Everyone can get behind the idea of providing more personalized customer engagement, but theories abound about the best way to accomplish this. Of late, communications APIs have been much ballyhooed, leveraged alongside WebRTC to enable real-time communications to be initiated directly from a company's website, for example.
A bit of interesting news around personalized engagement came out on Friday from Genband and SAP. As No Jitter readers no doubt know, Genband has its reputation in developing real-time communications software solutions, and is known especially for its comms platform-as-a-service offering, Kandy (see related article, "Creating Context-Rich Real-Time Communications"). SAP is well known globally for its enterprise application software focused on improving the way that businesses operate.
SAP will now be reselling Genband's Kandy as the SAP Real-Time Communicator Web application by Genband. With the real-time communications capabilities that Genband provides, SAP will enable enterprises to personalize engagement. Specifically, business professionals will be able to collaborate in real time via chat and video conference with co-workers and customers.
The SAP Real-Time Communicator is now natively integrated into the SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) solution; further, SAP customers have the option of integrating the Real-Time Communicator with the SAP hybris Commerce solution.
"By embedding digital communications in SAP Cloud for Customer, we are able to offer our customers dramatic improvements in productivity to help make the experience richer, more contextual and highly efficient for managing vital relationships," said Nayaki Nayyar, senior vice president of Cloud for Customer Engagement at SAP, in a press release.
When I spoke with Jon Jorgl, president of Enterprise for Genband, about this news, one of the first points he brought up was the growing trend that has more businesses pursuing the ability to collaborate within the workflow applications they are using. When you integrate collaboration capabilities into these apps, communications become less fragmented -- no need to open up a separate application to chat or to toggle back and forth between applications. The streamlined communications enhances interactions between employees, partners, and customers because the necessary context is there where you need it, Jorgl said.
If, for example, your business is using the SAP hybris platform for your customer to buy, and a customer has a question on a particular product, having communications capabilities built into that application enables contextual insight that can truly personalize engagement. Interactions are enhanced because all the customer insight can be carried over to the conversation, and analytics around customer buying history, Web browsing history, etc. can be utilized to provide better answers to customer questions.
Genband has been working with SAP for over a year on this project of enabling real-time communications in SAP applications, Jorgl told me. SAP has all the challenges that come with a company of its size and scope, with more than 75,000 employees in more than 130 countries across the globe. With such a globally distributed company, SAP has to grapple with abiding by a wide variety of international regulations, like EU privacy requirements, for example.
Genband has more than 700 carrier customers globally and a heritage of supporting large carriers/enterprises around the world. Further, Genband's bread and butter revolves around providing scalability and reliability.
"We found Genband's platform to be an advanced market offering that was uniquely positioned to help us launch new capabilities quickly across our applications," Nayyar continued in the release. "This, combined with Genband's proven technology performance leadership, global presence and comprehensive product portfolio, all factored into our decision to select this platform."
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