SAP Customer Experience

1. SAP Hybris is based on Spring framework. Because Spring is the most widely used framework in Java fraternity, finding developers and architects who can be quickly made productive on the Hybris platform is much easier as compared to that on other platforms. Moreover, there are strong SAP Hybris communities at answers.sap.com and stackoverflow.com.

2. SAP Hybris has been consistently at the top position as rated by Gartner and ForresterWave. The selection criteria for these two agencies have been most respected for many years.

3. The business tooling is very extensive and business users find the merchandising tools quite intuitive. Hybris SmartEdit (which is a tool enabling the business users to make changes to the website content as intuitive as editing a live site and previewing it on multiple devices before publishing the changes to the live site) is the only tool of its kind provided by any Java-based eCommerce platforms.

4. SAP Hybris sticks to releases as per the roadmap published well in advance. At the same time, SAP Hybris comes up with the required patches (e.g. security patches) immediately when they are deemed critical for businesses.

5. The documentation is quite rich and there are more than one sites (e.g. help.hybris.com, wiki.hybris.com, www.sap.com/cxworks etc.) where relevant help is available.

6. The licensing is very flexible.

7. There are many deployment options e.g. on-premise, on SAP cloud infrastructure, on a public cloud infrastructure.

1. The CMS and personalization still have some room for improvement.

2. SAP needs to campaign for SAP Hybris as AWS does for its cloud. After having worked with many different eCommerce platforms (including the top three), I can say that it is the best platform. Yet, because of the lack of proper campaign many customers, are not aware of its strengths and the array of features.

It is an excellent tool for tracking the customer relationship because of its multiple channels and customizable tools.

It is not easy to use if you are not relevant with the SAP. However, after you are familiar with the interface everything is easier.

SAP offers a lot of features than can address most of the possible business cases.

The User Interface and User Experience is on a very low level - the interfaces seem to be very outdated when compared to the modern competitors.

SAP CRM is a very robust product and SAP has done well over the past decade to cater to the CRM needs of customers across industries. The best part of SAP CRM is that it not only integrates seamlessly with other SAP softwares but also with various non-SAP softwares providing options to enterprises to keep using certain legacy systems at the same time. CRM solutions in general are very customer centric and SAP has done exceptionally well over the past few releases to come up with advanced features like Social Media Integration to capture market vibe in a more structured and organized fashion. While some of the core CRM modules keep getting better with frequent bug fixes, focus has been on adding new features to cater to industry specific needs. Another important aspect of this software is its ever improving UI. Since CRM 7.0 there has been considerable change in the UI which I should say is extremely friendly now. For customer who want to deploy SAP CRM solution faster, SAP provides them with Rapid Deployment Solution which reduces the implementation time and cost drastically. SAP CRM Best Practices are now successfully used across industries as a proven tool to successfully run business. SAP CRM on HANA platform has made data retrieval a very quick and hassle free affair. SAP also has a great community of developers and professionals who help to share ideas and answer questions when it comes to configuring and customizing their solutions. Another important thing is that for customers who do not want to invest in huge IT infrastructure , SAP CRM comes as an on demand (cloud) solution with most of the features from its on premise version.

SAP CRM releases newer version at a relatively slower rate than most of its competitors. Configurations in SAP CRM backend still remains pretty complex and require highly skilled and experienced professionals to do so. Though SAP CRM can be used as a standalone product but the usability is drastically reduced when SAP ERP is not implemented. Standalone SAP CRM analytics is very basic in its present form and cannot cater to customer need without complex customization.Lastly, lets face it, SAP solutions are still heavily priced compared to other vendors and quite understandably SAP CRM consultants are pretty expensive to hire.

SAP gives the user the ability to organize multiple operations and is transparently available to anyone in the company to view and edit if need be. Helpful for large companies to create and organize portfolios for individual transactions.

I found SAP to be a steep learning curve as there are many steps to do just one thing. It is not very creative and can be more of an exhaustive step in the job process than a streamlined step. It communicates with multiple internal parts so one change in one part may affect another so being highly detail oriented is recommended for this program.