May I have your votes, please?

Pieter Rijlaarsdam, 22 October 2014

Only 8 days left to get your voice heard!

On October 8th, I shared my top 5 improvements delivered in the last cycle of Customer Connect for SAP CRM. For those who are not familiar with the Customer Connect Program and Customer Engagement Initiative, you can find more info here or check the platform directly here.

Basically, SAP is listening to customers in order to define and implement improvements in the software. A good thing if I may say so.

The improvement cycles always consist of a Define, a Collect, a Select, a Develop and a Use phase.

In the case of the SAP CRM Customer Connect program, this cycle takes about a year.
Right now (the end of October) we are in the collect phase.

During the collect phase, all users registered to the platform can create improvement requests.
These improvement requests can then be voted on by all the other users.
If a requests gets enough votes, it is qualified for the next phase, where SAP will select the most relevant improvements.

In order for a request to be selected (to be built), it has to meet a few requirements:

Global relevance (so reach as many customers as possible)
A minimum of 5 votes (subscribers on the platform)
Feasible in a preset timeframe
Easy deployment
Downportable

So basically, it should have a good relevance, get support from other users and shouldn’t be too big a change.

Current top 5

So let’s take a look at the current top 5, based on the amount of subscriptions:

Cancel search button should leads you back to search
Thanks to improvement D5164 there is a cancel button available for searches. It would be nice if the cancel button not only proceed a F5 but just go back to the search where it comes from. In this example not to show al possible business roles but show the opportunity search.

Timed out CRM does not show it is already timed out
Similar to many on-line banking systems:
(1) There should be a warning popup when CRM is about to time out, which seeks the user’s action to continue or ignore.
(2) When CRM is timed out, the opened CRM pages should indicate so. Preferably CRM would first perform the Automatic “Save” (IR: 15354) and then close all open sessions or replace the screen of
the open pages with a splash page indicating the system is timed out

CRM Search: Missing user-defined “AND”/ “OR” operators among multiple search criteria
CRM Search should provide user-defined “AND”/ “OR” operators to allow users to form correct searches or more sophisticated searches among multiple search criteria

Autocomplete/type ahead feature for account search
There are several SCN blogs dealing with autocomplete features (e.g. using jquery) for input fields. I think it’s time to include such a feature in CRM standard delivery, here’s the requirement I’m facing the most in my customer projects:
When searching for an account, the name field should include an autocomplete feature, e.g. when typing “mic”, all accounts having a name starting with “mic” (Mic*) should be displayed.
I’ve included a mockup in the attachment and mentioned a WebDynpro function which is similar as well.

Prevent the creation of duplicate Contact Person
Audit to help prevent the ability to save duplicate Contacts in standard SAP CRM. For example, validate against phone number, email, first initial/middle initial/last name of existing contacts, before allowing the new contact to be saved. Warn the user if a duplicate match is found, based on configured fields. If a duplicate warning is presented, allow the user to select an existing Contact instead of creating a new contact. New contacts can be requested either directly by an Interaction Center user, or requested indirectly by a field mobile user (from the Service Manager app).

Current Situation
Many duplicate contacts are created. We don’t want to require an exhaustive search be performed before creating a contact.

A record amount of 150 requests already!

Besides the top 5 just mentioned, there are 145 others already requested and awaiting your approval.

Currently, there are 76! improvement requests with less than 5 votes. This means, that only half is actually eligible for selection in the next phase. With only 8 days to go… time is running out for them.

May I have your votes please?

So… May I have your votes please? Log on to the CRM 2015 Customer Connect program here, read the improvement requests, and vote for the ones you would implement if they became available. Do it now, because in 8 days, our chance to have a say at SAP will be over for another year.

We wouldn’t want to miss out on these beauties for instance: