The SAP® small business CRM software application provides the necessary flexibility to quickly develop distinctive capabilities and deliver superior customer experiences. SAP CRM drives rapid user adoption and productivity and provides quick time to value while supporting your strategic CRM initiative. It also delivers best in class, front-office functionality and support for end-to-end, industry specific processes. As your company evolves, your organization can ensure outstanding customer experiences and respond immediately to market requirements.
Delight Your Customers
SAP CRM helps foster collaboration between your organization and your customers, facilitating superior interactions and experiences across all channels.
Empower Your Team
SAP CRM empowers your employees to perform business functions and manage interactions with their customers – anytime, anywhere. With SAP CRM, you can employ comprehensive, real time views of all customer information to drive your actions and support collaboration across your global business network.
Grow Your Business
SAP’s small business CRM software delivers simplified access to insights into your customers, so you can differentiate and grow your organization, provide superior customer experiences, and make the most of your business advantage.
The SAP Best Practices for Customer Relationship Management (SAP Best Practices for CRM) offering has everything you need to set up a comprehensive solution in the area of customer relationship management (CRM). You can fine-tune all the functions covered by SAP Best Practices for CRM to meet your specific needs. When you combine SAP Business Suite applications with SAP Best Practices for CRM, you can be confident that you are receiving proven expertise and concrete business value.
Technology And Automated tools
The SAP® Best Practices for Customer Relationship Management (SAP Best Practices for CRM) offering enables you to realize best business practices in the area of customer relationship management (CRM).
Product overview
SAP Best Practices for CRM enables you to develop a fully documented and reusable prototype that you can quickly turn into a productive solution. It offers a variety of methodologies, descriptions of business processes, and proven software configurations.
Key Elements
SAP Best Practices for CRM includes the following key elements:
- Detailed, step-by-step implementation procedures for the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application, including automated steps.
- Extensive documentation that you can use in several different contexts – for self-study, evaluation, or project-team and end- user training.
- Complete preconfiguration settings that give you everything you need to run key processes out of the box with minimal installation effort. All preconfiguration settings are fully documented. The preconfigurations are built using the latest technology, enabling you to adapt the settings quickly and easily. Flexible Technology.
The procedures, documentation, and settings that comprise SAP Best Practices for CRM provide the building blocks you need for a fast and smooth implementation of SAP CRM. The size and content of the building blocks can vary from simple to complex functions that can be used as stand-alone elements. You can assemble several basic building blocks to form a higher level building block to support an entire business scenario, for example. Or you can use individual building blocks to modify an existing process or steps within a process.
Support for All Key Project Phases
You can use SAP Best Practices for CRM in all of the following project phases:
- Evaluation – You can quickly set up a prototype to get a “look and feel” impression of SAP CRM.
- Implementation – You have all the steps necessary for implementing functionality to support selected business processes.
- Demonstration and training – SAP Best Practices for CRM can be used with SAP Business Suite applications at an early stage of the implementation project for demonstration and training of both the project team and future end users. In addition, SAP Best Practices for CRM documents numerous end-user procedures, which can serve as training material and as a basis for end-user documentation.
Technical Building Blocks
You can use a variety of technical building blocks from SAP Best Practices for CRM to support your business processes.
Definition of Building Blocks
Building blocks are reusable technical units of preconfigurations you can combine to install parts of SAP Best Practices for CRM. Similar to the components in a snap together construction kit, the building blocks can be flexibly assembled to support a variety of business processes. Because you can use a generic building block for different business processes, this method of constructing business content reduces redundancy. You can use building block installations as the basis for your own processes.
And because the building blocks are reusable and connectable, they accelerate and facilitate the installation process. Rather than import the configuration of an entire software application, you can simply select blocks of process oriented configurations to meet your current requirements, thereby minimizing redundancy in the development process and reducing development and maintenance costs.
Installation for Support of Business Processes
To enable the support of a process, you have to install a number of building blocks in a predefined sequence. The installation assistant functionality of SAP Best Practices for CRM and the installation documentation guide you through this process. The installation assistant specifies which building block you have to install and provides all the information needed for installing the building blocks in the correct order.
