Executive summary
The goal - Take your sales to the next level
Customer information, at the marketing, sales and service levels, is crucial to your overall business value. If customers aren’t happy, sales will lag and business will be lost. The customer relationship management (CRM) solution from IBM and SAP helps you understand and utilize your consumers’ demands, converting prospects into first-time buyers and first-time buyers into long-term customers.
The advantage - Customer experience is key
Using an integrated database as a single repository for customer information, this CRM solution delivers administrative functionality that is easy-to-use, simple-to-customize, and quick to roll out. The solution features can include:
- CRM business transformation outsourcing
- CRM technology hosting
- Sales productivity tools
- Contact center optimization
- Marketing and customer intelligence
The benefits - Act quickly. Grow strategically.
The CRM solution from IBM and SAP can help you respond more accurately to your customers needs, learn their habits and increase customer interaction. This information can help your business:
- Perform daily tasks and operations more efficiently and with greater visibility into your business, including functions such as:
- Planning and monitoring accurate marketing campaigns
- Coordinating budgets
- Performing customer segmentation
- Identifying decision makers
- Tracking sales
- Managing contracts
- Reacting quickly to market changes
- Facilitate better business decisions through flexible management reports on virtually every aspect of your customer relationships.
- Collaborate on critical information with your business partners for sales forecasts, order flow and delivery schedules, streamlining your supply chain and working toward total customer satisfaction.
Business view
The goal - Deliver service without compromise
Customers are the driving force behind business innovation, and companies are looking to customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to help add value to all levels of their enterprise. The CRM solution from IBM and SAP helps to optimize and integrate your internal and external information—from sales forecasts to marketing campaigns—helping you become a more customer-driven enterprise.
The advantage - The longest standing and strongest alliance
The IBM and SAP alliance has combined SAP's powerful enterprise software with IBM's global infrastructure tools to create a unified, open-standard platform for over 30 years. Together, we can help you implement a comprehensive solution, leveraging existing systems and providing a low total cost of ownership.
- IBM has implemented SAP for its own internal operations, resulting in a total cost of ownership reduction of almost US$11B.
- IBM has 8,200 certified consultants worldwide and 300 experienced and trained SAP CRM consultants.
- IBM has SAP professionals in 75 countries with over 20 solution development sites and demonstration centers around the world. IBM is the only systems integrator to win the SAP Award of Excellence every year in every country it has been offered.
The benefits - Reap the rewards of loyalty
The CRM solution from IBM and SAP can help your company address customer interaction through all four phases of the customer interaction lifecycle.
- Customer engagement
- Business transactions
- Order fulfillment
- Customer service
To address these key business issues, the solution offers:
- Efficient and effective marketing processes, including accurate customer segmentation.
- Full-featured customer service, support and service operations through an uninterrupted flow of customer information, interactions and transactions.
- Analytical capabilities that allow you to measure, predict, plan and optimize customer behavior and value.
- Near real-time availability checks, contract management, billing management, fulfillment visibility and order tracking.
Through implementation of our CRM solution, you can have the ability to:
- Execute targeted marketing campaigns, increase sales and deliver prompt customer service through near real-time information gathering.
- Serve customers through a variety of different channels including phone, fax, Web, wireless devices or face-to-face interaction, providing a consistent, personalized experience.
- Speed time to resolution by providing consolidated, operational insights that decision makers can utilize to make better informed decisions.
The approach - A solution implementation
IBM and SAP have everything you need to implement a successful CRM solution. Together, we've helped many businesses realize their CRM goals, including an Austrian coffee company that needed an integrated call center solution.
The company chose the SAP CRM with Customer Interaction Center (CIC) and, after a quick three-month implementation, started seeing results. Running on IBM hardware, the application quickly provided call center agents with all relevant information for order entry, permitted the processing of credit notes and delivered quantity issues and notifications of deliveries and defective goods. Along with that, the system also displayed targeted, weekly offers for the customer profile and created a call list on a daily basis, helping ensure customers were contacted regularly.
The financial advantage - Eliminate to streamline
The CRM solution from IBM and SAP can help you manage and cultivate profitable customer relationships, allowing for a faster return on your overall investment. We can help you:
- Achieve higher sales and profits through stronger ties with your customers.
- Increase revenue through efficient customer acquisition, improved direct marketing response rates, and enhanced cross- and up-selling.
- Automate processes and streamline your entire value chain, reducing overall costs.
Technical details
The issues - Cost effective, immediate integration
When looking for a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you need to make sure it’s compatible with your existing infrastructure. A lengthy network disruption could mean a huge loss of business. The CRM solution from IBM and SAP features an open standards-based infrastructure that can integrate with your current systems, helping to keep implementation costs to a minimum and offering low total cost of ownership.
The benchmark - We do IT
IBM and SAP can provide your company with some of the best in IT innovation and expertise the industry has to offer.
- IBM Global Business Services has been an SAP Global Strategic Alliance Partner since 1989 and was SAP’s first global alliance partner.
- IBM delivered SAP’s first Global Mobile Sales implementation and was the first to implement Mobile Workplace and was the first to implement 3.0, 3.1 and 4.0 capabilities, with 5.0 projects in the pipeline.
The CRM solution from IBM and SAP delivers:
- Functionality throughout the customer engagement cycle, including marketing, sales, service, analytics, field applications, interaction centers, e-commerce, and channel partners.
- An open, flexible framework that supports both SAP and non-SAP systems and industry standards such as HTML, XML and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) to help ensure flexibility and interoperability.
- Leading, award-winning hardware, software and services to help ensure your new solution functions as efficiently and effectively as possible.
The components - Design your new CRM blueprint
IBM and SAP can help you deliver a customer-centric, relationship-based CRM solution with the best in applications and technology that both have to offer.
As part of the mySAP Business Suite, mySAP Customer Relationship Management features:
- End-to-end integration of customer-centric business processes.
- Portal technology to provide broad access to information across departments.
- Multichannel collaboration along the entire value chain.
An end-to-end customer relationship management solution can also include powerful hardware, software, middleware and services.
- IBM System servers:
- Intel®-based IBM System x™ for Linux® and IBM System p™ for UNIX®
- IBM System i™ platform for midrange server needs
- IBM System z™ platform for mainframe server needs
- IBM DB2® Universal Database™—a Web-ready, relational database management system optimized for SAP
- IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner™ for Data—one of the only data mining solutions certified for SAP NetWeaver Business IntelligenceIBM WebSphere® MQ
- IBM Lotus® Domino™
- IBM Tivoli® software
Also included is IBM Global Business Services consulting, implementation and financing services that can help with everything from the design to the actual implementation of your new solution.
The implementation - A solution implementation
Together we have helped many clients build a complete, end-to-end CRM solution, including an Austrian coffee company. The company needed an integrate call center and chose the SAP Customer Relationship Management solution because of its intuitive interface and its support of the B2B and e-procurement centers, from the fully-integrated call center through to electronic support for the mobile sales team.
The IBM and SAP CRM installation included:
- SAP CRM
- IBM DB2
- WebSphere MQ
- IBM System i
- IBM System x
The cost of ownership - Flexible, open architecture
The CRM solution from IBM and SAP can help you cut overall IT costs and implement an integrated, cost-effective IT infrastructure, featuring an open standards based technology framework. Our solution is designed to:
- Ensure flexibility, interoperability and inexpensive implementation.
- Provide architecture that can be tailored to your company’s individual needs for greater IT cost savings.
- Achieve rapid integration by leveraging existing IT systems and keeping acquisition costs at a minimum.
