Moving beyond traditional customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, SAP's innovation and unmatched industry expertise are setting new standards for the way companies connect with their customers and partners. By leveraging SAP Customer Relationship Management to become more customer-centric, businesses can acquire and retain more customers, building long-lasting relationships marked by increased customer loyalty. With the full roster of CRM solutions from SAP, which includes on-demand options, businesses can meet both current and future business needs, drive growth and maintain business agility. Enterprises can become more profitable and improve their bottom line by increasing revenues, improving effectiveness and efficiency and enhancing competitive advantage.

By enabling CRM without compromise, SAP allows customers to avoid the tradeoff of improved customer relationships at the risk of an extensive solution implementation marked by decreased productivity. SAP offers simple, flexible and comprehensive CRM solutions, allowing for rapid adoption and quick time to value without disrupting growth.

CRM solutions from SAP have helped best-run companies in more than 25 industries benefit from stronger relationships with customers and partners. Using the SAP CRM application, for example, organizations can capitalize on customer and market insights to develop enhanced products and services, drive proactive decision-making and quickly adapt to changing business and customer needs.

In a nutshell, CRM solutions from SAP are:

• Simple — SAP drives rapid user adoption and productivity with a unified, intuitive Web-based user interface — delivering deep CRM capabilities that are uniquely tailored for the business user
• Flexible — SAP provides companies with the ability to act immediately and grow strategically, without disruption, by providing the choice of the right CRM application for the right situation with flexible deployment models that include on-premise, on-demand and hybrid applications
• Comprehensive — SAP delivers best-in-class front-office capabilities across marketing, sales and service and all customer interaction channels, powerful embedded analytics, as well as end-to-end, industry-specific processes

SAP's full array of CRM solutions enables integrated industry-specific processes to support customer-facing departments in marketing, sales and service. Users gain a 360-degree view across all customer touch points and interaction channels?whether from the field, the Internet, interaction centers, or channel partners?as well as powerful analytics to support business decisions.

SAP CRM — A comprehensive, integrated application

The SAP CRM application supports a number of the core capabilities in the following areas:

• Sales. SAP CRM helps sales professionals be efficient with time and effective in action, provides the knowledge needed to turn insight into action and to acquire, grow and retain profitable relationships. Sales planning and forecasting can be steered to maximize sales-team productivity by improving territory, account and contact management. SAP CRM includes quotation and order management, pricing and contracts, incentive and commission management as well as sales analytics.
• Marketing. SAP CRM increases the resource efficiencies and empowers organizations to acquire and develop long term profitable customer relationships. This integrated closed loop application enables marketers to analyze, plan, develop, execute and measure all marketing activities. It also includes marketing resource management, segment and list management, campaign management, lead management, trade promotion management and marketing analytics.
• Service. To maximize service profitability by keeping profitable customers loyal, decreasing costs through greater service efficiency, and increasing service revenue. SAP CRM comprises service order management, service contract management, complaints and returns management, in-house repair/depot repair, case management as well as installed base management, warranty management and resource planning.
• Partner channel management. Organizations can manage their partner relationships and help their channel partners sell more effectively, resulting in a more profitable and loyal indirect channel. They can also work effectively with channel partners to better market to, sell to, and service end customers. The application also delivers a collaborative channel solution by offering partner management and analytics, channel marketing, channel sales, channel service and channel commerce.
• Interaction center operations and management. A strategic delivery channel for service, sales, and marketing efforts that can be leveraged across all contact channels to maximize customer loyalty, reduce costs, and boost revenue. This includes telemarketing, telesales, customer service and interaction center management.
• E-commerce. By empowering companies to turn the Internet into a profitable sales and interaction channel for both business customers and consumers with SAP CRM, companies can strengthen sales and service operations while reducing transaction costs and customer service calls. The application also includes e-marketing, e-selling, e-service, and e-analytics.
• CRM analytics. Analytic functionality in SAP CRM provide business decision-makers with actionable insight across all business functions, including marketing, sales and service. Organizations utilizing full analytical capabilities can perform predictive analysis, performance management and business intelligence to make informed business decisions in real time.
• Support for mobile CRM. SAP CRM ensure that mobile teams remain accessible while away from the office or disconnected from the network. Mobile sales and service teams have access anytime, anywhere to mission-critical, up-to-date customer information and processes using any device, from laptop computers to wireless handheld devices.

