You may want to provide your online customers with cross-selling recommendations to increase your revenue. These cross-selling recommendations can be global — shown to all customers on the Web — or you can personalize them based on profile data or other information about the customer, such as prior purchasing history.
Key Concept
You can use cross-selling recommendations in multiple channels when creating a sales order. These suggestions entice customers to purchase additional products that are complementary to their primary product of interest. Within direct sales and telesales scenarios, the system shows cross-selling recommendations to the sales representative or the customer service representative. On the Web, customers view cross-selling recommendations as additional detail information for the products they display on the Web.
Increasingly, customers use the Internet to easily research and compare products. Therefore, it is crucial to provide in one place all of the information a customer needs to make a purchasing decision. By using SAP E-Commerce for mySAP CRM, you can include recommendations of complementary products (cross-selling), which are presented to the customer online in addition to the product’s details such as text, images, and specifications. You can also use SAP E-Commerce for up-selling, which provides customers with alternative product suggestions that typically include more expensive products to increase revenue.
You can personalize these recommended products to match the interests of a particular customer. Cross- selling helps the customer to find products that are compatible with the primary product of interest without needing to perform additional searches. For the selling company, these personalized recommendations can increase revenue. They may also increase customer loyalty if recommendations are personalized and provide valuable information to customers.
SAP E-Commerce is delivered as part of mySAP CRM. I will describe how CRM Marketing functionality is extended to the Web to provide cross-selling and up-selling recommendations to online customers as well as to personalize these recommendations. The use of cross-selling and up-selling in SAP E-Commerce has been available in mySAP CRM since Release 2.0.
Set Up Cross-Selling Rules
As a first step, the marketing department determines which products it wants to recommend to online customers. You may define cross-selling rules based on criteria such as knowledge of compatible products or availability of a new product you want to highlight to create awareness. You might also use analytics derived from customer purchasing history, or general purchasing patterns of customer segments, to determine the relationships between products that customers typically purchase together.
Two queries are delivered in SAP BW to analyze such product associations. These are simply reports that provide information to the marketing department as it decides which products should be recommended to online customers. The query CRM Cross-Selling is based on CRM sales data. The query Cross-Selling is based on sales data from mySAP ERP.
Once you decide which products to recommend, you can create cross-selling rules in mySAP CRM. The People- Centric User Interface (People-Centric UI) includes the cross-selling functionality and allows you to access it through SAP NetWeaver Portal. Cross-selling is part of the campaign manager role delivered with the business package for mySAP CRM. You can navigate to the cross-selling functionality in SAP NetWeaver Portal by following the menu path Accounts and Products>Products. In the Detailed Navigation section on the left side of the screen, you can access the Cross-Selling Rules (Figure 1). You may also configure cross-selling rules in SAPGUI by following SAP Easy Access path Marketing>Product Proposals>Maintain Cross-/Up- /Down-Selling Rules.
Figure 1
Create cross-selling rules in the campaign manager role
In the Cross-/Up-/Down-Selling screen, you can change existing rules or create new rules. To create a new rule, first select the association rule type (Associat. Rule Type column). If you choose Cross-Selling Rule, the system recommends additional related products to the customer. If you choose Up/Down-Selling Rule, the system recommends alternate products, which may be either higher (up-sell) or lower (down-sell) in price than the primary product. In both cross-selling and up/down-selling, the system can recommend multiple products to customers online.
Note
Cross-selling is a core Marketing functionality, so you can use these rules in multiple channels in addition to SAP E-Commerce. For example, a telesales agent sees cross-selling and up-selling rules and uses them for verbal recommendations to customers on the phone. In these scenarios you can enter more than one leading product. However, if you define more than one leading product, the system shows the additional recommendations to telesales agent during order entry only if the customer has ordered all leading products.
Next, enter the product for which you want to define the cross-selling rule under the Leading Product tab. The leading product is the primary product that interests the customer. You should create cross-selling and up-selling rules with only one leading product.
The online customer sees the cross-selling and up/down-selling recommendations on the detail page of a particular product in the product catalog. This page shows additional information about a single selected product. The system only recognizes this one leading product in determining cross-selling and up- selling rules.
On the Dependent Product tab (Figure 2), you may enter one or more cross-selling products. The dependent products are the cross-selling (and up-selling) products that the system presents to the online customer. In SAP E-Commerce, the system displays all of the products defined here as dependent products. These recommendations appear in the product catalog on the detail screen of the leading product, and again in the online shopping basket if the customer has added the leading product to the basket.
Figure 2
Select different options for cross-selling rules in the campaign manager role
Once you identify the leading and dependent products, select whether the rule is global (for all customers) or personalized for each customer. If you create a Global cross-selling (or up-selling) rule, as shown in Figure 2, you do not need to enter marketing segment information. The cross-selling recommendation appears to all customers who enter the Web shop.
You can also create a personalized cross-selling (or up-selling) rule. If you wish to personalize based on a customer profile (a questionnaire filled out by the customer), then choose Profile. In this case, you need to enter the profile ID in the Marketing Segment column. Each profile ID links to the customer’s responses to a questionnaire in the Web shop. You can create a profile for either a single response or a combination of responses to different questions.
Note
On the Web, you can use the customer segmentation capabilities available in CRM Marketing to present a more personalized user experience. Target groups are customer segments, or groups of customers who share common attributes. Examples of similar attributes are geographic location, past purchasing history, and profile information, and combinations of this data. You can create target groups manually by defining common characteristics of customers, or through a query in SAP BW. A customer can be a member of more than one target group.
