SAP's enhanced telecoms CRM functionality comes at crucial time in local, African telecoms evolution

The introduction by enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solutions giant, SAP, of new applications enabling telecommunications companies to cost-effectively improve service levels and introduce new products and services, comes at a crucial time in the evolution of the South African and African telecommunications industry.

"De-regulation of the South African telecoms market and the explosion of the prepaid cellular market in the rest of Africa means that the old ways of attracting and retaining customers won't work any more," says SAP CRM solution manager, Philip Swanepoel. "There are just too many organisations competing for the same share of wallet.

"Besides, telecommunications is no longer just a utility. It sits at the core of most economies. More than that, it carries the collective genius of any society. It therefore takes not just a new approach but new tools to manage, control and profit from it. Intelligent tools that can tell you what you need to know about your customers in order to be able to attract and retain them more profitably."

The enhancements to mySAP CRM made specifically for the telecommunications industry are therefore focused on providing what SAP calls a "full order to cash view" of the customer.

"Even with all the technology advances of recent times, customers still have to interact with different departments within a telecommunications company in order to either resolve a dispute about an account or find out about and order new products. Back office and front office systems remain fragmented and so, therefore, does the organisation's view of the customer - and, of course, the customer's experience of the organisation.

"As a result, customer loyalty is paper thin, debt collection is unnecessarily complex and time-consuming and the introduction of new products and services a hit and miss game. Performance management and strategic planning are, essentially, based on fictions."

The new telecoms extensions to mySAP CRM address these problems by analysing, monitoring and managing the entire customer financials cycle - complementing existing SAP functionality for managing cases and complaints, sales orders and contracts, and campaigns.

"The cornerstone of the extensions is integration - as facilitated by our Net Weaver platform which enables the interface of information from disparate systems - and what we call ivies," says Swanepoel. "The ivies sit behind our portal and are roles-based - so they collect, analyse and present information related to specific roles, such as sales manager, call centre agent or debt collection manager. Accordingly, whoever accesses the system gets precisely the information he or she needs to deal with a customer in the most efficient way and therefore build long-term relationships.

"At the same time, call centre agents can access all the information they need to handle up to 95% of all customer queries, regardless of whether they are product or account related, boosting first time query resolution.

"In addition, the analytics that are now pre-packaged into all my SAP products automatically provide the business intelligence organisations need to track customer behaviour - allowing accurate customer segmentation and, thereby, identification of cross- and up-selling opportunities as well as tight tailoring of new products to actual customer needs."

The collection process is also eased, with call lists automatically generated in the back-end dunning processes along with interactive scripts and payment tools. Agents are able to outline the situation to the customer effectively, capture payment authorisations or promises-to-pay, create an instalment plan, or open a dispute case when necessary. Revenue leakage is significantly reduced and customer behaviour is recorded so that companies can focus their profitable-customer growth initiatives on more viable candidates.