C/4 outward, S/4 inward
From call center to customer experience center: This is how the management consultancy PwC recently described the importance of customer relationship management in a study of the CRM market in Germany.
Driven by the possibilities of advancing digitization, customers today have new, holistic expectations of companies. These must meet the expectations of marketing and sales.
According to Gartner, CRM was the largest software market in 2017 and will also prove to be the fastest-growing software discipline in 2018. By presenting the customer experience suite C/4, SAP has now positioned itself forcefully in this market.
The C/4 Hana Suite integrates modules known from the previous SAP Hybris with new technologies to form an end-to-end solution approach and consists of the following areas:
-Marketing Cloud - marketing planning and analysis, lead management, customer profile maintenance and more.
-Commerce Cloud - including B2B and B2C support as well as management of product content and orders
-Sales Cloud - including sales support and management as well as product configuration, quotation generation and subscription billing
-Service Cloud - location-independent customer service, on-site service support, AI-powered service ticket automation and more.
-Data Cloud - including secure customer identities, standardization of customer profiles and obtaining consent in accordance with the DSGVO, building and maintaining digital customer relationships.
Whether they access digital platforms via computers, tablets, or smartphones, e-commerce customers expect consistent, transparent experiences across all channels in both B2C and B2B.
C/4 supports all these requirements and thus enables the required homogeneous omni-channel marketing. In the interaction of the solutions in the new SAP environment, C/4 takes over the directed "radiating" tasks - the bilateral communication with the customers according to the requirements of the digital age.
C/4 puts customers at the center of business activities. It supports all areas in the front end and is therefore externally oriented. S/4, on the other hand, as an ERP system in the backend, continues to be responsible for the operational processes of companies - in other words, it is more inward-looking.
Because C/4 and S/4 work together organically, by using both systems simultaneously, companies minimize the not inconsiderable time and cost that would otherwise be required to integrate CRM and ERP.
High potential: combination ERP-CRM
This integration of ERP (S/4) and CRM (C/4), which is easily possible in the SAP world, results in a number of advantages for companies. Master data created in ERP, for example, as well as data on delivery status, can be automatically used by CRM, for example, to create quotations.
Orders entered in CRM can in turn be transferred to ERP for invoicing and shipping. The analysis of processes also benefits from the connection of the data stocks. In this way, not only is customer service optimized - business processes are also streamlined and the coordination effort between departments is minimized.
This enables significant cost savings to be realized. With C/4, SAP enables its customers to fully network their entire business processes. This closes digitization gaps that have so far hampered or even prevented an all-round view of customers.