SAP CRM on-demand solution — Growth without disruption

SAP CRM on-demand solution delivers quick time to value and enables strategic growth as the only enterprise CRM solutions that offer a flexible deployment model. As business needs evolve, organizations can transition from on-demand to hybrid and on-premise SAP CRM at any time, avoiding data losses or interruptions to productivity.

SAP CRM on-demand solution provides three functions for sales, marketing and service:

• Sales The SAP CRM on-demand solution is designed to help midsize companies and large enterprises manage their customers, contacts and sales pipelines with affordable simple-to-use and easy-to-configure tools available directly over the Internet. Key sales capabilities include:
  • Opportunity management that provides transparency and improves team communication to help manage sales cycles more effectively, predictably and at a lower cost.
  • Sales process, planning and forecasting to proactively handle trends, shortfalls and opportunities across all sales channels, as well as better manage budgets and allocate resources.
  • Account and contact management to attain complete visibility into all sales activities, foster collaboration and team efficiency.
  • Calendar and task management (Lotus Notes® and Microsoft® Office integration available) to easily capture and manage calendar activities and customer interactions, support analysis and summarize opportunities.
  • Sales assistant that can be configured to sales methodology and help standardize best practices across the organization.
  • Sales analytics to monitor and respond to business issues and requests in real-time.
  • Pipeline performance management to capture and track new and existing business opportunities, generate leads, execute sales and improve client engagement.
  • Product support that allows detailed product information to be quickly uploaded from and integrated directly into the SAP ERP application that can be leveraged in all marketing processes.
  • Quotation management enables sales professionals to quickly assign products to customer quotes and track quotations, manage pricing and discounts, and export quotes to Microsoft® Excel to simplify quote management.
• Marketing The SAP CRM on-demand solution is designed to provide marketing line-of-business managers with powerful search capabilities to help segment and target customers more effectively, as well as track and pursue promising leads. Key marketing capabilities include:
  • Campaign management and customer segmentation allows marketers to analyze customer data easily using advanced queries and creating target groups based on search results to help reach target audiences.
  • Lead management enables marketing managers to track all important lead information on one overview page, making it easier to update account data, create tasks for follow-up, report on lead status and assign sales teams to help convert more leads into sales opportunities.
  • Role maintenance and owner realignment helps customize the application to the specific needs of the user and ensure business continuity by allowing marketing managers to realign owners for accounts, contacts, opportunities and activities as staffing, organizational and customer needs change.
• Service The SAP CRM on-demand solution is designed to support service managers in answering customer requests. Service level agreements can be better adhered to, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Key service capabilities include:
  • Service ticket management allows service agents to manage customer service tickets comprehensively. The solution enables multilevel categorization, rule-based service-level determination and due-date calculation.
  • Rule-based service ticket distribution enables service ticket distribution based on priority, status product and account type.
  • Service level monitoring helps agents specify the business time frame of service availability to better track and improve compliance with service level agreements.

Technology

CRM solutions from SAP leverage the integration capabilities from the SAP NetWeaver® platform, providing a customized and highly intuitive role-based environment that allows users to access information from different sources through a single interactive format. All CRM solutions from SAP, including the SAP CRM application, leverage the same architectural platform.

SAP NetWeaver integrates people, data and business process across heterogeneous technologies and enterprises, enabling flexible business strategies, driving innovation into business processes and making change sustainable through contained cost and reduced risk. SAP NetWeaver enables SAP applications to operate on an open, flexible, collaborative services architecture that supports SAP and non-SAP software as well as common industry standards. By delivering preconfigured, industry-oriented business content, SAP NetWeaver easily solves companies challenges of integration and reduces the need for extensive custom implementations, making applications such as SAP CRM simpler to implement and resulting in quicker deployments and a lower total cost of ownership.

For additional information please visit:

http://www.sap.com/crm or http://www.sap.com/crmondemand

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