When you have successfully installed the functionality of SAP Best Practices for CRM that supports a business process, you can use the business process procedure to test the functionality. Business process procedures are provided for all business processes supported by SAP Best Practices for CRM. They contain detailed, application-focused descriptions of individual business processes.
Installation Assistant
Using the installation assistant for SAP Best Practices for CRM, you can easily install the complete offering or selected functions within a very short time. The installation assistant guides you step-by-step through the installation process.
Personalization Assistant
You perform the standard installation for SAP Best Practices for CRM using default values and sample master data. If you want to install SAP Best Practices for CRM with personalized values, the offering provides functionality to let you easily adapt selected values to your needs, such as central organizational data. The personalization assistant for SAP Best Practices for CRM guides you through the personalization activities. You perform the subsequent installation of the personalized solution using the installation assistant described above.
Business configuration Sets
SAP Best Practices for CRM delivers preconfigured settings in the form of business configuration (BC) sets that you can use to assemble either a prototype or a development system. Via the installation assistant, you can choose which preconfiguration to use for implementing functionality that supports a specific business process. When you activate BC sets in the development system, the system automatically carries out configuration settings and saves them in transport requests. If necessary, you can employ a delta configuration to implement additional customer-specific requests that are not covered by SAP Best Practices for CRM. Then you can import the transport requests resulting from the BC set activation and delta configuration into the quality assurance or production system.
Extended computer-Aided test tools
You can use extended computer-aided test tools (eCATTs) within the context of SAP Best Practices for CRM to activate BC sets and create master data. For example, you can use eCATTs to create master data in all components of the landscape in which you need example data. You can execute eCATTs from within the installation assistant.
Key Business Processes Supported
SAP Best Practices for small business software CRM software includes best-practice descriptions that reveal how best to implement various functionalities in your application that support key business processes, as well as details about how to set up and configure your applications. This unrivaled combination of detailed business documentation describes best-in-class business practices in the area of CRM and includes a complete set of technical tools and information to help you implement SAP CRM to support your business processes. SAP Best Practices for CRM supports business processes that handle your most important business requirements, covering the following key functional areas:
- Marketing provides the tools you need to drive customer demand, gain valuable customer insights, accelerate the marketing process, and reduce overall marketing costs – while increasing marketing ROI. SAP Best Practices for CRM eliminates complex integration issues by providing everything you need to track and analyze customer relationships throughout the entire customer life cycle.
- Sales equips sales professionals with the functionality they need to acquire, grow, and retain profitable relationships with customers. SAP Best Practices for CRM helps sales organizations plan and analyze the entire sales execution cycle, find new ways to accelerate the sales cycle, uncover new areas of revenue potential, and determine new methods for improving sales productivity.
- Service empowers customer service and support, field service, and service operations to meet their service-level responsibilities. It speeds time to resolution by providing consolidated operational insight enabling informed decision making.
Marketing Processes
SAP Best Practices for small business CRM software makes marketing resources more efficient and empowers marketers to acquire and develop long term customer relationships. Whether for inbound or outbound lead management or lean campaign management, SAP Best Practices for CRM provides the tools you need to analyze, plan, execute, and measure all marketing activities.
Lead Management
Lead management supports both inbound and outbound lead management processes. Inbound leads are triggered by customer activity, whereas outbound leads are triggered automatically during a marketing campaign. With lead management, you gain full visibility into the lead management process and can accelerate the process from first interest to sales. You can generate highly qualified and prioritized leads, distribute and handle leads faster, and optimize all related activities. You can align marketing and sales teams to increase conversation rates.
Lean Campaign Management
SAP Best Practices for CRM provides support for lean, end-toend campaign management from customer segmentation to campaign execution and campaign analysis. You can analyze, plan, execute, and measure marketing activities through all inbound and outbound interaction channels to build long-term, profitable relationships. You can implement inbound and outbound campaigns that are multichannel and multiwave, and you can develop and execute the best marketing strategy by using constraint-based optimization techniques to determine the best marketing mix.
Sales Processes
With best practices to guide them, your sales professionals can remain focused on the right deal at the right time. They can be effective in action and efficient with time by spending more time with your most valuable customers, increasing win rates, and converting more leads into closed opportunities and booked revenue.
