SAP has today announced the rebranding of SAP Emarsys into SAP Engagement Cloud to enhance engagement across operations and coordinate departments.
This product expansion is designed to shift Emarsys from marketing personalization to enterprise engagement orchestration, connecting customer interactions to real-time operational execution across a business.
This expansion aims to address the widening execution gap between brand and customer, with SAP research revealing that 75% of consumers say they are put off by brands that appear disorganized or pass them between teams, despite 78% of businesses believing they deliver seamless experiences.
SAP has also launched SAP Engagement Cloud, Enterprise Edition, designed for large, global organizations operating at scale.
Speaking with CX Today, Joanna Milliken, Head of SAP Engagement Cloud, explained how SAP is leveraging its existing strengths to create something broader and more valuable for customers.
“I think we just see an opportunity to bring an advantage to the market and to the customers by taking everything that we do best, that backbone of governance, the omnichannel personalization.
“We’re really doing something different right on behalf of our customers.”
Surface Level to Deeper Engagement Strategies
With 75% of consumers detached from 78% of business enterprises, siloed success metrics doesn’t always equal seamless customer engagement.
“Everyone kind of has their single view, but when you put all that together, they’re really missing that complete end-to-end personalization,” Milliken explained.
This can show up in various engagement strategies, such as personalization, where traditional omnichannel marketing platforms tend to prioritize data from marketing and customer, and may include basic commerce signals to ensure surface-level consistency.
However, SAP argues that brands should now be diving deeper into enterprise context for effective personalization, incorporating operational, supply chain, service, and fulfilment data to align customer interactions with real-time business conditions and execution capacity.
“Obviously, in marketing, it’s happening at all those touch points, suppliers, partners, employees, at the storefronts,” Milliken continued.
“Not only then can we write, apply all the customer signals that you would typically do, but we also have all that business context. Like which product to show based upon what’s available, but even like deeper supply chain, signals, shipping delays, production times.”
The problem is no longer convincing customers that personalization matters, but about how enterprises need to execute it.
SAP Engagement Cloud: Enhancing Business Operations
SAP’s Emarsys expansion into SAP Engagement Cloud will allow enterprises to move beyond traditional marketing into full-on customer engagement, positioning engagement as a core business discipline rather than simply a function.
By leveraging SAP Business Data Cloud, this unified platform can deliver personalize experiences for increased loyalty, deepened customer relationships, and drive business growth.
It can also analyze operational and behavioral signals in real time to guide responses and adapt interactions instantly.
As AI makes more decisions, triggers actions, and adapts to experience with limited human intervention, this enables organizations to better understand customer behavior in real time.
Further integrating AI into business processes and using it to connect customer insights with real-time operational actions across all functions, enterprises can now respond with greater relevance and consistency, and continuously refine engagement strategies based on live operational and interaction data.
By moving from marketing-led personalization to enterprise-wide engagement orchestration, this allows enterprise systems to coordinate interactions across sales, service, operations, and marketing.
As SAP positions engagement as a core business discipline rather than a function limited to customer-facing teams, customer interactions can be integrated into operational execution across the entire organization.
Coordinating the Customer Journey
This expansion aligns with SAP’s broader customer experience portfolio strategy by offering a holistic, purpose-built solution that integrates marketing, support services, and field operations, enhancing the overall customer journey.
By connecting every stage of the customer journey, teams can utilize shared data and real-time signals to ensure the execution gap closes and help prevent inconsistent experiences.
This can ensure improved customer personalization and accuracy by connecting insight with operational action, aligning what the business communicates with what it can deliver.
By synchronizing teams for coordinated execution, customer engagement becomes more continuous, data-driven, and coordinated across the entire enterprise, rather than isolated within marketing.
SAP Engagement Cloud, Enterprise Edition
SAP has also launched the large-scale enterprise version of its platform, supporting coordinated customer engagement across multiple functions, regions, and brands.
This is particularly designed for enterprises that are heavily regulated, allowing them to operate at scale with centralized governance, real-time data processing, and integration with core business systems for effective customer engagement.
“I think governance now is really a strategic advantage,” Milliken said.
“In today’s world of increasingly autonomous AI… having that at the enterprise scale to make sure that all your regions, your teams, your brands, are doing things in a trusted, compliant way.”
