Key users to pilot C4C

Our “Replacing Salesforce.com (SFDC) with SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer” project is rapidly picking up pace. These past few days made me feel like I was a test driver racing a new car down a new test track. And it was a hell of a lot of fun!

Test drivers wanted!

Our cross-disciplinary pilot group was made up of colleagues working in the inside sales and sales & marketing departments. After a mere two hours of training, we were ready to go. We were genuinely impressed with how far the project had progressed: All the data is there and single sign-on is as smooth as it can be. Making the switch was a very easy exercise. SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C) is highly intuitive and brings structure to our activities. And we are already familiar with social features such as feed, favorites, and tags. We were all delighted with the consistent and logical user experience: Once you have, for example, understood the process of creating a new lead, you can readily apply this knowledge to similar activities such creating tasks or opportunities. We caught the bug right away.

Personal highlights in C4C

Creating a new location for a customer is now much faster because you only need to enter the new address rather than then entire account.

The homepage can be customized using status dashboards or reports to create personalized KPIs. And they can be “fed” with significantly more information than with Salesforce, giving us a much more detailed overview of our own work.

Practice, practice, practice

The "All in one Tab" feature practically forces us to focus exclusively on the record at hand. I was used to working on multiple contacts in parallel using multiple tabs. Now, this approach will just produce one Java error after another, which I found pretty annoying at first. I have gotten used to it though and, in fact, am sure that it lets me work much more efficiently.

We also had to re-learn how to process our data. But again, practice makes perfect and it is sure to make work so much easier for us. In Salesforce, for example, pieces of information were listed underneath each other, different areas, that is, subject matters were separated by lines. Depending on the scope of information, these areas varied in size. When scrolling up and down, your eyes were just too busy trying to find the information you were looking for. This cost us a lot of time and energy. With C4C, the information is always in the same spot and presented within the different tabs within an object, making it that much more convenient to find what you are looking for.

Lessons learned

Anyone who thinks they can just mirror their existing Salesforce processes to C4C will fall flat on their face. It's a new CRM. Only those who are willing to embrace new paths (processes) will be happy with the results. SAP Hybris C4C allowed us to get there faster time and time again and we discovered standard features that, with SDFC, would have cost us a fortune or required tedious programming.

To go back to my analogy at the beginning: You get in the car and realize right away that it is an automatic rather than a stick shift. As we all know, they both have their upsides and downsides. But then you look around and see the panoramic sunroof, the on-board computer complete with smartphone connectivity, and a rear-view camera and you're sold!