Top 5 improvements delivered through Customer Connect CRM 2013-2014

On October 13th last year, I wrote about Customer Connect, SAP’s Customer Influence platform.
Now, a year later, I look back at the process, share my top 5 enhancements, and look forward to the 2014-2015 cycle.

Looking back

So let’s go 1 year back.

On October 13 2013, I mentioned there are 4 stages in the Customer Connect cycle. At that time, we were in the collect phase. I still had good hope for the selection phase. Hopefully, my contributions would be selected and implemented. Also, I was curious towards the implementation phase… Would SAP development indeed co-develop the enhancements?

As promised, after the collection phase, the development team selected the requests that were valid for the next round where both popularity and feasibility played a role.
Unfortunately for me, one of my personal favorites didn’t make it to the development phase.
Default values for search criteria in UI configuration – Delivered
Automatic refresh of the agent inbox – Rejected
Add the status of an activity to the calendar – Delivered

After the selection, I expected someone might contact me to follow-up on the details.
This was not the case though. A few months of silence followed, after which the closing call was done which explained that most developments had finished. We can only hope that the actual outcome is as expected.

My personal top 5

Looking at the list of delivered enhancements, it is hard to select a top 5. Feel free to disagree :-).

Stop Function for Each CRM Search
This sounds promising. Whenever you have started a search, but have noticed that this search will take a long time, it would be great if you could stop the search and return to the homescreen.
I have heard rumours though, that clicking the ‘stop search’ button does not return you to the previous screen, but will reload the page :-(.

Automatic “Save”
Automatic save of texts eventually became a way to restore texts if (for instance after a timeout) the system crashes. The functionality stores the text from the textboxes to the local storage, and deletes it from there once a save or explicit cancellation is done. Whenever something is found in the local storage, the user is asked if he wants to use this to restore.
In my opinion, I think I would prefer a periodic save to the database with a specific status (draft), which can be restored next time the object is reopened (independent of the user, computer, browser, etc). Still one of my favourites though.

Add the status of an activity to the calendar
It goes without saying that the requests I created myself are among my favourites.
This change adds the activity status to the calendar in SAP. This makes it especially easier to distinguish between open activities (still to do) and closed activities (finished).

Default values for search criteria in UI configuration
Definately one of my favorites. Some of the articles on this blog already focussed on (re-usable) custom coding to enable the setting of default search criteria for business roles. This has now been added to the standard functionality, so yeah this is one of my favorites :-).
According to the comments there seem to be some implementation issues though, I hope this is not due to misunderstanding of the needed functionality.

Allow mass maintenance of tags
This is quite cool. The use of tags allows users to easily categorise the objects which are interesting for them. The mass maintenance of tags allows directly editing (adding and deleting) of tags on multiple objects. For instance, I could search for all open opportunities assigned to me, and add the tag ‘openopportunity’ to them. Handy! :-).

2014-2015 cycle

Now, in October 2014, we are in the new cycle, and a record amount of 92 requests have already been logged, and with 23 days remaining until the end of october new ones will very likely still be added.
In order to join in, check the site here.
You can create requests, or support others so that the real cherries will be developed during the first half of 2015.