Perfect Customer Experience

Modern customer relationship management (CRM) is the fuel of success for every medium-sized company. When products and services converge and make competition more difficult, you have to delight your customers all the more. Customer interaction and experience - or customer experience, CX - have become a strategic factor. Offering more, being better, acting reliably and efficiently - these are the decisive competitive points.

Many companies rely on the SAP Customer Experience Suite for this purpose. With it, companies are bringing new momentum to their sales. SAP Sales Cloud, for example, shines with its functions and on-board tools for efficient lead and opportunity management. But here we can still use and incorporate a decisive turbo. That's why B4B Solutions has developed solutions to dovetail the ubiquitous Microsoft world with the SAP world.

One aspect of New Work

New working means being flexible in terms of working hours and locations, being fast and enabling new forms of collaboration. Several people solve tasks together. Agile processes also determine relationships with customers. Tasks and projects are jointly controlled and processed with collaboration tools, as in customer relationship management.

Tools and services must be designed in an optimized information architecture and made available in a user-friendly manner, as a further consistent step into the digitalized, mobile working world with lean processes, flexible in terms of space and time. In the Microsoft area, there is SharePoint, Teams, Planner for team task management and so on.

These collaboration tools are essential for New Work. But this is a silo next to the other silo CRM. B4B Solutions has built the bridge in between. When both user and corporate worlds in Microsoft and SAP are more closely connected and interlocked, employees' work is made easier and the experience for customers is improved.

In times of crisis and upheaval, we also observe a variety of transformations in sales models. Not least, the Corona crisis has brought about changes in order intake. All customer information should be digitally recorded, centrally managed and easy to handle.

The central nervous system of the company from an internal perspective is and remains the ERP system. But on the outside, the customer is knocking on the window. He wants his wishes to be taken seriously; he wants not only products or services, but his positive experience.

This also includes self-services and various communication channels that bring the customer closer to the ERP system. For example, they can use a portal approach to search for and order spare parts, call up documentation, view order histories, or position orders.

In other words, they do what the customer would otherwise call and employ the internal sales team to do. This is what customers want today. This means that they are more closely integrated into the company's processes, which also enables companies to reduce their process costs.

Alongside this portal approach are elements such as online marketing and campaign management, but also the area of customer care - all components of CRM. Microsoft SharePoint in particular is used in many companies as a central document management system, for offers, product presentations and much more. All of this is relevant for maintaining and expanding customer relationships. However, the actual lead and opportunity management takes place in CRM.

With the solution from B4B Solutions, SharePoint is integrated into the CRM in such a way that, at the click of a button, all documents in the CRM are visible that are stored in SharePoint for a specific customer - and vice versa. The same applies to the Planner: Tasks and appointments that are stored here or newly created in the team can be conveniently viewed and retrieved by the field staff in their Microsoft interface. The integration of Outlook into the CRM is also possible, so that mails can be automatically moved to the corresponding opportunities.

Another important plus point is computer-telephone integration (CTI), which can be used to integrate classic telephone calls or even video calls into the CRM world. This applies above all to one of the systems that is currently most popular and has won great acclaim, namely Microsoft Teams. Currently, the CRM integration of Skype for Business is in use; in the course of the next year, a free extension to Teams will be available.

The basis for everything is a hub in which, for example, such call logs and other documents are set in relation to the associated opportunities in CRM. This data hub is our connecting link between the Microsoft world and the entire SAP world, all the way to ERP. For the daily business with the customer, this is a very useful solution for companies that creates transparency and makes processes easier and faster.

So from an IT perspective, closer integration of the two worlds makes sense and is feasible - from a user perspective anyway. The customer doesn't know it, but notices it in better relationships.