Customer Relationship Management

Features & Functions

SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) includes features and functions that support core business processes in the following areas:

• Marketing – Analyze, plan, develop, and execute all marketing activities through all customer interaction points. This central marketing platform empowers marketers with complete business insights – enabling you to make intelligent business decisions and to drive end-to-end marketing processes.
• Sales – Maintain focus on productive activity to acquire, grow, and retain profitable relationships with functionality for sales planning and forecasting, territories, accounts, contacts, activities, opportunities, quotations, orders, product configuration, pricing, billing, and contracts.
• Service – Drive service revenue and profitability with support for service sales and marketing; service contract management; in-house and depot repair; warranty management; installed-base management; and resource planning. Call centers, field service, and e-service provide various flexible delivery options.
• Partner channel management – Attain a more profitable and loyal indirect channel by managing partner relationships and empowering channel partners. Improve processes for partner recruitment, partner management, communications, channel marketing, channel forecasting, collaborative selling, partner order management, channel service, and analytics for partners and channel managers.
• Interaction center – Maximize customer loyalty, reduce costs, and boost revenue by transforming your interaction center into a strategic delivery channel for marketing, sales, and service efforts across all contact channels. Activities such as telemarketing, telesales, customer service, HR and IT help desk, and interaction center management are supported.
• Web channel – Increase sales and reduce transaction costs by turning the Internet into a valuable sales, marketing, and service channel for businesses and consumers. Increase profitability and reach new markets with functionality for e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service, and Web channel analytics. Deploy these capabilities directly against the SAP ERP application or with SAP CRM as a fully integrated customer channel.
• Business communications management – Manage inbound and outbound contacts across multiple locations and communications channels effectively and efficiently. By integrating multichannel communications with your customer-facing business processes, you can provide your customers and partners with a smooth, consistent experience across all avenues of contact, including voice, text messaging, Web contacts, and e-mail.
• Real-time offer management – Advanced analytical real-time decision engine that lets you optimize any decision-making process on all customer interaction channels, enabling you to take the most appropriate next action to enhance customer relationships.

SAP CRM also supports several industry-specific processes with functionality designed to meet the individual needs of diverse industry groups, for example:

• Trade promotion management – Empowers account and trade managers to improve control and visibility of the entire trade promotion process. The end-to-end solution enables managers to accurately plan, maximize profitability and increase brand presence with trade activities.

Marketing

• Marketing resource management
• Manage and optimize the use of marketing resources including budgets, people, time, and assets.
• Align all activities and resources around strategic marketing goals.
• Gain visibility and control into your marketing processes.
• Accurately manage the marketing budgets and costs.
• Facilitate collaboration among team members and coordinate marketing activities across the enterprise.
• Segment and list management
• Manage enterprise customer and prospect data without the need for IT support.
• Define accurate segments with a consolidated view of all relevant enterprise customer data.
• Gain insights into customer segments with data visualization features.
• Easily perform segmentation using an interactive, drag-and-drop interface.
• Campaign management
• Make relevant and personalized real-time offers through inbound marketing channels.
• Execute marketing activities through all inbound and outbound interaction channels: direct mail, e-mail, phone, web, fax, and SMS.
• Build customer relationships with dialog marketing that builds on previous interactions to make the follow up interactions more relevant and personalized.
• Leverage online marketing channels to plan, develop, and execute e-mail marketing campaigns.
• Trade promotion management
• Optimize allocated trade funds to best generate sales volumes and to maximize brand awareness.
• Centrally plan and align all trade activities with the SAP Trade Promotion application
• Accurately develop sale volume forecasts and financial accruals with downstream performance data.
• Close the loop on trade claim payments and deductions.
• Automate trade settlements and redemption processes with integration to financials, close the loop on trade activities, and track plan and actual figures.
• Gain insight into trade promotional effectiveness at multiple planning levels: product, category, account, and segments.
• Lead management
• Maintain a single source of all enterprise lead information.
• Automated the entire lead life-cycle process from lead generation, prioritization, distribution, and follow-up processes.
• Extend your lead management process to partner organizations to increase conversion rates.
• Marketing analytics
• Understand the effectiveness of marketing activities.
• Convert reports and data into actionable insights.
• Gain insights into why marketing activities did or did not work.
• Identify business challenges and opportunities.
• Predict customer behaviors, anticipate their needs, and create more relevant, targeted messages.

