9 steps to organize a virtual hackathon on Customer Experience Management

Qualtrics has been a pioneer to create Experience Management (XM), so that companies listen to their customers and employees, understand them and act to deliver better experiences. The SAP Customer Experience and Qualtrics program brings together corporate resources to help solve global challenges on Customer Experience Management, while focusing on innovation-led growth. We recently organized a virtual hackathon, which delivered creative prototypes through an engaging and dynamic three-month partner experience.

Let’s discover how we made it happen!

1.     Set a specific goal

Shoot for the moon, focus on it and find the right group who wants to travel with you!

1.1  Identify the innovation idea: Customer Experience Management

Transforming Customer Experience with Experience Management can be done across several dimensions, from eCommerce to marketing, sales or customer service. We encourage innovation from our ecosystem, to design and develop solutions that bridge identified experience gaps.

1.2  Find people with the right spirit

SAP has an internal “catalyst program” for its top talents, which encourages participants to define their own projects with the help of other catalysts. That was the trigger for my initial idea of a hackathon, which grew way bigger than initially planned. A broad SAP and Qualtrics team went the extra mile with an open mindset to make crazy ideas a reality!

1.3  Be practical with the right partners

We decided to work with selected SAP and Qualtrics European partners, to apply innovation and develop our ecosystem. A hackathon with SAP colleagues wouldn’t have been enough customer related, whereas it would be hard to scale when involving directly customers.

2.     Invest into planning

Always aim for the best: choose a topic, identify the right experts and find solutions!

2.1  Encourage and enable the participants to innovate

We delivered 13 sessions around SAP and Qualtrics, with a focus on Customer Experience. Dotaki, a start-up on Emotional UX Personalization, presented its solution so that partners could include it in their prototypes. Last, we produced two developer labs to give the participants hands-on exercises.

2.2  Coach the partners

We had coaches and technical experts who supported the partners to refine their use cases and to choose the most appropriate architecture. This was done prior to the event with personalized discussions, so that the teams would make the best out of their idea.

2.3  Set up the virtual environment

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, we organized a virtual event and we selected the most convenient tools to create an engaging and interactive experience: Mural for brainstorming, Zoom for web conferences, SAP Jam for information sharing and Slack for live messages.

3.     Conduct the live event

Keep the planning on-track, connect the dots when help is needed and stay focused on the end-goal!

3.1  Plan properly and stick to the structure

We delivered a 3-day virtual event, with a break-out room for each team. The coaches and experts could come in when needed, like in a real-life hackathon. As an alternative for the social events, we organized virtual happy hours at the end of each working day.

3.2  Enjoy the final ceremony

A great two-hour final ceremony took place on the third day, with a judging panel of SAP and Qualtrics executives that was excited by what they discovered! Zoom unfortunately kicked out some of the participants, we even created a blooper on these issues.

3.3  Create a buzz with the innovations

The partners delivered excellent and innovative prototypes, that are promoted now:

Netconomy: B2C for a perfume retailer

• Understand customers’ expectations in-store and online with the help of the fragrance wheel to create a fragrance profile used for targeted recommendations and loyalty activities
• Add sustainability footprint to the product page to profile customers on their sustainability behavior, in order to raise awareness, increase loyalty and achieve a better and more sustainable future for all
• Overall Winner
• Audience Award
• Special Sustainability Award

Sybit: Predictive Churn for B2B

• Collect customer feedback after trade fair visits, product reviews or service tickets and understand it to improve the churn rate accuracy, to act swiftly and decisively if a critical threshold is reached
• Best overall showcase

Kantar + ECENTA: Self-Service Experience, Katherine and chatbot for B2B Discrete Manufacturing (DMI)

• Help customers 24/7 and reduce costs through transfer of inquiries from human contact center to self-service with the Katherine chatbot
• Most innovative prototype

maihiro: B2B2C Direct-to-Consumer use case for a motorbike manufacturer

• Define personas for the website visitors to guide buyers and dealers, to personalize the customer journey based on their emotions and to make the sales funnel more visible for the brand
• Best realization of Experience Management (XM)

Delaware: B2B2C Smart Bakery

• Understand critical moments like quality or delivery issues to improve production, order and delivery processes, brand loyalty and customer satisfaction

Osudio: B2B Commerce for farmers

• Listen to farmers during the onboarding process to understand how to make them loyal and to act upon the collected insights

Conclusion

This first SAP Hackathon CXM was a great event, appreciated by all contributors: partners, SAP and Qualtrics teams. We loved what the teams delivered and how they could grow with this 3-month experience. We enjoyed everything and the final presentations made us forget the hard work! A big thank you goes to everybody who was involved!

Our key learnings are: 

• Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the stars!
• Have a Plan B for everything and have everybody ready to go!
• Be open to new ideas in every aspect of the hackathon, from preparation to resources and outcomes, these can be game changers!

This motivated us to decide to scale the event. We are now in the early stage of planning the SAP Hackathon CXM Wave 2 with a global event, across Asia-Pacific-Japan, Europe and the Americas. The focus will be on SAP CX and Qualtrics, with the introduction of innovative solutions on Emotional AI.

Let’s make XM a reality for CX with the SAP and Qualtrics partner ecosystem, to innovate with our customers!