Benefits of using SAP CRM

SAP Enterprise Portals generally offer over 200 predefined roles for various SAP solutions such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management and Supplier Relationship Management. These roles can be tailored further to suit specific conditions and requirements of a particular company.

CRM, like database marketing, involves two very different types of professionals:

• Constructors (people with technical skills): This group comprises people who know about computers and software; who understand things like, merge/purge, postal pre-sort, segmentation, data enhancement, coding, modelling and profiling.
• Creators (people with marketing skills): This group comprises people who understand the motivation of customers and how to use a database to build relationships with them, leading to increased loyalty and repeat sales. These people are conversant with the strategy and tactics of database marketing, customer lifetime value, recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) analysis, affinity tables, and attrition analysis. These are the professionals who understand a customer’s value to the company and company’s value to customers. Authority, long-term budgets, objectives, and tools to communicate effectively with customers are some of the factors that are critical to their success.

A new breed of technology executives—known as business technologists, have emerged in the recent past. They are technology staffers with both business and technology skills, able to communicate with non-technologists and thoroughly versed in the business where they work.

A customer-facing website enables customers to communicate to a company exactly and precisely what they want and need. The Internet enables a company to establish a dialogue with individual customers. This is where the customers themselves assume a role of a self-serviced user. Customers are now ready to provide information about themselves in exchange for specific services rendered. This means companies now don’t have to rely on information about the customer, instead, they can pay attention to information from the customer. Companies must, however, take care that they don’t ask for the information until a trust-based relationship has been built and that they don’t ask for the same information more than once. An important thing to note is that once customers have invested their time in giving you their profile information, it is unlikely they will go to a competitor to start all over again.

This is a technique in which websites take advantage of the low cost of interacting with customers online to gather and store information on individual customer tastes and preferences. A site combines the preferences and interactions of similar users. The site then compares the preferences of one customer with those of others in the database and then makes recommendations to the customer. The more is known about a given customer, the more useful the site’s recommendations can be.

The inherent characteristics of the Internet do not provide a welcome mat for marketing and advertising strategies of the past. The Internet is not about mass marketing; it is heading solidly in the direction of one-to-one direct marketing. It is not about selling a can of soup, a beauty treatment product, or a pair of trousers through entertainment on radio or television; it is about providing information that has unique value about a can of soup, a beauty treatment product, and a pair of trousers. Web-enabled CRM is about narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. And the Internet can be thought of as a salesperson in every home.