Activity management
Activity management often begins with an inbound call from a current or prospective customer. A marketing campaign may have triggered the interaction with that customer and sparked interest in your product or service. The customer calls a sales representative to get more information. The sales representative checks for an opening in his calendar and schedules an appointment, which automatically generates a task list containing all of the items that need to be prepared prior to the customer visit.
Following the customer visit, the sales representative captures all of the customer’s requirements in a call report and develops a list of follow up activities discussed at the customer meeting, such as providing collateral, developing a proposal, or scheduling a product demonstration. At the end of the process, the sales representative may create a quotation for the customer or enter a sales order on the customer’s behalf. All activities and tasks can be synchronized easily with leading groupware solutions used by most sales representative.
Opportunity Management
Opportunity management provides greater control and transparency around your sales processes. An opportunity is any qualified possibility for business, such as the sale of a product or service, and can result from a lead captured at a trade fair, promotion, or any other sales and marketing activity. The opportunity describes your prospect, the prospect’s budget, the potential sales revenue, and the estimated probability that the opportunity will successfully close and convert into a sales order. The quality and certainty of this information become more concrete as the sales cycle progresses and can be displayed and evaluated by the application.
Quotation and Order Management
Quotation and order management gives sales professionals the tools that they need to generate accurate quotes, configure and place orders for products and services, check product availability, and track order status in real time. Sales professionals are guided through the product configuration process; business rules are enforced to ensure that correct product combinations are recommended to customers and that pricing is tailored appropriately to each customer or sales channel.
Web Channel Enablement
SAP CRM provides Web channel functionality that enables you to turn the Internet into a valuable sales, marketing, and service channel for both businesses and consumers. It supports all Web channel processes – from presales to sales and postsales activities. With SAP CRM, you can empower each customer with a personalized Web experience and convenient self-service functions. At the same time, the application’s fully integrated Web channel helps you strengthen sales and service operations while reducing transaction costs and the volume of customer service calls.
You can gain these capabilities with your existing SAP ERP application for an entry-level solution to quickly turn the Web into a profitable sales and interaction channel. SAP ERP 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 business models, including business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) models, can speed the enablement of your Web channel.
Business-to-Consumer Sales Order Processing
B2C sales order processing enables you to provide an intuitive, easy interface for the casual or first-time user. Web and e-mail marketing campaigns drive both generic and personalized cross and up-sell recommendations. Consumers can browse a catalog without logging in, view availability and pricing, and leverage product comparisons, favorite lists, and top-seller lists. They can take advantage of simplified and easy-to-use tools like saved shopping carts, guided selling, and quick checkout. Consumers can self register on a Web shop to create a login account and monitor their account and order status.
Business-to-Business Sales Order Processing
B2B sales order processing is designed for selling to business customers and partners. You can provide an intuitive interface that includes productivity tools for more sophisticated users like order templates, fast order entry, contracts, and quotes. Web and e-mail marketing campaigns can drive personalized cross and up-sell recommendations to business customers with a focus on interactions that are governed by account history. You can offer customer- specific catalogs and pricing as well as customized part-number entry where customers can enter their own part numbers when ordering. Business customers can leverage delegated user administration functions to set up and manage new users for their company.
Interaction Center: Inbound Telesales
SAP Best Practices for CRM covers inbound telesales, including the typical activities of a sales agent interacting with a customer on the telephone. When customers contact the call center to buy a product, they are identified automatically by the software. Agents can access customer-specific information by entering the requested product and receiving additional product offers that can be made to customers (up-selling or cross-selling). Agents can create sales orders as a result of customer calls. The software supports either a Web-or a Windows-based user interface.
Interaction Center: Outbound Telesales
SAP Best Practices for CRM supports outbound telesales, describing the typical activities of call center managers and agents when making outbound phone calls based on call lists. You can develop a tailor-made user interface that provides the required information, ensuring optimal and targeted preparation for the sales call. During the call, sales agents can offer additional products to customers (up-selling or cross-selling). If customers are interested, agents can create sales orders. Outbound telesales activities can take place in either a Web-or Windows-based user interface.
Service Processes
In the service area, SAP Best Practices for CRM facilitates timely resolution of customer issues by connecting the entire service process, from initial customer contact through to final resolution.