Sales

• Sales planning and forecasting
• Enhance performance with coordinated planning and execution of sales activities across all channels.
• Provide a complete picture of projected revenue and anticipated sales volume over time.
• Increase the accuracy of demand plans and sales forecasts.
• Territory management
• Optimize account coverage and distribution of sales resources across clearly defined territories.
• Improve resource utilization with clear visibility into assignments and availability.
• Place the right resources in the right locations at the right time to optimize team performance.
• Accounts and contacts management
• Provide a single, comprehensive view of all information necessary to manage your sales accounts.
• Capture, monitor, and track all critical information about prospects, customers, and partners.
• Access key contacts, critical relationships, detailed customer profiles, and the status of all recent interactions at anytime and from any location.
• Activity management
• Focus the collective energy of your sales team on actions proven to promote profitable business.
• Foster efficient team collaboration with better transparency and coordination of sales activities.
• Manage customer visits, account profiles, and activity-driven sales processes.
• Seamlessly synchronize your e-mail, contacts, calendar entries, and tasks with leading groupware solutions.
• Opportunity management
• Track, qualify, and distribute leads to the most appropriate sales professionals.
• Monitor the conversion of opportunities into revenue.
• Identify stalled deals, monitor quota attainment, simulate strategies to push deals through the sales cycle faster, and scrutinize the quantity and quality of sales opportunities with pipeline performance management.
• Quotation and order management
• Generate accurate quotes, capture customer orders, confirm product availability, and track orders through to the fulfillment process.
• Integrate end-to-end business processes to optimize supply chain planning, synchronize billing activities, and ensure the efficient fulfillment of customer orders.
• Product configuration and pricing
• Guide sales professionals through the product configuration process to ensure that complex product and service recommendations – with multiple options and dependencies – fully meet customer requirements.
• Ensure consistent, accurate, and up-to-date pricing – including special quotes and contracts – regardless of the sales channel.
• Billing and contract management
• Develop and manage long-term customer contracts, incorporate customer agreements into ongoing customer processes, and monitor the sales process from inquiry to completion.
• Seamlessly integrate with back-end financial and accounts receivable processes to generate invoices, process payments, credit returns, and process claims.
• Incentive and commission management
• Increase revenue and profitability by strategically employing incentive compensation to align the goals of individual sales professionals with those of the organization.
• Develop, implement, and manage compensation plans to retain and motivate your sales professionals to succeed – allowing them to track performance and simulate potential compensation of deals in the pipeline.
• Sales analytics
• Monitor the overall health of your business by creating accurate forecasts, proactively monitoring pipeline performance, effectively managing budgets, and properly allocating resources to meet revenue goals.

Service

• Service order management
• Process service quotations and service orders from initial receipt to billing and analysis.
• Service contract management
• Manage service contracts, automatically verify entitlement, manage service-level agreements, and alert agents when a customer's contract is about to expire.
• Complaints and returns management
• Manage the entire complaints and returns process, from recording complaints to analyzing and processing them and performing statistical evaluations.
• In-house and depot repair
• Automate the entire in-house and depot repair process, including creating the return materials authorization (RMA), billing and shipping repaired products to customers, and issuing and tracking loaner units as necessary.
• Case management
• Consolidate diverse information in a central repository, and track and analyze the information.
• Installed-base management
• Track customers' installed base of products and know what else is installed at the site, so you can predict the behavior of the products in that environment and provide fast, accurate service.
• Warranty management
• Manage the entire warranty and claims process, from return merchandise authorization (RMA) to receipt and inspection.
• Coordinate with third-party logistics providers to ensure timely customer credits and avoid unnecessary goodwill allowances.
• Resource planning
• Organize, plan, and dispatch service resources to meet service demands in the most effective way.
• E-service
• Provide a secure, personalized portal for customer support and service over the Web.
• Enable customers to troubleshoot their product issues, create service requests, register products and warranties, and track orders.
• Service analytics
• Identify problems and trends, and take corrective action if needed.
• Compare the effectiveness of service territories, and compare actual values with target values.

