Tech Bytes: Three Ways SAP Makes Commerce a Community Event

Seamless commerce is constantly evolving, and SAP is attempting to stay at the front of the curve with its new SAP Jam Communities with Commerce solution. The cloud-based customer engagement tool is natively built on the SAP Jam enterprise social collaboration platform, and also integrates with the SAP hybris commerce management platform.



At a recent event in Boston, SAP explained how the new solution enables retailers to build community pages that support and drive seamless commerce. Here are three of the most innovative community page features.



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SAP designed the solution to align with the modern customer journey. No matter what channels are used along the way or which channel is ultimately used to execute a transaction, most customer journeys now begin with an online product search.



Online community pages are easy for Google to index and tend to come up at or near the top of keyword search results. Jam Communities enables retailers to quickly build an out-of-the-box community page for any product they sell, and also brand and customize it as needed.



This focus on community pages as a means for retailers to engage customers from their initial product search greatly increases the odds of the customer journey ending with a transaction at that same retailer. Community pages also deliver another couple of important benefits.



Community Effort

By letting retailers easily create community pages built around specific products, Jam Communities lets them seamlessly extend the customer experience in a few ways. First, retailers can deliver the type of unsolicited third-party commentary and insight consumers crave, while still keeping them “in-house.”



Second, retailers can build direct purchase functionality into the community pages. This lets them capture purchases at the moment of discovery, rather than having to wait for the customer journey to continue to their e-commerce site. And they can also integrate content (including image and video) from a community page into their e-commerce site, making online product displays more customer-centric and “sticky.”



Third, community pages by their nature are ideal tools for converting customers into advocates who will promote a retailer’s products of their own volition. Retailers can also link information from other blogs and online information sources, and even include paid promotional content (personally I would recommend identifying paid content to avoid consumers feeling duped).



Analyze This

Jam Communities leverages its tie-in with hybris to offer real-time analysis of community page activity. For example, retailers can trace the path to purchase back to clicks on community page posts.



This allows retailers to determine which commentators are actually driving purchases, as well as simply drawing eyeballs. Profitable commentators can then be offered targeted deals and discounts to reward them and encourage continued community participation.



Retailers can also perform sentiment analysis and dive into other metrics to determine exactly how successful their community page efforts are, and also obtain further insight into what consumers think about their products and services. That type of data access is a jam session most retailers would never want to end.