Like many of its competitors, SAP has begun integrating social networks into its CRM product.
And, like many of its competitors, SAP has started with Twitter.
SAP CRM 7.0 has all key objects exposed as Web services allowing SAP to connect the Twitter API
to SAP CRM. Additionally, the Business Objects Text Analyzer serves to provide sentiment
analysis.
Combined SAP is enabling users to monitor and interact with their customers who want to connect
to the company through the rapidly expanding social networking channel.
In the first demo, Bernard Chung, director of solution marketing for SAP, shows how customers
can create service tickets based on Twitter messages and interactions as well as conduct marketing
campaigns.
In the second demo, Chung demonstrates how organizations can create marketing campaigns in
SAP CRM using the Twitter integration.
Yet, challenges remain for both SAP and its customers, Vinay Iyer, vice president of enterprise
marketing for SAP CRM, acknowledged. There are security concerns with the social networks and
mapping social network profiles to customer records presents a significant hurdle. Connecting
directly to customers via social networks is difficult.
"What we're seeing when we demo this at a number of customers is they're at the first wave of
deployment they're more interested in looking at things in the aggregate," Iyer said. "They're
looking for tweets relevant to a brand and to do sentiment analysis and then create a service
response based on that. Responding to individual tweets? The technology exists but it's not
practically implemented yet."