Partner Channel Management

• Partner management
• Manage channel partner relationships throughout the entire partner life cycle.
• Recruit new partners, plan and forecast channel sales and revenues, segment your partner base for more effective partner programs and management, manage partner compensation plans, and track partner training and certifications.
• Channel marketing
• Motivate partners to sell your products and services rather than competitive offerings.
• Provide relevant information to partners, maintain consistent branding, engage in joint marketing campaigns with partners, and manage channel marketing funds and partner incentives.
• Use functionality to manage content, catalogs, collateral, campaigns, and leads – as well as personalization features and a partner locator – to drive demand for your products through channel partners.
• Channel sales
• Give your partners and direct sales force the same knowledge, tools, and expert advice.
• Gain insight into demand across all selling channels to effectively forecast future business.
• Enable a full range of channel sales processes, including account and contact management, activity management, opportunity management, deal registration, and pipeline forecasting.
• Partner order management
• Optimize partner ordering processes and include partners in collaborative selling across organizational boundaries.
• Enable a complete set of channel order management processes including quote and order management, interactive selling and configuration, pricing and contracts, and point of sale (POS) and channel inventory management.
• Empower end customers to order products and services across your demand network and support distributed, order-management scenarios.
• Channel service
• Ensure consistent and timely service to end customers by providing your partners with the tools and expertise to manage problem resolution and ongoing service relationships.
• Enable a range of channel service business processes, including knowledge management, service order management, live partner support, warranty management, and complaints and returns management.
• Partner and channel analytics
• Get a broad range of standard reports and analyses to determine partner coverage and gaps, partner and channel performance, revenue and sales statistics, the return on your partner investments, your gross margins with partners, and partner utilization.
• Provide channel partners with reports and analyses relevant to their business.

Interaction Center

• Telemarketing
• Seamlessly coordinate all interaction center efforts, including call lists, agent scripts, promotions, and additional channels, and coordinate them with broader marketing activities to ensure a focus on qualified prospects.
• Provide agents with all the information they need to deliver relevant information to prospects.
• Telesales
• Help agents drive more qualified leads into the pipeline, capitalize on cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, and process orders and status information.
• Customer service within the interaction center
• Enable interaction center agents to handle large volumes of incoming e-mail in a direct or automated fashion, as well as communicate by phone or chat sessions.
• Allow agents to research and diagnose problems, handle complaints, confirm contract entitlements, address customer concerns, assist with returned materials, answer technical questions, make exchanges, and even schedule field services.
• HR and IT help desk management
• Deploy company-wide HR help desks that streamline employee access to information and enable HR professionals to provide consistent, personalized services.
• Implement IT help desks that use the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) approach to help resolve issues.
• Interaction center operations and administration
• Manage a multichannel interaction center with a role-based interface that enforces business rules and arms agents with scripts, alerts and messages, and knowledge management features, which speeds customer service.
• Give managers powerful tools for administering the interaction center.
• Multichannel communication
• Integrate multichannel communications solutions, including SAP Business Communications Management and third-party solutions, with your interaction center. These support both inbound and outbound interactions via voice, text messaging, Web contacts, and e-mail.
• Interaction center analytics
• Measure, predict, plan, and optimize your interaction centers by analyzing customer interactions, business processes, and market opportunities, and apply the knowledge gained to improve your customer-focused operations.

Web Channel

• E-marketing
• Support demand generation and customer loyalty processes via the Internet.
• Personalize your customers' Web experiences with the most relevant and convenient online interactions and information.
• Generate additional revenue through a Web-based channel via comprehensive support for catalog management, content management, campaign execution, customer segmentation, personalization, and a store locator.
• E-commerce
• Run business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) selling processes on the Internet.
• Enable a full range of online selling processes, including quote and order management, pricing and contracts, interactive selling and configuration, web auctions, and selling via partners.
• Streamline sales and fulfillment operations with an end-to-end order-to-cash process.
• E-service
• Offer your customers an intuitive channel to perform service tasks, from requesting a service visit to logging a complaint or registering a product.
• Enable customers to perform service-related tasks such as checking order status, obtaining order tracking information, managing accounts and payments, and researching and resolving product problems.
• Service complex products that require sophisticated maintenance.
• Web channel analytics
• Gain insight into, analyze, and act on e-business trends.
• Measure and optimize the success of your Web shop and online content.
• Perform analysis across the breadth of marketing, sales, and service from a Web perspective, and track and use Web behavior to target customers and drive future marketing activities.

