80% of CEOs believe their organisations provide a really good customer experience, while just 8% of customers agree – according to a recent customer experience survey referenced by SAP during the company's User Group conference or Saphila 2019, underway at Sun City, North West Province, South Africa.

Executives from the company have positioned cloud and data analytics at the frontline of digital transformation of businesses. This is the strategy to help enterprises automate and strengthen their processes, improve the customer experience and ultimately establish an innovative, intelligent business.

The intelligent business is the central theme of the event. Discussion has focused on how intelligent technologies, including cloud, AI, IOT, machine learning and analytics, can be used strategically to drive the intelligent business to compete effectively in the experience economy.

SAP says Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is necessary for businesses to extract the full value of an investment in cloud technology.

According to the company, ALM orchestrates the delivery and operations of software. It provides integrated processes and tools to manage the entire life cycle of an application from demand, design, development, testing, and deployment to operations and support.

SAP says contrary to what some think, cloud providers do not automatically address these tasks, nor are they included in software licenses.

New level of customer engagement

The experience economy is not new, but is now a reality say ICT professionals. For businesses, it is about a new level of customer engagement using data, about achieving brand recognition with an ever-increasingly powerful consumer base, it is about how well a business understands their target market, their customers.

SAP believes it is vital that businesses combine their experience data or 'x data' (the 'how' and 'why' questions) with traditional operational data 'o data' (the 'what' exactly question) to provide all-round insight into the customer.

This is a way to deal with the challenges that companies in the midst of transformation must deal with, including the overwhelming amount of data being generated and pressure to improve productivity, and employees are demanding more purpose from their work and bring a new set of skills to the workforce.

Additionally, competitors are gaining momentum through consolidation and/or disruptive business models, and customers will only be loyal to a perfect total experience, as alternative choices proliferate.

Isabell Petzelt, Global Vice President, Customer Strategy & Innovation, SAP America, demonstrated analytics in action and showed delegates a video of one of the latest releases of the Tesla autopilot that she says is actually already driving on the streets of California.

"(It's) applied methodology ... that is also what innovation is all about, it's not magic, its applied technology, applied methodology. This is also what the intelligent enterprise is, we're automating processes, we're using technologies like machine learning , using sensors to make decisions and automate certain processes. That is what Tesla is doing ... they are using a TV on the right, image recognition, picture recognition to let the car make the right decision."

Petzelt said the intelligent enterprise is about embedding technology into the business process, connecting devices, and using various channels to the endpoint to create a new experience.