What’s new in SAP Cloud for Customer 2011 Release

Mark Peeters, 28 October 2020

Another 3 months have past since the last release briefing of Acorel, so it’s about time to dive in the new features of the upcoming 2011 release of SAP Cloud for Customer. In the weekend of 31 October the test tenants will be upgraded and the production tenants will follow in the weekend of 14 November.

As there are quite some changes/enhancements in this new release, we will try to give you an overview of the main highlights in today’s blog.

What’s new in Platform and Integration

Let’s begin with one of the biggest changes in this release, the live integration of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). Some releases ago SAP announced that SAC will become the reporting engine of SAP Cloud for Customer. However it never seemed to deliver to that promise. The 2011 release will bring the live connection allowing Admins to create Stories in SAC via SAP Cloud for Customer. The complete process and impact on for instance licenses remains a bit unclear for now, but it looks very promising. Undoubtedly we will have more information on the topic in coming posts.

With the new release, the new fresh theme Saphira becomes generally available. So everybody can now work with the state of the art theme.

Feedback so far is promising. The theme looks very clean and user friendly.

As SAP Cloud for Customer is around for several years now, some customers are working with very large data sets in their tenant. To speed up processes SAP is now introducing an Archiving mechanism to the cloud. Admins can set a retention period per document type, like leads or tickets, to determine when the object should be moved to the Archive. For what we see now the object will longer be part of the standard lists and reports, but a separate Archive Search is available under the Administrator work center. A second retention period can be set to even delete records from this archive after several more years.

Since some releases SAP has moved the details of objects, like leads or tickets, back to the top part of the Screen. This position is still optional until 2102 release, then it will become standard. When using the details on Top, some fields are larger than others, and can even have colors. Until now these fields were determined by SAP. With the 2011 release Customers can determine which should be “emphasized” and which fields should have colors. This can really make the UI Customer specific.

What’s new in Sales

Within the Sales area SAP delivers a complete new work center to improve the support for Outbound Calling. The Call List work center.

When the calls are successful and an Opportunity should be created, SAP Cloud for Customer now provides the agent with a duplicate check for Opportunities. This should improve on data quality and agent handling time.

Within a sales implementation the Lead object is often the transfer between the Marketing team and the Sales Team. To support this transition it was already possible for the Lead to have two “Owners”, one from Marketing and one from Sales. Now in the 2011 release we can set both party roles via determination rules.

SAP has also improved the Intelligent Sales Execution functionality delivered in the 2008 release.

What’s new in Service

Let’s move to the highlights of the service scenario’s. Many customers are using the email channels to receive new questions or complaints from their customers. SAP has introduced some new functionality in this region that will make life easier. First of all as a safety measure, you can now only use newly added email channels (email addresses) after filling in a verification code sent from the C4C system. In Customer service it is important to inform your customers timely on receiving their request or complaint. Sometimes this was not possible as the email was not processed due to unsupported MIME types. The email would be stuck in the inbound message monitor. Customers can now choose to have the inbound emails processed without Attachments if the Mime Type is unknown in C4C. This will provide the agent with the info needed to contact the customer.

Another reason why responding to the customer is sometimes difficult is the Unassociated email feature in SAP Cloud for Customer. If SAP Cloud for Customer is not able to recognize the sender of an email, the mail is stored here. Previously we were not able to send out an Auto Reply to these kinds of mails. With the new Workflow option of release 2011 we can also send auto replies on emails ending up in the Unassociated email work center.

When a ticket has many interactions it sometimes is hard to find info you are searching for. In the previous release SAP introduced a search option on emails from the “time line” section. This functionality has now also found his way to the regular interactions section of the Tickets. Furthermore, SAP is providing a summary function. This can summarize all emails linked to a single ticket. This option is still in beta release but sounds promising.

Final improvement I would like to mention here is the option to configure tiles on the home page that were introduced in the previous release. Especially the Kanban board to show Number of Tickets per status. Many of my customers were enthusiastic about the new tile, but missed the option to determine what to show in the Tile. This will now be possible and will definitely provide nice home screens for the service users.