HANOVER, Germany, March 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced new capabilities for the SAP® Customer OnDemand solution that empower businesses to know their customers like never before, guide them through each step of the buyer's journey and groom customers to become loyal brand advocates. Combining the advantages of consumer-grade design, social, mobile and cloud technology with deep customer insight and awareness-to-cash process automation, the solution re-imagines what customer-centricity means for today's enterprises. Designed for marketing, sales and service organizations, SAP Customer OnDemand is comprised of the SAP® Sales OnDemand, SAP® Service OnDemand and SAP® Social OnDemand solutions and the SAP® Social Media Analytics application by NetBase. The announcement was made at CeBIT 2013, being held March 5-9 in Hanover, Germany.

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The inability to gather insight about each stage of the buyer's journey across multiple platforms is a major limitation with most CRM applications today. In addition, it is costly, inflexible and time-consuming to tap into back-office systems to expose customer-specific processes such as pricing, quotes and sales orders. Whether companies leverage on-premise, cloud or hybrid solutions, SAP is the only company that can easily integrate with any environment to surface the insight and execute the processes that deliver a new level of customer-centricity.

With SAP Customer OnDemand, SAP empowers people through a consumer-grade user experience, purposeful collaboration and insightful analytics for sales, service and marketing professionals across businesses of all sizes. The latest innovations from SAP Customer OnDemand are geared toward delivering a personalized customer experience.

Prepare Sales Professionals for Meaningful Customer Conversations Anytime, Anywhere

Sales representatives today expect beautiful applications they can easily personalize based on their selling motion, helping them work effectively to deliver a best-in-class customer experience. The new home page for SAP Customer OnDemand brings consumer-grade user experience to sales professionals. The dashboard equips sales professionals with everything they need to know about the customer to orchestrate the sale from lead-to-cash. Based on what they deem relevant, insightful and productive, sales professionals can personalize the home page through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Having customer information at hand is essential to ensuring each customer engagement is relevant and differentiated. New offline capabilities for the iPad application for SAP Customer OnDemand means sales people have complete customer insight wherever they are. With this new must-have sales feature, meaningful customer engagements no longer halt when cell signal does. In addition, the new "sales assistant" provides guided selling that helps ensure representatives are leveraging best practices, delivering the right message and making each customer engagement personalized at every stage of the sale.

"Mobile is a must-have capability for our sales teams," said Jaap Stoppels, manager, Managed Training Services, Schouten Global. "SAP Sales OnDemand delivers full-feature mobile apps — at no extra cost — that helps our mobile sales team in China to collaborate on the road, all with a complete customer view. With the SAP Sales OnDemand mobile app, they're prepared to make every customer engagement relevant and meaningful."

Create a Delightful Customer Service Experience via Any Communication Channel

Customers want to choose how they interact with customer service, whether by email, phone or social media channels. At the same time, customer service agents need cross-channel visibility into every step of the interaction to deliver a delightful customer experience. Additional communication channels in SAP Service OnDemand and SAP Social OnDemand now include a powerful self-service Web portal and an interface for computer-telephony integration (CTI). These channels allow customers to truly do business on their own terms. Customer service agents can now leverage an even greater number of sources for proactive customer interactions, such as branded online communities, websites for product ratings and customer reviews with pre-built integration into Bazaarvoice, a social commerce company that enables customer-powered marketing.

Customer service leaders can now access relevant service information such as ticket status, escalations and key service metrics while on-the-go with the new iPad application for the SAP® Customer Insight mobile app. Turning customer service from a cost center into a revenue-generating team has never been more important. To foster this, product registration and warranty information have been added to help service agents identify targeted upsell and cross-sell opportunities with their clients, and to serve their customers in a more targeted way.

Gather More Social Media Insights for Modern Marketers Faster and in More Languages

Customers' tastes and opinions are evolving faster than ever before. In today's global, networked world, there is no reason for language to be a barrier when getting to know a customer. With new scheduled alerting capabilities in SAP Social Media Analytics, marketers can stay on top of the latest social media trends across the globe. This powerful feature has added support for 19 new languages — from Arabic to Vietnamese. Now campaign managers can quickly capitalize on opportunities to adjust messages and launch corresponding campaigns or promotions almost anywhere in the world while also giving communications teams a chance to get ahead of risks before they go viral. Additionally, with the new "Focus Wizard," a streamlined approach to topic refinement, marketers can access research topics faster than ever. Through increased research efficiency, marketers are able to evaluate the quality of any social Web topic they wish to analyze. It also helps eliminate any irrelevant chatter by applying filters with a single click, instantly providing a clean set of accurate results.

For marketers seeking the next level of customer insight, SAP has partnered with FanAppz, a personalized marketing platform for social media. This platform allows marketers to deliver compelling experiences on their social media pages, driving engagement and capturing social data as well as permission to use it. Now brand managers can fine-tune the way they connect with their audience and drive conversations across multiple channels.

SAP is devoted to giving companies the power to harness the right solution for their diverse marketing, sales and customer service needs across their global enterprise. Continued investment and quarterly updates across SAP Customer OnDemand enable sales, service and marketing organizations to understand, engage and delight customers like never before at every stage of the customer journey.

To learn more about the three must-have capabilities that sales reps love, visit the SAP Sales OnDemand blog. To learn more about putting the "C" back in customer service, visit the SAP Community Network. For more information, including additional news from SAP at CeBIT, visit the SAP Newsroom.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 232,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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