SAP CS

What Is Customer Service?

Customer service is the support a company provides to customers before and after they purchase a product or service. Today, customer service has evolved to include omnichannel support, such as in-store, telephony, email, chat, social media, and self-service options.

What Is SAP Customer Service Management?

SAP offers SAP Customer Service Management as part of the SAP Service Cloud portfolio. According to SAP, “SAP Service Cloud can help your company deliver fast and personalized customer service and increase service efficiency. It connects customer contacts from different channels in one solution to enable a consistent service experience across any contact channel.”

What Is Customer Service?

What Is SAP Customer Service Management?

Successful Customer Service Process

Companies rely on an effective customer service process not only to retain existing customers, but also to attract them. How well a company interacts with its customers can affect brand reputation and potential long-term revenue.

A blog from HubSpot identified several critical areas that comprise an effective customer service function. A few of those include:

Put customer needs first. This is first and foremost to be successful with customer service. If a solution to a customer issue is not readily available, the company does what is necessary to devise one that meets the customer’s needs. Ultimately, the customer knows you’re invested in their success.
Ask for feedback and learn from customers. Always seek feedback from the customer about what went well and what could be improved. Not only is it a learning opportunity to identify process deficiencies, but it also can lead to insights about products or services. Is the same product failing for multiple customers? This is valuable feedback for the product development team.
Solve for long-term solutions, rather than short-term conveniences. What does true customer service look like? It takes the form of a company that resolves a product issue at the moment but reopens a customer file and reaches out with a longer-term or permanent solution when it becomes available. For example, a software package may not have a direct solution for a customer problem; through a workaround, a short-term fix is found. However, in a future update, a feature becomes available that solves that specific issue. The company contacts the customer and alerts them about the updated feature and solution.

Vendors in the SAP customer service space include: Bilot, Datasense Solutions, and Focused Impressions Technology.

- Premium
A Three-Step Process for Averting Downtime When Modifying Your R/3 System

Reading time: 2 mins

/Project ManagementWhether your SAP system is still in its settling-in phase, or is one that has been firmly entrenched for years, ushering in new changes is a nontrivial challenge. Even small, seemingly innocuous changes, like rearranging a screen, introducing new headings on a report, or revising your backup practices can introduce downtime. Large or small,…...…
- Premium
Destination and Session Management for the SAP DCOM Connector

Reading time: 2 mins

The SAP DCOM Connector (SDC) is the standard middleware for Windows applications that require access to SAP functionality. SDC contains an API that offers access to the “destinations” in which R/3 system and user information required for logon is maintained. This article provides an overview of those destinations and the SDC API that enables a…...…
- Premium
Paving the Way for a Smooth and Successful Integration of Your EDI and SAP Systems

Reading time: 1 mins

/Project ManagementSAP professionals are finding that the integration of SAP and EDI systems is fundamental to many of the e-commerce applications they are being asked to support. All too often, however, SAP teams do not have a working knowledge of their organization’s in-house EDI subsystem, and vice versa. This article aims to bridge that gap…...…
- Premium
BAPI Programming with Java — Beyond the Basics

Reading time: 2 mins

SAP’s Common RFC Interface for Java has made it easier for customers to adopt the “outside-in” approach, whereby Java programs running on non-SAP systems can make BAPI calls into an R/3 system to leverage R/3 functionality. Working with Java middleware for SAP R/3 is a somewhat complex affair. This article outlines some of the nasty…...…
- Premium
Better Management of Change Requests with Extended Transport Control

Reading time: 2 mins

Every implementation and development team instinctively knows that the transporting of change requests is vital to the success of an R/3 implementation. Recognizing that this process can become overwhelming, SAP introduced extended transport control with Release 4.5, so once you define client-specific transport routes, you don’t have to worry about managing into which clients a…...…
- Premium
Building Your Own BAPIs — A Step-by-Step Guide

Reading time: 2 mins

If you have some experience with crafting applications that utilize BAPIs and want to know how to actually create and implement a BAPI in the event that an appropriate BAPI does not exist, this article is for you. Once you have searched through the BOR and identified the suitable object types for your application, and…...…
- Premium
A Custom Performance Test — Is It for You?

Reading time: 2 mins

A load test makes sense — in fact, it’s an absolute must — for large, complex, or highly customized systems with add-ons. In these situations, a load test, whereby you physically test a heavily loaded system before it is deployed, is the only way to verify that the hardware sizing, configuration, and parameterization of your…...…
- Premium
Optimizing, Monitoring, and Fine-Tuning a Newly Upgraded Release 4.x Spool Service

Reading time: 1 mins

For Release 3.x spool servers, all output requests and related management activities are anchored by a single spool work process. Needless to say, processing bottlenecks can be a common occurrence, forcing administrators to add additional R/3 servers just to get more spool work processes. Release 4.x spool servers, which can support multiple spool work processes,…...…
- Premium
Selecting the Optimal System Landscape for Your SAP R/3 Upgrade Project

Reading time: 2 mins

An R/3 upgrade requires that changes be made to the new system, and it requires support for ongoing changes to the production system as well, so the underlying system landscape must make it easy to manage change. Most upgrade projects use a variation on one of two landscape strategies: rehearsal of the upgrade process on…...…
- Premium
Transaction Handling in SAP R3 What Every Programmer Needs to Know

Reading time: 2 mins

Understanding how R/3 is able to handle even very large numbers of transactions with ease is essential for any ABAP or BAPI developer who wants to build performance-optimized applications, and for administrators who are charged with maintaining overall system performance. This article explains the details of transaction processing and the asynchronous update scheme around which…...…