Customer Service is the new Marketing

Telling your customers the benefits of your products and services has long been the definition of Marketing, but in this era of immediate access through the internet, that definition has begun to evolve. Word-of-mouth is still and probably always will be the most powerful Marketing tool you’ll have as a marketer. This has become evident with the rise of influencer review websites like FeedbackCompany (NL), TrustPilot, Tripadvisor and BazaarVoice.

Now, when buyers talk about your company, what are your prospective buyers hearing? Are they still only hearing about the benefits your products provide? Most likely they only talk about the service you provide alongside or after the purchase instead of the product they bought; for example how satisfied they are on your follow-up and solution to their complaint. Therefore, it is important to know if there are any complaints captured for your customers and how these are resolved.

With the new SAP Marketing Cloud 1908 release you are finally able to use this information from your internal service process to influence the customer experience on this specific part directly from Marketing. The long-awaited integration is available: Service Tickets/Complaints from SAP Service Cloud are now available in SAP Marketing Cloud.

Why is this important?

To be able to create a complete 360 degree view of your customer, you need as much information from your customers as possible. This also includes information from your customer service department. By collecting information from your customer service department on all customer complaints that are recorded in the Service system, you can identify unhappy customers and directly act on it through Marketing. You can engage with those customers again in a positive way via email or social channels that gives them the feeling that they are really important to you.

Or if a complaint is solved for your customer, it is essential to follow-up with them to check if they are satisfied with the provided solution. This can be done via an email message with a survey (Qualtrics integration is also available since 1905 release) in which feedback is asked on how the complaint was handled. With the new integration available in release 1908 this message can now be triggered from Marketing Cloud based on the Service Tickets/Complaints from Service Cloud that are captured as Interactions in the Marketing system.

Integration of Service Tickets in SAP Marketing Cloud

As stated above, by replicating Service Tickets from SAP Service Cloud to interactions in SAP Marketing Cloud, you can use this information as triggers in Marketing for inviting people to surveys and checking the overall customer satisfaction.
Service tickets/complaints in Marketing are important to understand your customer’s business needs, for example to trigger campaigns for a new product launch or product replacements to the right group of customers.

What is needed to use Service Tickets as Interactions in SAP Marketing Cloud?

The integration of Service Tickets between SAP Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud requires the following preliminary steps:

1. If not already in place, please integrate the Sales/Service Cloud with SAP Marketing Cloud by performing the integration scenario ‘SAP Cloud for Customer Integration with SAP Marketing Cloud’. Check Integration Guide on SAP Help for more information.
2. Download the ‘Service Category Catalog’ in SAP Service Cloud via ‘Administrator > Service and Social > SLA Setup: Service Categories’ and upload it in SAP Marketing Cloud as a product hierarchy using the ‘Import Data’ app. The service categories of the service tickets are included as product categories in SAP Marketing Cloud. They can be classified with category types to distinguish service processes or service solutions.
3. In Marketing go to ‘Manage Your Solution’ app and define a new Interaction Channel for Service Tickets, named ‘Service’ in the ‘Manage Interaction Content’ configuration app. Don’t forget to assign the Communication Medium ‘BUSINESS_DOCUMENT’ and the Interaction Type ‘SERVICE_TICKET’ to the newly created Interaction Channel ‘Service’.

After the prerequisites are done, the following integration activities need to be carried out:

1. Go to ‘Scoping’ in SAP Service Cloud:
   Business Configuration -> Edit Project Scope -> Questions -> Communication and Information Exchange -> Integration with External Applications and Solutions -> Integration into Sales, Service, and Marketing Processes -> Service Tickets.
   Mark the following scoping question as in scope: Do you want to replicate service tickets from your cloud solution to an external application?
   
2. Go to ‘Communication Scenario / Arrangements’ in SAP Service Cloud:
   Administrator -> General Settings -> Integration -> Communication Arrangements.
   The following Communication Scenarios are supported for this Integration: Service Ticket Replication to SAP Business Suite:
   – Outbound Communication Services: Replicate Service Tickets to SAP Business Suite
3. Deploy the standard iFlow ‘Replicate Service Tickets to SAP Business Suite’ (is part of the ‘SAP Cloud for Customer Integration with SAP Marketing’ package) on SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) so Service Tickets are mapped and loaded as interactions into SAP Marketing Cloud.
   (Source: https://api.sap.com/)
   
4. Start initial load of Service Tickets from SAP Service Cloud to SAP Marketing Cloud via ‘Administrator > Extract Data to External System’ and start using the Service Ticket interactions immediately in Marketing.
   

Curious how Acorel can help to improve building your customers’ 360 degree view by using Service Ticket/Complaints information? Feel free to contact me at Remco.jansen@acorel.nl.