Wednesday, 10th March 2010.

Is Customer Relationship Management possible through SAP route only?

Written on Tuesday, 9th December 2008 by Neeta

Importance given to Customer Relationship Management in an organization speaks about its ethos and work culture. Organization can advertise, promote and market through many channels but it is the customer who ultimately decides when to approach an organization for fulfilling needs. So the importance of having, believing and maintaining customer relations is very important. No customer or for that matter sector can be ignored in today’s recessionary times. In fact any time. Even when the market is buoyant, customer has to have pride of place in any organization’s plan.

Various Customer Relationship Management suites or CRM applications that are available today only supplements our marketing and customer retention efforts. These solutions can not be the end and panacea for all our inefficiencies in our system. SAP provides very good solutions which aims at handling customer relations. There are defined solutions and practices for various sections of industries. SAP offers to address key focal issues in its own scientific way.

Lean Management
Customer loyalty
Speed of Response
Cost of operations
Regulations

For any CRM to address these industry specific topics, lot of research is required to be carried out across industry verticals. SAP has very good solutions covering entire gamut of industries. But cost of these solutions is quite prohibitive for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Customized CRMs developed based on requirements of an organization while integrating the entire set of operations right from marketing to dispatch, keep the organization culture and good matured practices alive and at the same time providing integrated solutions.

Piecemeal implementation of IT applications with no integration envisaged can in fact play havoc with the working of an organization. So when an organization is looking to improve its working and response to customer’s queries, the solutions have to be conceived covering entire sub functions of organization which affect the customer.