Flexible Implementation Options for SAP's Customers

SAP gives you an easy way to leverage your existing SAP software and IT investments to build a Web presence. You can implement these functionalities with your existing SAP ERP application for an entry-level solution to quickly turn the Web into a profitable sales and interaction channel. The application supports end-to-end, order-to-cash processes with easy-to-use, interactive selling and self-services – and provides an easy upgrade path to the complete SAP CRM application.
In addition, customizable Web shop templates for different industries and business models, including B2B and B2C models, can speed the enablement of your Web channel.

Business Communications Management

• Running an inbound contact center
• Run a single or multisite inbound contact center to respond to customer inquiries.
• Give agents – no matter where they're located – full access and control over communications functions via Web-based tools.
• Give managers the real-time monitoring, reporting, and quality analysis functions they need to make better business decisions, continually improve agent performance, and support long-term process development.
• Running an outbound contact center
• Plan and execute outbound telesales, telemarketing, and proactive customer service programs efficiently and effectively, across all locations.
• Minimize redundant work by combining disconnected outbound-calling initiatives into a single, networked operation.
• Give managers the real-time monitoring, reporting, and quality analysis functions they need to make better business decisions, continually improve agent performance, and support long-term process development.
• Enterprise-wide communications management
• Provide an all-IP communications foundation for communication-enabled business processes across the enterprise.
• Provide enterprise-wide IP or Voice Over IP (VoIP) telephony for everyone who needs it – from any network-connected workstation, terminal, or mobile phone around the world.
• Reporting
• Monitor and manage your communications in real time.
• Adjust communication-enabled business processes as needed and manage multiple locations as a single entity.
• Give your organization a combined operational and business view of all communications and contact center operations.
• Interactive voice response (IVR)
• Provide automatic voice response to customer inquiries or gather information for intelligent routing of inquiries.
• Allow customers to respond by touch tone, obtain or leave information, and, if needed, connect to the appropriate contact center agent.

REAL-TIME OFFER MANAGEMENT

• Offer catalog management
• Centrally create and manage offers for business users.
• Easily define offer targets, eligibility rules, and policies.
• Simulate and test offer effectiveness before putting it into production.
• Create and deploy offers without IT dependence.
• Real-time decision making
• Make real-time recommendations, cross sell, up sell, retention, marketing messages, or actions.
• Take into account all relevant customer information, including session information and other factors such as agent skills and offer value, to make the very best recommendations.
• Leverage advanced optimization and arbitration analytics to help agents make the best decision about what kind of offer to make, when, and to whom.
• Self-learning
• Automatically adapt to shifting market environments by changing the offer recommendations based on evolving customer demands.
• Learn from every customer interaction to anticipate future customer demands.
• Experiment and automatically learn from various offers and different response profiles to recommend offers with highest likelihood of being accepted.
• Offer analytics
• Gain insights into offer effectiveness by understanding why and how offers are performing.
• Review your agents' effectiveness in promoting offers and their conversion rates.
• Gain a more thorough understanding of your customer segments by seeing their reactions to various offers.
• Leverage the insights to build more effective and targeted offers.

Business Benefits

SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) provides the insight and analysis you need to anticipate customer needs and build lasting, profitable customer relationships.
SAP CRM excels because it does the following:

• Provides the flexibility to create unique customer experiences – SAP CRM enables a wide range of end-to-end business processes to address an array of marketing, sales, and service situations. The functionality of SAP CRM is deployed step-by-step and easily adapts and extends to create a more distinctive customer experience.
• Drives the organization to more consistent, relevant interactions across all channels and touch points – SAP CRM allows organizations to make the most of every customer interaction across the entire customer life cycle by ensuring that each interaction is consistent and relevant, with real-time information about the complete history, context, value, and profitability of each customer.
• Enables end-to-end processes within the industry value chain – SAP CRM is the only application that helps organizations drive customer value, loyalty, and profitability across the entire value chain. With best-in-class front-office functionality that complements industry-specific processes, SAP CRM turns the vision of customer-driven growth into reality.