. It doesn’t mean you won’t have some success, but when you are looking at the root of making experience better, it’s about action. That action needs to be taken by the folks responsible for your products or services. Those folks have to be incented, or they have to be looped in and committed to the program. There has to be a governance model that measures the experience of the customer based on how the customer interprets it -- not how you interpret it.

If, as a company, you interpret success as net-new software sales, you have to shift that mindset. That’s not how your customers view their own success.

Gardner: That’s very important and powerful. Before we sign off, five years in, where do you go now? Is there an acceleration benefit, a virtuous adoption pattern of sorts when you do this? How do you take what you have done and bring it to a step-change improvement or to an even more strategic level?

Turn feedback into action

Bianco: The next step for us is to embed the experience program in every phase of the customer’s journey. That includes every phase of our engagement journey inside of our organization.

So from start to finish, what are the teams providing that experience, whether it’s a service or product? That would be one. And, again, that requires the governance that I mentioned. Because action is where it’s at -- regardless of the feedback you are getting and how many places you listen. Action is the most important piece to making their experience better.

This requires governance because action is where it's at -- regardless of the feedback. Taking action is the most important piece to making the customer experience better.

Another is to move beyond just NPS surveys. Again, it’s not that this is a new concept, but as I watched the impact of COVID-19 on accelerating digital feedback, social forums, and public forums, we measured that advocacy. It’s not just the, “Will you recommend this product to a friend or colleague?” In addition it’s about, “Will you promote this company or not?”

That is going to be more important than ever, because we are going to continue in a virtual environment next year. As much as we can help frame what that feedback might be -- and be proactive -- is where I see success for SAP in the future.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how companies can better understand and respond to their markets -- one subscriber at a time.

And we have learned that by better listening inside of products businesses can remove the daylight between their digital deliverables and their customers’ impressions to best fulfill those customers’ wants and needs.

So a big thank you to our guest, Lisa Bianco, Global Vice President, Experience Management and Advocacy, at SAP Procurement Solutions. Thank you so much, Lisa.

Bianco: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect digital business innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator throughout this series of SAP-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.


Thanks again for listening. Please do come back next time, and feel free to share this information across your IT and business communities.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Transcript of a discussion on discerning customer preferences to best fulfill customer wants and needs and inform digital business imperatives. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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