Madanjit’s promise: Customers at heart of everything that we do

SAP Concur managing director (Southeast Asia) Madanjit Singh today told a packed ballroom here in Kuala Lumpur that customer success and “making them successful” is the motivating factor that ensures the company continues to innovate and share expertise with industry.

“I am personally held responsible for customer success at Concur,” said Madanjit. “Customers is at the heart of everything we do: From how we design our user experience to how we measure success, our ultimate goal is to provide solutions our customers need and want.”

He was delivering the opening address at the SAP ConcurXchange event which was overwhelmingly received by customers, partners and industry players. Concur is an enterprise software company that was acquired by SAP in 2014 and world renowned for simplifying travel, expense and invoice management for total visibility and greater control.

Madanjit elaborated on how “customer experience” comprises two parts: The buyer’s journey followed by the customer journey which consists of, amongst others, adoption and optimisation.

Transitioning to the cloud

“Innovation and expertise equates to value,” he said, adding that having the necessary implementation methodology is integral to any desired solution.

Madanjit also said that “SAP Concur is the safest and shortest distance between business transitioning to the cloud.

“The SAP Concur cloud-based solution is designed to meet the needs of any global business and offers a sophisticated – yet simple – way to manage expense, travel, and invoice that scales with any-sized business,” he said. “Our cloud is built using modern architectural patterns designed to provide security, reliability, and scale.”

Meanwhile, its travel services department head (Asia-Pacific and Greater China) Carl Jones emphasised that hyper-connectivity is resulting in a shift toward greater mass personalisation of products and services.

“More and more companies are using sophisticated algorithms to understand their customers better and tailoring their products to specific needs,” he said, adding that algorithms, in combination with collaborative analysis, are keys to driving sales.

The future of travel

On the travel front, and for the travel manager, visibility of spend is now an expected standard, he said.

“For the travel manager, predictive analytics can help them manage travel policies in real time, together with managing budgets,” he added. “What’s more, for high level policy guidance, ‘what if’ scenarios can easily be predicted on MIS.”

As for the traveller, artificial intelligence and robotics can help them automatically make changes when things are disrupted – or help them with recommendation of new travel plans, he shared.

“In addition, traveller can also be warned at booking when circumstances change (such as weather disruption) while they could also look for options to automatically recheck air and hotels for cheaper tickets,” added Jones.

“SAP Concur will continue to innovate to improve the experiences of business travellers, travel managers and finance leaders,” emphasised Jones.

“Our cloud-based solutions deliver an effortless experience for employees and total transparency into spending, helping organisations of all sizes, industries and locations run better,” he concluded.