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WALLDORF, Germany -- SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) today announced a clear path for companies to get even greater return on their customer interaction center operations with the latest release of mySAP(TM) Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM). With the industry's most powerful interaction center capabilities, mySAP CRM provides real-time analytics to ensure that customer insight is applied to the customer interaction; multi-channel support to enable a comprehensive view of all customer interactions across the enterprise; and workforce management to best address each customer with the agent possessing the best-matched skill set. Available now as a browser- or thin client-based solution, SAP's new interaction center brings to the CRM market a new freedom of choice that is being embraced by market-leading companies across diverse industries, including Adobe, AEPEX Business Consultants, Coca-Cola Drikker, Ilshin, International Paper, The Schwan Food Company, Socopa, TetraPak and Volkswagen Bank. mySAP CRM synchronizes customer, product, and marketing information across all customer touch points so that whatever the customer's request, from whichever channel, a single view to the customer is in the agent's hands. The interaction center provides companies with the tools to increase customer retention, gain new customers and seize cross- and up-selling opportunities, while making it easier for customers to do business with them and making customer interaction as direct and personal as possible. Companies can choose between the flexibility of a browser-based interface or the tight office integration of thin-client software. By providing both of these options, companies can easily tailor their workforce requirements depending on the anticipated volume of interactions and location of employees. Additionally, the solutions allow agents to tap into multiple knowledge sources. Thus, customers can keep their existing knowledge bases, and integrate these into mySAP CRM. Integrated Analytics and Workforce Management Capabilities The new interaction center in mySAP CRM brings a whole new dimension into the processes that can make or break customer interactions, delivering benefits to the company, its agents and its customers. For example, analytics capabilities identify customers at risk of churning, and generate a tailored script most likely to lead to successful customer retention. With integrated workforce management, the script is automatically forwarded to the best-skilled agent, who can then best address the customer. In addition to higher customer retention, the company avoids the inefficiencies of manually routing its agents' scripts. Agents benefit from higher success rates, and the customer is addressed with a greater level of service. Real-time analytics also help companies better develop new products, increase revenue and capitalize on cross- and up-sell opportunities by continuously monitoring and instantly assessing customers' buying habits as well as feedback about product quality. The integration of marketing campaign analyses and shift planning enables interaction center managers to optimize the number of agents on duty during peak and slow periods, ensuring ample coverage and reducing idle time. For example, mySAP CRM checks planned marketing campaigns and analyzes these against previous, similar campaigns to calculate the expected response rates. Empowered with predictive analysis, managers can optimize workforce scheduling to ensure that when the upcoming campaign hits, it is supported by a sufficient number of best-qualified agents. Multi-Channel Support Lets Customers Be Heard By supporting multi-channel communications, the interaction center enables a level of reliable, individualized service that provides agents with a single view of a customer's entire interaction history, ensuring the deepest level of personalized service. Automobile manufacturers and dealerships, for example, can integrate their interaction centers so that an agent knows of all the customer's previous interactions -- for instance, requests for test drives or configuring vehicles -- whether via phone, mail, Web or traditional channels such as letter and fax, and can acknowledge these in responses. Volkswagen Bank -- which offers an extensive range of financial and insurance services for customers of Volkswagen Group's global brands, such as Audi, Seat and Skoda -- has launched an initial project designed to demonstrate the value of integrating the interaction center with existing systems to serve customers effectively and consistently throughout the bank and its departments. "By maintaining all customer data in a single, portal-based system that easily integrates with our back-end systems where business processes are carried out, the interaction center from mySAP CRM will provide an integrated end-to-end solution," said Sven-Torsten Huster, CIO, Volkswagen Bank. "mySAP CRM thus allows us to meet the needs of our various customer groups in a consistent and personalized manner, helping ensure that our customers are satisfied and our customer relationships profitable." Powerful, Multi-Channel, Open Interface SAP's newly developed integrated communications interface (ICI) for multi-channel access supports the integration of mySAP CRM with third party communications products-such as universal queue, computer telephony integration, automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, e-mail management and text chat systems -- allowing companies to leverage their existing technology investments. For improved quality assurance, SAP offers an ICI certification program for partners. Cycos AG (now a Siemens Company) and Genesys Telecommunication Laboratories, Inc. are the first partners to have achieved certification. Developed on the basis of extensive research and in close collaboration with user-experience experts, SAP is leveraging the user-friendly interface of the new interaction center in other SAP solutions, such as mySAP(TM) Human Resources (mySAP HR). Easy to learn and to deploy, the interaction center helps companies reduce training time and costs. The new browser-based offering delivers high performance and also integrates with Web-based self-services, allowing companies to support all types of product- and service-related requests. "With real-time analytics, workforce management and multi-channel capabilities in the interaction center, mySAP CRM helps ensure that the right people are in the right place, and that the right information reaches them," said Peter Zencke, executive board member, SAP. "Continuing our commitment to deliver on the evolving business demands of our customers, we are applying SAP's innovation in the CRM space to further solution sets. Customers implementing SAP solutions, not only those using mySAP CRM, can also benefit from these unparalleled capabilities of the interaction center in areas such as human capital management. The employee interaction center will help ensure that employees receive high quality service and that companies can achieve and maintain effective employee relationship management, a key driver of business success today."