You can also choose Target Group if you want to base the personalized recommendations on a particular customer segment that you have defined in marketing, using various attributes about the customer. In this case, you enter the target group in the Marketing Segment column.
Finally, you need to activate the rule that you just created in the Status column at the far left. Once you set a rule to Active, you need to enable your Web shop to display these rules so that online customers see the product in the particular Web shop.
Display Cross-Selling Rules
In the Web shop, SAP E-Commerce offers you many settings that determine available options within your SAP E-Commerce site. Examples of these settings include the product catalog to display, the language and currency, the order type and sales area in which you create sales orders in mySAP CRM, and the countries to which you can ship products ordered online.
The Web shop also controls the marketing features presented to online customers. You can access the Web shop configuration with the following URL: https://:/ shopadmin/shopadmin/init.do? scenario.xcm=. Enter the user ID that you use to directly log in to mySAP CRM. To determine which marketing features are active, such as cross-selling and up-selling recommendations, select your Web shop and go to the Marketing tab.
You configure the relevant settings for cross-selling and up-selling in the Product-Related Proposals section under the Marketing tab (Figure 3). Activate the Display Product-Related Proposals setting to enable the display of cross-selling and up/down-selling recommendations within the Web shop.
Figure 3
Configure the customer’s Web shop experience
If you activate the display of these rules, then you must also enter a Method Schema (Figure 4). Method schemas contain lists of function modules that determine which cross-selling and up-selling rules the system should read. mySAP CRM contains a set of standard function modules. You can also write your own function modules. Configure method schemas in the IMG using the menu path Customer Relationship Management>Marketing>Product Proposals>Create Method Schema.
Figure 4
Method schema that contains all function modules delivered with mySAP CRM
In Figure 4, CRM_MKTPR_PP_CS_GL_READ reads all global cross-selling rules. CRM_MKTPR_PP_CS_TG_READ reads all personalized cross-selling rules for target groups. CRM_MKTPR_PP_CS_PF_READ reads all personalized cross-selling rules using profiles. CRM_MKTPR_PP_DOUBLES_DELETE removes duplicates. If a product is recommended twice it is only shown to the customer once. Similar sets of function modules exist for up-selling rules and down-selling rules.
By including or excluding specific function modules in the method schema, you can include or exclude certain types of recommendations within a particular Web shop. For example, you may configure a Web shop that only contains global recommendations, so you would configure a method schema that only includes the function modules that read global recommendations. Even if personalized recommendations exist, they would not be shown on the Web. For another Web shop, you may also want to configure a method schema that only contains personalized recommendations and no global recommendations. You may do this because your customer groups are so unique that a global cross-selling rule would not provide relevant information any group.
If you want to display personalized recommendations in addition to global recommendations, you need to also activate the flag Personalized Product-Related Proposals in the Web shop, as shown in Figure 3. The system then displays the global recommendations and all personalized recommendations read by the function modules in the method schema.
Finally, you must also enter a Standard Target Group in Figure 3. This is often a target group that is set up to automatically include all customers, but it can also be limited to specific customers. If personalized recommendations are turned on, and if the system cannot find any personalized recommendations based on target groups or profiles for the individual customer entering the Web shop, the system uses the standard target group as a next step to find personalized recommendations.
If you activate the Personal recommendations for unknown users, you activate the use of cookies in the Web shop within a business-to-consumer (B2C) scenario. If a customer accesses the Web shop without logging in, but has visited the site in the past and completed a profile, the cookie displays personalized recommendations based on the profile responses, without requiring the customer to log in. Cross-selling is also available in the business- to-business (B2B) scenario, but this option is not available for these customers. B2B customers must always log in before accessing the Web shop so the system can always read their profile information as they browse the catalog.
The Customer Experience: Cross-Selling Rules
Now that I’ve set up the cross-selling and up/down-selling rules, let’s take a look at the online customer’s experience in the Web shop, using the B2C scenario as an example. As a customer, you access the Web site of the selling company, and browse the catalog. When you find a product of interest, you display the detail view of the product (Figure 5). Here you can view additional information about the product, such as images, text, and attachments such as product specifications.
Figure 5
Cross-selling recommendations on the product’s detail screen within the product catalog (B2C scenario)
Note
Cross-selling and up-selling are available both in B2C and B2B scenarios as part of the standard templates. Since the templates are based on Java technology, you can change the look and feel of them to meet your branding needs.
Figure 6Related ProductsAlternative
Figure 6
ross-selling and down-selling recommendations based on the items in the shopping basket
Note
Accessories are related directly to a product through a relationship defined in the product master (a master record that contains both basic data, such as the weight of the product, and sales data, such as sales texts, to allow appropriate processing of the product being sold). Accessories are always global.
When you are ready to check out, you navigate to the shopping basket where you again see the cross-selling and up/down-selling recommendations for all the products you placed into the basket. The system displays the additional recommendations in the order of the leading products in your shopping basket. You can still add the cross-selling and up/down-selling recommendations to your shopping basket at this time.
Birgit Starmanns
Birgit Starmanns is a senior director in solution marketing at SAP for EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) and Finance solutions. Birgit has more than 20 years of experience across solution marketing, solution management, strategic customer communities, and consulting. Her functional experience is in finance, including core SAP ERP and enterprise performance management, as well as customer relationship management, which has allowed her to focus on the integration of cross-functional business processes. Prior to joining SAP, she was a principal in management consulting organizations, redesigning business processes and implementing SAP R/3 and R/2 for numerous Fortune 500 and SME companies, with a focus on management accounting. Birgit holds a BA and an MBA from the College of William and Mary.
You may contact the author at birgit.starmanns@sap.com.
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