E-Service: Solution Assistance
Customers use Web-based self-service to search for information or solutions for a problem concerning a recently purchased product. You get a step-by-step view of how customers enter the self-service page in order to access FAQs and a solution repository where they can search for helpful product-specific information.
E-Service: Service Request Management
SAP Best Practices for CRM supports service request management. In a typical situation, customers can use Web-based self-service to apply for an on-site service visit. You get a step-by-step view of how customers log on to the self-service page to enter a service request for a recently purchased product.
E-Service: Complaints and Return Management
SAP Best Practices for CRM supports complaints and return management. In a typical situation, a customer uses Web-based self-service to enter a complaint. You get a step-by-step view of how customers log on to the self-service area to register a recently purchased product and to enter a complaint.
Interaction Center: Information Help Desk
SAP Best Practices for CRM supports the information help desk where service agents process inbound customer e-mails. Preconfigured best-practices settings enable SAP CRM to confirm receipt of incoming e-mails and to automatically identify customers by their e-mail addresses. Agents can resolve a customer’s problem by searching in a knowledge database that contains solutions to common problems. Agents then send an e-mail to the customer with the information that best matches the search criteria. All these activities can take place in either a Web-or Windows-based user interface.
Interaction Center in a Web-Based Environment: IT Help Desk
SAP Best Practices for CRM supports the IT help desk where service agents interact with customers on the telephone. When customers contact a call center to communicate a problem, they are identified automatically by the application software. Best-practices configurations enable agents to check the customer interaction history, display and edit customer data, and check service agreements and warranties. Based on the customer’s problem, agents create service tickets. All activities take place in a Web-based user interface (Web GUI).
Interaction Center in a Windows-Based Environment: Customer Service and Support
SAP Best Practices for CRM supports customer service where service agents interact with customers on the telephone. When customers contact a call center to communicate a problem, they are identified automatically by the application software. Best-practices configurations enable agents to check the customer interaction history, display and edit customer data, and check service agreements and warranties. Based on the customer’s problem, agents create service orders. All activities take place in a Windows-based user interface (SAP GUI).
Interaction Center in a Windows-Based Environment: Complaints Processing
SAP Best Practices for CRM supports complaints processing where service agents interact with customers on the telephone. When customers contact a call center to communicate a complaint, they are identified automatically by the application software. Best practices configurations enable agents to check the customer interaction history, customer data, and service agreements and warranties. Based on the customer’s problem, agents create a complaint containing a return request and a credit memo. All activities take place in a Windows-based user interface (SAP GUI).
Service Order Management
Within the context of service order management, SAP Best Practices for CRM describes how you can enter and process service orders in the SAP CRM application. Best-practices documentation covers a complete range of processes, starting with the creation of a service order, the planning of service resources, and the processing and confirmation of the actual service order, right through to the preparation of the invoice and reporting.
Complaints and Returns Management
Within the context of complaints and returns management, SAP Best Practices for CRM describes the entering and processing of complaints in the SAP CRM application. Best-practices documentation covers the entire complaints process from the recording of a complaint, the technical analysis, relevant follow-up steps (such as processing the return of a defective product and the corresponding credit memo), through to statistical evaluations.
Industry-Specific Processes
SAP CRM supports customer-centric business processes geared toward specific industries. SAP Best Practices for CRM covers a subset of these industries.
Automotive Interaction Center (Web-Based Environment): Customer and Vehicle Service Help Desk
SAP Best Practices for CRM supports the customer and vehicle service help desk, specifically the workflow associated with service agents answering incoming phone calls and processing service tickets at a service help desk for automotive dealers. Best- practices documentation gives you a step-by-step view of how first-level service agents process calls; how they create service tickets as a result of customer problems, which are automatically routed to a second-level help desk; and how second-level service agents process incoming service tickets. The entire process takes place in a Web-based user interface (Web GUI).
High Tech: Design Registration
SAP Best Practices for CRM provides preconfiguration settings for the SAP Design Registration application, which supports the process of getting semiconductor products into the designs of OEM end products. The application tracks the complete design cycle from a new design request to a design win. The best-practices configurations enable you to describe the OEM product design using project, assembly, and opportunity in flexible hierarchies.
