Outreach is a sales execution platform that helps market-facing teams create and predictably close more pipeline. From prospecting to deal management to forecasting, Outreach leverages automation and artificial intelligence to help revenue leaders increase the efficiency and effectiveness of go-to-market activities and personnel across the revenue cycle. Outreach offers sales engagement, revenue intelligence, and revenue operations functionalities in a unified platform. The software…
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SAP Conversational AI (discontinued)
Score 6.8 out of 10
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SAP Conversational AI was a platform used to build chatbots and digital assistants in SAP integration. Starting January 2023, SAP Conversational AI, SAP’s chatbot building platform has been set to maintenance mode. Existing customers can continue to use the enterprise edition of the product until the end of their contract.
Outreach is outstanding for volume outreach, as it allows you to touch many prospects and accounts with limited time, while also storing data on historical interactions with prospects. It can be useful for SDR/BDR roles, as well as SMB and MM volume of sales pipe, but I don't think it would be nearly as useful for enterprise sales where more strategic and lower volume outreach is needed. I believe that incorporating more AI assistance with writing would make it a more useful tool for strategic sales.
It would be most suitable to help you attain swift conversation flows as you engage with your audiences. The bots are also of indispensable value in handling repetitive tasks around the firm such as automated HR resourcing expeditions or marketing campaigns or any other important but monotonous tasks. I however admit that analyzing the bot's performance is quite complex, have an RPA specialist around.
SAP has helped me manage my teams cost in material management.
SAP Conversational AI has provided with the goal of developing bot analytics to respond to common user face issues when reporting troubleshooting issues with software equipment as well as technical equipment.
Has helped deploy new bots to increase response time to employees who require assistance with ordering equipment software as well as application development in software ordering.
When sequencing, I need to mark multiple leads, and using the search bar, it will uncheck all the leads that were previously checked.
Calls drop constantly.
Syncing contacts and leads with SF is challenging. The buttons to synchronize with CRM are available when searching for a contact or lead, but you cannot sync it when viewing the lead or contact itself.
SAP can certainly provide better and more clear documentation on how to customize and deploy the chatbot/use SAP Conversational AI.
There is lot less developer community around SAP Conversational AI so it is hard to get help from outside developers and experts on best practices, hacks and existing applications/integrations.
It is hard to use SAP Conversational AI outside SAP S/4HANA Cloud, for example on AWS or GCP or in a multi cloud environment.
It's a strong tool that helps our sales development team manage a large number of qualified leads. The sequence framework ensures that every lead receives enough contact attempts that we have confidence that we're not abandoning our prospecting too early without the overhead of managing those activities manually.
Overall, Outreach is usable and scalable across team sizes. The only reason I give a nine and not a 10 is that there are improvements that can be made within the reporting feature. It is usable, but not everyone can easily self-learn the best practices. At times, it may require building 2-3 reports and then using a VLOOKUP in Excel to achieve the desired outcome.
Chatbots have already acquired most of the market and are still trending with the needs of changing market everyday. It will keep evolving with AI and NLP more to offer for improvements. SAP CAI is a good product to add to an enterprise using SAP ERP Suite
In our years as Outreach customers, I can count the number of outages we've experienced on one hand. Generally, outages have been very brief and have not completely frozen our access to the platform. Scheduled maintenance is always proactive communicated and the hours never interfere with standard business hours or scheduled sequences.
Never had an issue. SAP CAI shares the same platform as any other product hosted on SAP Cloud Platform (aka BTP) and depends on your hosting (US, Europe, Asia). Maintenance modes are planned and customers are aware of it well in advance in order to mitigate potential impacts on the service offering.
Outreach's performance overall is very high quality. Pages load right away. Occasionally it might take a minute to generate a report, but not any slower than in other platforms I've used. Outreach is integrated into many of our other tools and seems to be a very clean integration. Everything runs very quickly.
It's a pure SaaS platform hosted on SAP Cloud Platform (aka BTP). The experience is pretty much seamless with minimum loadings or noticeable lags. The hosting depends on your location so you may want to make sure the instance is available on a server close to you, such as the USA, Europe or Asia.
There is almost zero customer support. What they do offer is a live chat feature which is active during "normal" business hours which is nice for instant inquiries if someone is available. However, you do not have a dedicated representative to address questions or concerns and their billing process is confusing and messy without any support.
Great support from the people of SAP Conversational AI as of the community. Sometimes it takes a little while for folks of the SAP Conversational AI team to answer but this has mostly to do with the overload of questions and users the product has. The gold-support channel within Slack that SAP Conversational AI has, is a great help to distinguish more professional usage and therefore more urgent questions.
We were trained in person and it was very easy to understand. And if we missed any pointers there was more training given to us. So i always like this tool. The drafts were also prepared for us to sync outreach with our devices so it was straightforward. Highly recommend
Lots of attention from the Outreach training team, with a great willingness to customize to our needs. To be clear, you get out what you put in. If you don't work with them, you'll get cookie-cutter training. But we asked for a lot of customization, and they delivered what we asked for.
I expected more assistance in connecting Outreach with Salesforce. We have a basic connection, but many fields were left without a sync. We can apparently sync data without adding the app into Salesforce, but believe we could get more functionality with a better integration. The basics of setting up our sequences and using Outreac to run them was was fine.
Outreach is designed with a workflow-first approach, which helps ensure that reps adopt the process and allows AI and machine learning to understand the full funnel. On top of this, Outreach offers more robust functionality, reporting, and integrations than other competitors. Outreach also understands user workflows, which helps influence rep behavior and outcomes.
The platforms have similarities in terms of making the organization more data-driven. However, the use cases are different. SAP Analytics Cloud is used for reporting, deploying dashboards, and scheduling timely delivery of reporting and analytics. SAP Conversational AI is a more front-end product that end users can directly use to navigate the web application better. Both have strengths in their respective areas. Conversational AI is more recent and cutting edge.
When I first joined the company we were a sales team of 10. Over the last 4 years we have grown to 30 and have used Outreach the entire time. Everyone uses Outreach and it works for virtually any size business. The seat model works perfectly for any size company plus Outreach can handle hundreds of thousands of emails being sent out. We never have to worry about throttling or any type of lag time based on usage. This is key when scaling.
It's helped me speed up my ability to reach out to customers. I like bulk composing but would be even better if Outreach was able to recommend (daily/weekly/etc.) who we should reach out to based on intent/other metrics.
I will say outreach has improved our ability to book more meetings simply because it enables volume activities.
The impact has been very positive for our business objectives. Through the chatbot, our clients can have an immediate response to any of their requests without the need of an intervention of a person or without the use of the telephone or email. Customer satisfaction has been much higher.
