Insights

View full profileJim Cook

Head of CRM
Bluefin Solutions

Is it the technology that's holding us back, or just our imagination?

It's CRM...but not as we know it

We've just done a proof of concept that got me thinking back to what CRM really means - understanding your customer and responding to them appropriately with the right message. SAP CRM is now functionally rich, flexible and powerful - actually a great product - but SAP has many other SOA enabled products. I think using some of these (with or without CRM itself) creates possibilities that enable you to serve your customers in different, and perhaps better, ways than before. Maybe it just requires a bit more imagination.

Is it the idea or the technology that comes first?

I don't know the answer but in the SAP world SAP HANA is certainly making us think about use cases for the technology. Check out "What Are the Killer Apps for SAP HANA and Other In-Memory Computing Systems?" by Dennis Moore.

Working with SAP Malaysia we've taken this a step further. I can't give too much away about the specific use case, but in short, the client needed immediate insight into events/situations/updates about their customers so they could respond immediately with offers and promotions. SAP thought it would be a good idea to put a few new and innovative products together and based on volume/speed requirements, use SAP HANA as the database platform. We thought the timescales were mad but that didn't stop us from getting involved. 

The process

The idea was to collect transactional data from various systems relating to customers, process and understand it, and then respond accordingly with customer offers which are then presented through a mobile interface. Simple?

The products

SAP Event Insight (EI) listens to the data from the various systems, processes it using rules and passes significant events through to SAP Real Time Offer Management (RTOM). EI also sends the data to SAP HANA to store the events. SAP RTOM accesses the data from SAP HANA (customer attributes and event data) and uses its rules to propose offers that the customer might like. The offers are sent back to EI which saves these into SAP HANA but also triggers a web service to Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP). SUP collects the data it needs from HANA (customer data, offers, previous events) and sends this to an ipad application that the customer service agents use with the customers. The customers can respond to the offer and this response is fed back to SAP RTOM so it can learn how to target the offers more accurately.

The result

Amazingly thanks to our technical gurus and SAP product experts, we managed to get all this talking to each other (I'm sure more techy blogs will follow) and yes it was fast - sub second between the input to SAP EI being simulated and the offers appearing on the iPad screen. We are pretty sure it's scalable - SAP EI and SAP RTOM can be distributed, SAP HANA...well it's in the name really! So maybe it'll just be the plumbing that slows it down!

So is this real-time CRM?

There must be more use cases for this - capturing complex and large volumes of customer data about their trends and habits, things they have done, felt, bought, complained about etc., and through whatever channel they use (social media, call centre, email etc.) and responding immediately and appropriately through the right channel. It may not be a traditional CRM application but isn't this the essence of customer relationship management? I don't know whether we've changed the game with real-time CRM, but it was certainly an interesting challenge which I have no doubt has many possibilities.