The SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution is a suite of modules that cover marketing, sales and service.

The modules:

• CRM Marketing: everything to do with targeting customers and managing your contact with them.
• CRM Sales: managing all aspects of selling to your customers.
• CRM Service: allows all aspects of managing the product after sale, especially online.
• Mobile: modules are available for mobile sales and service.

Managing your customers is more than the software solution: it’s all about strategy. We can help you with that, too.

CRM Marketing

The marketing solution has a broad menu of functions that help you to manage your relationship with customers including:

• Acquisition of customers: SAP calls this ‘opportunity management’. It takes new prospects and helps you to work them up through the customer commitment hierarchy. It helps you to manage your leads (someone who has expressed early interest) and turn them into customers, and to manage contact with all of your prospects, leads and customers.
  
• Targeting customers and segmenting customer groups: you can extract clusters of customers according to criteria you specify. This is an especially useful tool for creating lists for mail outs, marketing and telemarketing campaigns and prospecting.
• Retention of customers: the contact management functions, which help you to automate and manage your cycle of contacting customers (including updates on your products or just keeping in touch), are important components of your customer retention strategy.

CRM Sales

CRM Sales allows you to manage all aspects of selling to your customers, including quotation management, entering sales orders, pricing.

An internet sales package enables you to sell your products online. Elements of the internet pack include: catalogue management, web shop, product search and pricing.

CRM Service

CRM Service allows you to manage all aspects of post-sales product maintenance, including repairs, billing and warranties. You can track progress of maintenance or repair work by customer, product or date.

One of the big advantages of CRM Service is the capacity for many functions to be accessed over the internet. This means that your customers can log on to check how the repair or warranty work on their product is progressing.

Mobile options

Sales and service functions are also available in a mobile form, loaded into a laptop.

When the sales representative visits a customer, they don’t take an order book, they just take the laptop. The rep can show the customer pictures of the product, along with pricing and other product information, then take orders on the spot, direct into the computer.

It’s all about strategy

Software is only the beginning of your journey to developing your relationship with customers.

It’s important to have a strategy, too, to ensure you get the most out of your software.

We can help you in a number of ways.

First, we can help you to work out if the SAP CRM tools are right for you.

We have developed a tool that can help you to determine what your business needs are and the benefits that a new system can bring to customer management. We call this Customer Strategy Assessment (CSA).

Once we have determined your needs, we can help you to decide what changes you can make in your organisation in order to improve the way you manage your customer relationships. SAP CRM tools may be part of the answer, but there may be other things you can do.

For CRM to be effective, you need to know how and where it is going help you change your business.