SAP Expands On-Demand Service Capabilities

SAP has upgraded its Software as a Service CRM application to include service capabilities, rounding out its earlier sales and marketing offerings.

The new modules also have enhanced integration capabilities and new sales automation functionality, specifically the ability to provide product quotes, said John Garrish, director, solution marketing, SAP. With this release, SAP has completed its on-demand CRM offering, which it first rolled out in February. Since then, he told CRM Buyer, SAP CRM On-Demand has gained significant momentum.

Third Leg

SAP CRM On-Demand targets large and medium-sized organizations. Most of the application’s uptake has occurred among existing SAP customers who wanted to expand an on-premise application to a new division or remote office.

“They look at our On-Demand offering as part of their strategic CRM planning,” Garrish explained. There have also been some installs by entirely new companies that did not have SAP already in-house, he added. SAP, like Siebel, offers a hybrid approach to its SaaS offering, meaning customers can easily switch between the on-demand and the on-premise versions.

Garrish could not provide exact growth figures for On-Demand, noting that SAP does not break outits CRM figures anymore. “The pipeline is very healthy,” he said. “We have been getting a few winsevery week.”

New Service Functionality

Presumably, growth for the SAP On-Demand application should increase now that it is a full-fledged suite.

Following are some of the new customer service capabilities in the SAP Service module:

• Service Ticket Management – includes multilevel categorization, rule-based service leveldetermination and due date calculation, and rule-based service ticket distribution to service teams;
• Rule-Based Service Ticket Distribution – organizes service ticket distribution based onpriority, status, product and account type; and
• Service Level Monitoring – allows agents to specify the business time frame of service availability to better track and improve compliance with service level agreements.

SAP has bolstered its sales module to provide product support — allowing reps to access detailedproduct information and integrate it directly into mySAP ERP. It also added quotation management to its SaaS sales application, providing users with the means to better track quotations and export them to Excel spreadsheets.

British Gas Business, a UK-based energy provider, has adopted the SAP CRM on-demand application, the company announced. “Our people will have full sight of our customer interactions — leading, in time, to a fully integrated sales and marketing support system,” said Ian Peters, managing director, BGB.