Revolutionizing Customer Conversations with OpenText and SAP
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Key Takeaways
⇨ OpenText’s Outbound Communications transforms SAP’s typically generic outputs into personalized, engaging customer communications, enhancing customer satisfaction and brand consistency.
⇨ The solution centralizes outbound communication management, streamlining collaboration across departments and ensuring governance, compliance, and reduced operational costs by automating workflows.
⇨ By enabling personalized communications at scale, OpenText turns traditional cost centers into revenue-generating opportunities, helping organizations adapt to modern customer experience demands and future-proof their SAP investments.
Engaging customer communication isn’t the first phrase that comes to mind when one thinks of SAP. Of course, it is a mission-critical system. However, the default outputs of this system can sometimes feel a little robotic. This is especially true in a landscape where personalization is gaining ground over a generic one-size-fits-all approach to documents like invoices, statements, and notifications.
Now, OpenText’s Outbound Communications from SAP Solutions are transforming this aspect of the SAP system, making it a customer engagement engine.
From Data Points to Dialogues
A primary capability of the OpenText solution is centralizing outbound communication management. By creating a single, controlled platform for all customer-facing documents, organizations can overcome issues of inconsistency and fragmentation. This centralized repository ensures that every communication, regardless of its delivery channel, be it email, web, text message, or an in-app notification, adheres to strict corporate branding and legal standards.
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This approach offers two key operational advantages:
- Streamlining collaboration between different departments, such as marketing, finance, and customer service, by providing a unified environment for document creation and approval.
- Significantly improving governance and compliance by ensuring that only approved templates and content blocks are used, reducing the risk of manual errors and regulatory non-compliance.
Personalization at Scale
However, OpenText shines in its ability to personalize communications at scale. The solutions go beyond adding a customer’s name to an email and leverage the rich data within the organization’s SAP system to create truly one-to-one messages. For example, for a utility company using these solutions, the utility bill not only shows customers their usage but also includes a personalized offer for a smart thermostat based on their consumption patterns. In the insurance space, these solutions enable agents to make authorized, real-time changes to an insurance renewal document directly within the SAP environment, eliminating the need for IT intervention.
This level of personalization has a ripple effect across the entire business. It leads to increased customer satisfaction, stronger brand consistency, and reduced costs by automating manual workflows. Most importantly, it turns a mundane business process into an opportunity to connect with the organization’s customers on a human level.
By using OpenText to transform outbound communications from a necessary evil into a strategic asset, organizations can unlock new revenue streams through targeted cross-selling and upselling and build the kind of lasting customer relationships that are the foundation of a successful business.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
A unified platform can offer simplified governance. OpenText provides a deeply integrated, enterprise-wide solution. For SAP architects and administrators, this means leveraging a single, cohesive platform to manage outbound communications that originate from various modules, such as SD, FICO, and HCM. This architecture offers a significant advantage over maintaining custom ABAP code, SAP scripts, or multiple third-party tools, as it reduces the total cost of ownership and minimizes technical debt. Moreover, governance is centralized and robust, all within a version-controlled environment that eliminates shadow IT and ensures every communication is consistent and approved.
Translate features into financial impact. The business case for OpenText moves beyond technical elegance to deliver measurable financial results. When building a proposal, SAPinsiders should highlight a multi-faceted ROI. This includes significant operational cost reduction by empowering business users to manage their communications, thereby minimizing reliance on expensive IT development cycles for simple text or image changes. This solution also impacts the company’s cash flow. Thus, features like clearer, interactive invoices with embedded payment links can directly reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). By turning mandatory communications into marketing opportunities, the solution transforms a traditional cost center into a tangible revenue generator.
OpenText’s solution is critical for future-proofing the intelligent enterprise. As organizations invest heavily in migrating to SAP S/4HANA, they must recognize that legacy output management systems are a primary bottleneck to achieving true business transformation. These older methods lack the agility and personalization capabilities required to compete in the modern customer experience economy. OpenText’s solutions enable the business agility needed to adapt communications on the fly, without a formal IT project. For any SAP S/4HANA program, modernizing outbound communications is a fundamental requirement to ensure the massive investment in a new ERP core delivers a consistent, positive, and valuable experience at every customer touchpoint.
