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CRM adds to business value in tough times
Building a valuable customer relationship and developing customer loyalty is a top priority in business today — but can be difficult to execute without the right approach.
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An Enterprise’s Most Valuable Assets Are Its Customers
Customers are at the heart of every business. Enterprises need to attract customers by creating products that meet their needs and by making these products known and attractive to them, thus convincing customers to buy their products and not their competitors’.
In order to attract and retain customers, a company must be able to analyse its target markets, identify the core needs in this market, then market and sell the products that meet the identified needs. Having successfully sold companies need to provide services of different kinds to their customers in order to keep them and do repeat business.
Developing a customer-centric approach like this must happen in a way that all costs are covered and a profit margin is achieved in order to stay in business.
Delivering a customer-centric approach to business, augmented by first-rate customer service are no new concepts in the business world. However, until recently, the strategies and technologies to support these key business drivers were not widely available.
Today, with the right strategy and technology, enterprises can develop a deep understanding of their customers, increase their market share and share of wallet, improve customer loyalty, and make each customer interaction a favourable one.
SAP CRM provides the market leading technology to help organizations build and improve upon a customer centric strategy and take full advantage of market leading CRM technology to develop business value around their most valuable asset—the customer.
Developing Your Most Valued Asset
Companies of all sizes, in all industries, are faced with an important question — how to protect and develop their customer base. The answer lies in improving the customer experience and providing added value with every interaction, consistently across all channels.
Perceptions of your organization are created, positive or negative, during every interaction the customer has with your enterprise.
Leading organizations collect and analyse information about these interactions very effectively and apply this knowledge about their customers to develop and improve each customer’s experience. These organizations concentrate on their most valuable customers – the customers with the highest lifetime value.
Being a leader in knowing your customers translates into your customers staying longer, buying more, recommending your product to others, and paying a premium price for value.
The Approach
Building a valuable customer relationship and developing customer loyalty is a top priority in business today — but it is a priority that can be difficult to execute without the right approach.
Enterprises need to develop an overall CRM approach and strategy with measurable key objectives. Next, these objectives need to be broken down into a series of executable projects that support these objectives. By implementing these projects in “bite-sized” increments, each project delivers measurable success already early in the process.
Integration
Front office – like CRM – functionality is critical to an enterprise’s ability to provide value at every customer touch point. Just as critical is the tight integration of the front office with the back office and e-Business solutions.
Participants of such a project need to have the business process knowledge and end-to-end implementation experience necessary to design and implement a solution around the enterprise’s customers’ needs at every point of contact.
SAP Customer Relationship Management
SAP’s CRM offerings allow an enterprise to develop its most important asset by providing the right tools to gain the deep insight into its customer interactions that is necessary to improve
- Its operational efficiency by enabling the streamlining of processes through data integration and by offering the availability of a 360 degree view on the customer
- Its market share through acquisition and retention of customers by enabling the enterprise to use relevant data collected consistently through all channels to specifically approach (potential) customers with the right products at the right time
- Its share of wallet of existing customers through sophisticated loyalty- and cross- and up-selling functionalities that are integrated into all channels.
Figure 1 : SAP CRM enables customer centricity by integrating channels and key capabilities on one platform1
Using these capabilities can quickly deliver long-term results that are profoundly affecting an organization’s bottom line. The strength of the SAP CRM solution is the strong integration of channels through all relevant processes and into the back end, augmented by strong analytics capabilities.
SAP’s CRM functionality supporting all channels includes:
Marketing
Identify and acquire new customers with:
- Lead Generation and Tracking
- Product Recommendations & Cross-Selling
- Loyalty Management
- Catalog Management
- Marketing Planning and Campaign Management
- Field Marketing Management
- Trade Promotion Management
- Data Mining, Reporting, and Customer Analytics
Sales
Increase market share, share of wallet and improve revenues with:
- Contact and Account Management
- Sales Opportunity Qualification & Management
- Loyalty Management
- Product Proposal Generation
- Sales Cycle Analysis, Sales Forecasting, and Analytical CRM
- Field Sales Force Management
- Pipeline Performance Management
- B2B and B2C e-Business
- Web Auctions
- Inbound & Outbound Telesales
- Real Time Order Management
Service
Retain customers and improve customer interactions with:
- Customer Service & Information Help Desk
- Web Customer Support & Self-Service
- Field Service Management
- Business Communications Management
- Technical Support & Solutions Database
- Complaints & Returns Processing
- Case and Grantor Management
Want more information?
SAP CRM Homepage
Discover the capabilities of the SAP CRM and SAP CRM on-demand solutions.
Visit the CRM pages and get the complete picture of SAP CRM by exploring the CRM Solution Map.
Discover how SAP enables customer centricity across industries. Learn more about the breadth and width of SAP CRM by reading the SAP CRM overview and the solution briefs and white papers.
Use the SAP Solution Composer to visualize, plan and implement coherent and streamlined solutions using SAP CRM
SAP Developer Network
The SAP Developer Network SDN and the Business Process Expert BPX community provide communities for developers, business process experts, and integrators working with SAP products. Visit the Business Process Experts Community. Registration required.
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1(C) SAP, 2008
