Customer Relationship Management

Abstract

The emergence and growth of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) trend is fueled by the dramatic increase in competitive pressure experienced by today’s leading companies. In order to stay ahead of the competition, companies are increasingly turning to their customers as a means of securing their future competitive edge. Both the value of the individual customer and the development of personalized relationships with them have made CRM a top-three topic in boardrooms around the world.

In contrast to the existing commercial CRM software products which more or less represent “island solutions”, i.e. just cover single aspects of CRM, we emphasize a comprehensive approach. This comprises serving the customer throughout the entire Customer Relationship Life Cycle, providing an integrated view of customer information, and marrying customer-centric processes with the enterprise execution system.

In this paper, we investigate the Customer Relationship Life Cycle and carve out the major business scenarios to be supported by a CRM solution geared to market requirements. Moreover, we highlight important technical requirements and propose a flexible, performant, and scaleable client-server architecture for mobile sales and service which is currently implemented as the heart of SAP’s CRM solution.