CRM Articles

Whether you refer to the technology as CRM, Customer Relationship Management or Sales Force Automation, the fact is the technology and terminology can be confusing. CRMReview.org helps address this challenge by providing a number of informative CRM articles which include editor reviews of top CRM providers.

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SAP CRM Review

SAP has long been a leader in enterprise applications, and the integration offered between their CRM product line and other components of enterprise resource planning offer corporations an excellent path towards a unified approach to computing.

One of the key strengths of SAP's CRM application is its isolated tenancy strategy. Unlike many other enterprise CRM application suites that still utilize multi-tenancy approaches, isolated tenancy affords a higher level of availability, less incidence of failure, and more flexibility in deployment.

SAP CRM includes a wide range of features in sales, marketing, service, e-commerce, interaction center operations and management, and channel management. SAP On-Demand integrates with the SAP CRM product, and is available as a web-based subscription. The On-Demand product gives sales representatives and other road warriors a convenient, real-time tool for accessing customer information such as order history and customization data while out in the field. On-Demand also includes features for campaign and lead management, as well as customer support and analytics. SAP On-Demand is used primarily for existing SAP CRM customers, and uses the same code base as MySAP CRM, which makes integration very straightforward. The On-Demand product is not meant to be industry-specific, and SAP does not offer a set of vertical solutions for the On-Demand SaaS product.

The larger MySAP CRM application however, does support several vertical industries. MySAP's marketing module is particularly useful in analyzing marketing projects centrally, and can be used to gain deep insight into customer metrics. The sales module includes a rich set of tools for sales planning and forecasting, and the service module is geared towards support across the board - delivering better service while reducing overall cost and time involved.

SAP's partner channel management goes beyond the direct sales force to offer services to the indirect channel, to help improve partner management and channel marketing initiatives. The very useful interaction center module is great for boosting customer loyalty while keeping costs down-acting as a central clearing house for handling all customer contact channels easily. The web channel leverages the web as a tool for increasing sales and keeping transaction costs down, while the business communications management module is an all-encompassing communications system that is integrated with SAP CRM. Lastly, the real-time offer management module is a recommendation engine that helps the decision-making process along throughout each customer relationship.

The most recent version of SAP CRM brings in a more advanced user experience that is much more flexible and customizable, as well as 'pipeline performance management', a set of features that simply makes communicating with customers easier from end to end. In addition, SAP's Enterprise SOA brings CRM out into the open, adding the capability of integrating with external applications and data sources as needed.

The flexibility delivered by SAP CRM does give the enterprise the tools it needs to service the customer well, and flexibly. Because it addresses end-to-end business processes and integrates with the full ERP suite, there's very little duplication of effort, and it's very easy to see the 'big picture' when it comes to servicing the client.

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