Your organisation sends out regular communication to various different types of contact, such as leads, customers, suppliers, employees, managers, business partners, pension holders and shareholders.

In lots of scenarios, these business communities are able to help themselves to information or trigger business processes via apps, web portals or just through your website.

When you issue business communication, sometimes this can reach employees through a work Inbox, Fiori LaunchPad notifications or mobile app notifications. Some types of communication to customers and employees can be sent by SMS.  But the vast majority of business communication (and there is an enormous amount of it) is sent by email.

‘The vast majority of business communication is sent by email’

The emails could be output documents, process notifications, mass communication or reports.  You send them every day to your key business communities: People who care about your business; people who make a difference.

The need for a communication strategy

It follows, therefore, that your communication strategy is (a) very important and (b) should focus on your business email.  The following questions arise:

  • Do you have such a communication strategy in place or has something grown organically as different solutions have been added in?
  • Are there times when you rely on others to send emails to your customers such as shipment updates?
  • Do you have the opportunity and capability to include your latest messaging and offers on all your business communication?

One consideration in your communication strategy could be that there must be a common look and feel for all customer communication: Common branding; a single email template.  This is greatly simplified if there is a single source for email content.  And since the data for many of the emails is in SAP, and the business process trigger point for many of the emails is in SAP, then surely it makes sense to manage the emails in SAP rather than in an external/third party system.

Customer Communication

Let’s consider some of your customer communications.  You might send a number of these:

  • Order acknowledgement / confirmation
  • Delivery confirmation
  • Shipment status
  • Delivery note / Picking list
  • Invoice / Receipt
  • Dunning Letter
  • Account Statement

Functionally these communications sit within Sales, Outbound Logistics and Finance, and typically they are managed separately.  But this is a single business process, and so you should provide the same experience to your customer at every stage.

“Provide the same experience to your customers at each stage in the business process”

Employee Communication

Employees are the lifeblood of your organisation.  As you work hard to deliver a digital transformation program in order to provide intuitive apps that look great, does this extend to the communication you send them?

You send employees process notification messages, to provide status updates on key processes (e.g. ‘Your expenses have been reimbursed’), and notifications which require action (e.g. ‘Please approve capital expenditure request’).  These may have a time dependency, and so it should be really clear to employees what notifications they need to take action on and prioritise.

You also might send HR communications, which could be as diverse as:

  • Congratulations on your promotion
  • Organisational Opportunities
  • Health and Safety Bulletin
  • Details about your pension
  • Your Payslip

Employees can receive many types of communication. Do you provide the same communication experience for each one?

The care you take with your communication to customers and employees says a lot about your organisation. What does your communication say about you?

“What does your communication say about you?”

What your business community deserves

Your business communities need, desire and deserve exceptional communication from you: Communication that is clear, consistent, informative, relevant and looks great too.

If you fall short of this then you are not alone. In our experience, all every organisation running SAP fails to deliver the communication its business communities deserve.  That’s why Floe Email Builder offers great opportunity for every SAP* customer.

(*SAP ERP, SAP ECC, SAP Business Suite or S/4HANA)

Floe enables you to provide that experience. Using Floe you can deliver exceptional emails for any SAP business process, blending rich graphical content with SAP data.

Floe can not only be used to replace existing emails but also SAPScript, SMARTFORMS and Adobe Forms, because you can ditch the PDF attachments in your SAP outputs and put the content in the email body instead.

You can try Floe for free to discover how you can transform your SAP communication, to give all your business communities the experiences they deserve.