The Qualtrics Effect, which in the past few months has driven massive change not only among customers but also within parent company SAP, was underscored with great clarity yesterday by none other than SAP founder, chairman and icon Hasso Plattner.
The significance of Plattner’s ringing endorsement for the new phenomenon of experience management—constant feedback with stakeholders driving constant product enhancements and improvements—centers on the ability by SAP to transform itself into a truly customer-centric and rapidly evolving development engine.
If SAP can meet the challenges and long-range targets Plattner laid out, then customers will have better experiences with SAP software and get more value from it. And that will raise the odds that SAP will be able to fend off the ferocious competition coming at it from all angles of the enterprise-software business.
Highlights From Hasso Plattner’s Sapphire Now Keynote
So—will SAP be able to meet them? Yesterday at Sapphire Now, Plattner spoke about the challenges and opportunities in passionate and emphatic tones. Some highlights:
“The only way forward is that we must update as quickly as we can—we have to accelerate the speed of innovation!”
“We can’t let ourselves just sit back in the bubble of our sterile offices! All of us at both SAP and Qualtrics must engage actively with the world outside and find out what customers want and need.”
“Get the feedback! Have empathy with the user! If we at SAP can do that, then the impact of Qualtrics on SAP will be one of largest organizational impacts ever in history of our company.”
“The general perception out there is that at least some of our UI sucks. But at the same time, we win awards! We have to figure out where it really hurts—where the customers are most unhappy—and then go get that feedback!”
“To all of our customers and users: please, share your feedback with us. I promise you, we will get it right at a detailed level, not just in big-picture view.”
“We were sorry to find out that while one of our SAP companies had been using Qualtrics for long time and got lots and lots of feedback, their developers couldn’t stand the nature of the feedback so they didn’t use it. They didn’t use it… And we must fix that. We must find ways to handle the critique—to look for it, to accept it, and to handle it.”
Disclosure: at the time of this writing, SAP was a client of Evans Strategic Communications LLC.
Subscribe to the Cloud Wars Newsletter for in-depth analysis of the major cloud vendors from the perspective of business customers. It’s free, it’s exclusive, and it’s great!
