Which SAP Module ? SAP CRM Customer Relationship Management

It is widely known that the customer is king, that is a no-brainer. If you want to run a business, the greatest asset your business will ever have is it’s customers. Products come and go, you can replace management, you can replace employees but without the customer, the company is nothing.

In this post, I will explain one of the modules of the SAP Business suite, SAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management). You will understand what features it comes with, whether your personal background fits into this module and the salary received by CRM consultants.

What is customer relationship management?

This is the term given to strategies or software that is used to manage the contact between the company and its customers in an efficient way. Here are some of the features a good customer relationship package should have.

1. The company can look into its systems to see which customers bring in the most revenue.
2. What is the demographic of the current customers.
3. Be able to target these customers
4. Generate leads for the sales team
5. The customer should be able to access information on orders or offers that are coming up

SAP has put together a package that claims to take care of all theses needs and more. The software streamlines the tasks of customer  relationship from end-to-end. Here are some of the features that are present.

Accounts and contact management

Have you called your bank, given them your account number and the person on the phone said “Hello Mrs Major, I have all your details in front of me here”? That is a CRM system in action right there. The company can view a list of all customers and drill down with different parameter like age, country of origin, products purchased.

Activity Management

Like a company that supplies coffee machines to offices should know when the customers are running out of coffee and need a refill. The company can focus its energy on following up the customers that are willing to buy or need more supplies.

Service contract management

You also have received a call from you mobile phone company telling you that you contract is about to expire, come and renew it so we can  some more money off of you. This is where all the legal stuff goes on, maintaining service-level agreements, alerts when a contract is about to expire etc.

Is it a good fit for me?

Well as you can imagine, someone with a sales and marketing background will find themselves comfortable in the SAP CRM. But the barrier is lower to break into CRM because it can easily be learned. Imagine having to learn ledger transactions and stuff like the FI-CO (Financial) guys  to do. So don’t feel like it is not possible. This module and Sales and Distribution (SD) are one of easier modules to tackle on your way to becoming a SAP consultant.

Here are some images depicting the state of the CRM market in the UK. Courtesy of itjobswatch.co.uk

From the table you can see that SAP CRM consultants are very well paid. As this series goes along, we shall compare this to other SAP modules. Another factor to note is that the demand has been steady for SAP CRM consultants since 2007 and has actually risen between 2008 and 2009.

In the next post in this series, we shall be looking at other modules like SAP FI-CO, SAP SD (Sales and Distribution) and others. If you have a special request for a module, leave a comment and I can make it the next post.

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You might be asking yourself,

Is SAP right for me?

What are my chances of getting a good SAP job?

The good news is you are not alone. A lot of people have the same questions as well. What is even better news? I have written a series of articles that answer these questions and many more on SAP Unveiled.

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Tagged as: SAP CRM, SAP module