Newsbyte: SAP Offers Deep Sales, Service and Marketing Intelligence for Better Customer Engagement in the Cloud

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Mar 10, 2014, 06:00 ET

HANOVER, Germany, March 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Today's digitally empowered customers demand higher-quality interactions from the companies with which they do business. As a result, businesses need to understand their customers more deeply and engage with them to build lasting relationships. To help companies better build these relationships, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced enhancements to cloud solutions for customer engagement, including new capabilities for sales, service and marketing that help employees deliver better customer experiences through richer insight and flawless execution of business processes across departments. The announcement was made at CeBIT 2014, being held March 10–14 in Hanover, Germany.

Facilitating more personal customer interactions, the latest updates to cloud solutions for customer engagement from SAP include:

Better Deals, Faster

Expanded predictive analytics: Leveraging the game-changing speed of the SAP HANA® Cloud Platform, the solutions now deliver next-generation predictive analytics available on any device, which help sales and marketing people engage the right set of influencers to win customers, easily identify new business and effectively secure leads.
Improved customer insight: A new dashboard provides visibility into top leads and marketing funds, helping marketing executives improve the execution of their campaigns by providing visibility into top leads and marketing funds. Account fact sheets are now automatically produced in PDF format to keep sales professionals better informed about their accounts.
Less wasted time: The new "influencer map" allows users to easily identify people who influence a decision-maker when closing a deal, so they can target the right people at the right time. Additionally, with the "deal finder," sales people can use topics to filter leads and quickly zero in on the best ones. Improved visualization of sales opportunities and dashboard enhancements that include the ability to incorporate analytics from other SAP and external applications also help sales people optimize their time.

Even More Mobile

Richer offline functionality: Mobile users gain even more power to work anywhere, anytime with the power to create, read and update records offline.
More devices: To deliver a consistently great user experience across devices, HTML5 is now the underlying user interface technology, offering better support for tablets and handheld devices where no native application is available.

Industry-Specific Functionality

Support for high-tech and retail companies: New features allow semiconductor and component manufacturers to collaborate with their channel partners and automate the design registration life cycle, helping to maximize channel revenue and increase design wins. Enhancements to the cloud version of SAP® Retail Execution help improve the effectiveness of sales teams with visit summaries, notifications on visits, next-visit scheduling prompts and auto assignment of task and surveys.

More End-to-End Business Processes

Expanded integration: Additional prepackaged integrations, called integration flows, connect the entire family of cloud solutions for customer engagement to the SAP® ERP and SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) applications, offering sales teams comprehensive data and business processes, including e-commerce information. Integration supports no-hassle access to back-office insight, from products and pricing to quotes and sales orders. New integration flows have also been introduced to facilitate quick integration with SuccessFactors Employee Central, enabling easy access to employee records.

Easy Application Administration

Reduced operational costs: New configuration tools and improvements to the creation, management and rollout of application customizations allow administrators to limit time spent on system administration and focus on helping sales teams successfully leverage the solution.

"The rules of customer engagement have changed," said Jamie Anderson, vice president, Solution Marketing, Customer Line of Business, SAP. "The customer is now in charge of the relationship and it is up to smart companies to find new ways to engage them. Businesses today are looking for ways to move 'beyond CRM' and into the realm of true customer engagement. Today's updates respond to the need for richer customer engagement regardless of department, location or interaction channel, making SAP Cloud a top choice for companies in any industry looking to create lasting connections with their customers."

Cloud solutions for customer engagement from SAP comprise a portfolio of cloud-based CRM solutions designed for marketing, sales and service organizations, including SAP® Cloud for Sales, SAP® Cloud for Service and SAP® Cloud for Social Engagement solutions, as well as the SAP® Social Media Analytics application by NetBase.

To learn more, watch a video, "What's New: February 2014." For more information, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contact:
Andrea Meyer, +1 (415) 370-7329, [email protected], PST

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

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SOURCE SAP AG