Important Points during SAP CRM evaluation
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Sales Cloud
SAP CRM is being used by my client for the Sales and Customer Service processes. There are approximately 7500+ users using SAP CRM. SAP CRM provides the tools for the field sales people to manage their accounts, contacts, daily activities, monitor their opportunities. For the Customer Service department, the CRM system is a single window to view the entire account and its transactional data without having to jump into multiple systems to view the customer data. It is also a system to interact with customers via telephone, email, chat etc. Truly it provides a multi-channel support. The breadth of functionality that SAP CRM provides is truly fabulous. It covers not sales but Customer service, Service Management, Marketing, Partner Channel Management, Web channel Management. The integration of SAP CRM with other SAP products is a big plus because it provides native integration to SAP ECC, SAP BI and other SAP systems. SAP CRM also provides integration with third party tools including Computer Telephony Integration, Microsoft Outlook integration etc.
- Primary the strength of SAP CRM lies in the breadth of functionality. It covers most of the front office modules including Interaction Center (Customer Service), Sales process for field sales, Service process for support and warranty, Partner channel management for Channel Management, Web channel for eCommerce support (for both sales and service)
- SAP CRM provides extensive integration capabilities with SAP products. This includes SAP ECC, BI, Supply Chain and other SAP modules.
- On the non-SAP side integration, it can integrate seamlessly with CTI (Computer Telephony Integration), Microsoft Outlook. In conjunction with SAP PI, SAP CRM can be integrated with any legacy application
- The biggest issue where SAP can improve CRM is in performance. Non HANA based CRM versions have latency in response times. The system degrades with increase in volume for very large customers.
- SAP CRM needs to simplify their UI design to enable developers for quicker enhancements. The UI layer has always been complicated. I compare this against their competitor Sales Force Dot Com where the architecture of the UI is fairly simple and straightforward with additional automatic integration to mobility.
- The Mobility integration with SAP CRM is very complicated in non-Fiori based installations. Even with Fiori architecture they should have simplified the development process instead of having layers of development to accomplish enhancements
- SAP CRM has been able to provide a single platform that covers all the gamut of functionalities listed in the earlier survey. It definitely has improvied employee efficiency and better customer service by being a single window for all Customer centric processes
- Due to native integration with other systems, the level of maintaining the system is minimal which provides a good ROI for Business and IT.
- The biggest benefit from a business process perspective is the entire Inquiry to Order process is seamless which helps business to track all events right from the Prospect to the point of converting the prospect to a revenue generating customer
Sales Force Dot Com (SFDC) is the leading competitor to SAP CRM. SAP CRM's breadth and depth of functionality is a clear advantage against SFDC. SAP CRM is the best front end for vertical industry solutions like SAP Utilities (IS-U). For the IS-U there is no better CRM tool than SAP CRM. SAP CRM lacks a sleak UI like SFDC. SFDC is easy to configure and very simple to enhance. Since SFDC is a cloud based solution, there is no overhead of managing the infrastructure to run the application.