When the sales team first started throwing around the idea of switching from Salesforce to SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, I broke into cold sweat. My first thought: NEVER CHANGE A RUNNING SYSTEM! But as Loren already explained in part 1 of our blog series, there was little to discuss from a business standpoint. We quickly agreed that it would also provide the required functionality and the switch was a done deal. This week, we were informed about the upcoming import of the data. And then and there, it crept up again, the fear of losing our data – our PRECIOUSSS! What can I say, the data is where it needs to be and it didn't hurt a bit. So now let us take a quick look at it all.
Compared to Salesforce, SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) has much tougher requirements on the quality of the data and will only import "good" data. And as much as we welcome that – purely out of self-interest, after all we are the ones that benefit from high-quality data, – this also meant that we had to put in a lot of grunt work. There were many improvements to be done before we could import our data. Software-based automation contributed a great deal, but we still had to keep intervening manually.
We were able to make up for lost time with C4C's ability to parallelize imports in order to reduce upload times. What's more, the system comes with three different upload variants: create new, add, and overwrite. This saved us even more time by eliminating the need to always upload the complete data package. And anything we couldn't do in the first step via the import, we were able to adapt later using the mass maintenance functionality.
The bottom line: C4C is more restrictive in terms of data and number ranges. Diligence is the key here, because there is no deleting after the fact.
The results were even better than we had expected. Features like leads, opportunities, activities, and so on are basically very similar in both CRM systems. But for us, the greatest advantage of working with SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C) is that it is finally giving us an end-to-end solution that will be fully and seamlessly integrated with our SAP ERP system. I remember all too well how complicated it was to customize Salesforce to enable integration with our ERP system. A never-ending story! Integration with the ERP system, however, is an absolute must for us because we use it for our order entry, invoicing, and much more. Apart from this, there were a lot of little things that made a big difference and made us fall in love with C4C.
The activities in C4C are broken down much more conveniently. They can be filtered by email, phone call, task, and appointment, making our daily work so much easier. In Salesforce, they were all subsumed under activities.
If contact with a lead is established during the sales process, the data is automatically deduplicated during lead conversion and C4C notifies us if we are missing data for the respective contact and, if so, how big the gap in information is. That allows us to react fast and systematically.
For companies with multiple locations under the same name, we can store all addresses with the account and don't have to create separate datasets for each of them.
A number of legal requirements force us to document whether, for example, we are permitted to contact someone for marketing purposes by email or phone. In Salesforce, we had to define our own entry fields for this. SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) now includes them as a default feature. This not only makes it much easier and faster to maintain these permissions, it also allows us to get instant overviews of the information we need.
When querying data, we can now change or undo views, while in Salesforce views were always deleted.
In Salesforce, we had to open each object in a different browser window – C4C allows us to open them in new tabs in the same window, giving us faster overviews of the different objects. For some, this may just be a question of habit, but we feel much more comfortable with it.
All in all, the C4C defaults are already doing much more for us than we were ever able to achieve even after extensive customization with Salesforce.
In our next article, Tilo will fill you in on the development of a role concept for our different user groups. So stay tuned, you won't be disappointed.