SAP has retooled its CRM solution, mySAP Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM 3.1), so that it is now a fully portal-based product that is, according to John Grozier, group director of product
marketing for mySAP CRM, a people-centric solution designed to provide connected CRM, collaborative CRM, people-centric CRM and industry-centric CRM to its users. The portal technology provides users with access to role-based information across multiple applications, data sources and Web services, and the mySAP CRM Analytics tools are designed to enable companies to measure, predict, plan and optimize customer relationships.
SAP's new presentation technology, the portal-delivered Web Dynpro, is designed to allow users to tailor the way they interact with the CRM application and adapt to the role of an individual user, so that he or she can now can aggregate both structured content from business applications and unstructured data from multiple sources by simply dragging information from one application into another.
New workforce management features include tools for short-term staffing forecasts, skill-based assignments and reporting in multichannel environments, as well as the ability to allocate resources to adjust for seasonal shifts in employee availability.
A new mobile engine for mySAP CRM provides extended mobile functions for sales and service representatives, allowing them to initiate orders, access accounts and maximize sales opportunities. New incentives and commissions management functionality provides tools to help align sales representative behavior with the overall goals of the selling organization.
The availability of the CRM solution will be supported by new functions of the SAP Solution Manager from mySAP Services. This tool provides support during all project phases of an implementation to facilitate a smooth start, professional deployment and ongoing optimization of a mySAP.com solution. www.sap.com/800-872-1727
A drawback with most analytic programs is that they cannot deal with unstructured data that come in from customers in many formats, such as e-mail, surveys, etc., which means that someone has to analyze each interaction to extract meaning from it. Although using in-house statisticians or linguistic experts may have its benefits, two of them certainly are not speed and cost.
To fill this gap in unstructured data analysis, Island Data Corp. has released Insight RT, which is designed to enable companies to capture unstructured customer feedback, perform real-time analysis and take action immediately. Insight RT captures unstructured or 'verbatim' customer feedback from a variety of sources including customer service and support tracking applications, e-mail, surveys and Web self-service interactions, and analyzes the content and intent of the feedback, converting it into insights that can be acted upon in real-time. The information provided by Insight RT can be used to provide sales leads, improve marketing campaigns, lower attrition rates, point out cross-sell and upsell opportunities to sales or service representatives, and identify product and market trends, all while the company has the mind share of the customer.
At the core of Insight RT is the patent-pending and internally developed concept recognition technology used to analyze unstructured text. Island Data's concept recognition technology was developed internally and is based on N-level text categorization. Treating each complete sentence at the lowest level of understanding, Insight RT uses the statistical differences between the occurrences of words when a category is true. For example, a simple query profile may have a variety of categories by which the interaction is analyzed, such as sales opportunity, attrition risk, tone, urgency, profanity, product keywords, legal, pricing, language, word count, transaction type, etc. The administration portal provides a dashboard of key indicators and alerts, so management can quickly drill-down on items that need attention or set rules for actions to be taken.
Insight RT can exist as a stand-alone solution or integrate with existing systems and databases. As it is a hosted solution, it can be deployed in less than two weeks. www.islanddata.com/760-517-4100
Captaris has released version 8.5 of RightFax, which provides users with enhanced enterprise fax and universal information exchange capabilities that integrate with enterprise business applications to provide users with more efficient document distribution. RightFax 8.5 renders data from legacy systems, CRM and ERP applications into forms that can be processed and distributed to multiple communication channels. The retrieved information is inputted into documents that can be delivered via e-mail, fax or the Internet to wireless devices, the desktop, or multifunction copiers and printers.
Captaris offers a variety of configurations for RightFax 8.5. The RightFax Business Server allows individuals or workgroups to send and receive documents from the desktop via fax, e-mail or the Internet, providing a single point of administration to manage RightFax servers on the network and reduce document delivery costs.
The RightFax Enterprise Server enables individuals or workgroups to manage heavy document traffic and is designed for multiple fax server environments (least-cost routing, load balancing/clustering and redundancy features). It eliminates manual processes such as printing, mailing or manually faxing documents and scales to support large volumes of transactions.
RightFax Business Integration enables applications for information exchange and low transaction volume environments to automate business processes and allows electronic delivery of critical business documents originating from mainframe, midrange, host or ERP systems.
RightFax Enterprise Integration enables applications for information exchange and high-volume environments to automate business processes and supports all delivery options available including print, fax, e-mail and the Internet. It also provides secure and certified document delivery and offers Java Application Program Interface (API) and XML interfaces for additional customization. www.captaris.com/425-820-6000
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