What is SAP CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy that aims to optimize the customer interactions in order to maximise the success of business.

While ERP is the backbone of SAP, SAP CRM helps business achieve 'One face to the customer'. The motto is to be customer centric.


help.sap.com states:

SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) is a comprehensive solution for managing your customer relationships. It supports all customer-focused business areas, from marketing to sales and service, as well as customer interaction channels, such as the Interaction Centre, the Internet, and mobile clients.

You take any product. To sell it, the company needs to have a proper marketing strategy in place. To maximize your sales, the company needs to have the infrastructure or the environment to track all the details, to bill the product and to deliver it. Once it has sold it, it has to provide all the services for the maintenance of the products purchased by the customers.

So, to carry out any business, a company needs to use at least one of the following business scenarios:

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Service

To carry out any of the above activities, the company would need to optimize its interactions with its customers and that is where SAP's predefined business scenarios (delivered as business roles SAP CRM Marketing, SAP CRM Sales, SAP CRM Service) come in use.

Key processes in CRM Marketing

• Campaign Management
• Customer Segmentation
• Lead Management
• E-Marketing
• Trade Promotion Management (TPM)
• Marketing Planning and Analytics

Key processes in CRM Sales

• Customer Order Management, Quotations and Contracts
• Account and Contact Management
• Opportunity Management and Pipeline Analysis
• Activity Management
• Commissions and Incentives
• Sales Planning and Analytics

Key Processes in CRM Service

• Service Request, Service Order, Contract Administration
• Complaint Management
• Case Management
• IBase Management and Knowledge Management
• Workflow and Escalation Management
• Workforce Management
• Service Planning and Analytics

It is also important to know in what all ways SAP CRM acts as an interface to the customers in the above mentioned business scenarios.

Customer Interaction Channels

• Back-Office -  For employees
• Field Service, Offline User - for field application users
• Interaction Centre - via telephony and email integration
• Web Channel Management(WCM) - E-Marketing, E-Commerce and E-Service
• Partner Channel Management - Combination of WCM and traditional CRM