110 SAP CRM Interview Questions with Answers & Explanations – eBook
Sample SAP CRM 7.0 Interview Questions with Answers
SAP CRM interview questions can cover a very wide range.
Here is a sample of questions that a typical CRM functional Consultant can be expected to face.
Q 1. What is the typical landscape for a CRM project? What is the maximum number of landscapes that you have worked on in a project.
A. CRM landscape typically has a minimum of three environments.
Development
Test (Quality Assurance)
Production
Though in a number of cases, there is also the Sandbox Environment, Training Environment and a pre-Production environment all set up as separate physical boxes.
Q 2. What is the difference between technical consultant and functional consultant with respect to their roles and responsibilities?
A. A functional consultant is typically responsible for running workshops, interviewing clients to get requirements, mapping these on to the Software, deciding the best way to customize the solution to meet these requirement keeping the client’s future plans in mind.
A technical consultant is typically responsible for suggesting suitable technical solutions for gaps, setting up the system infrastructure, doing the developments, testing them, ensuring that performance is not affected etc.
In the CRM world in particular, the role between the technical & functional consultants is blurring with there being a large overlap.
Q 3. Explain the general ways of how a CRM can be enhanced?
A. There are several ways to enhance the CRM system. Some of them are:
– Transaction Launcher
You can add external applications to the CRM WebClient User Interface using the transaction launcher and SAP ITS (Internet Transaction Server). These could be for example,
– Web sites of your choice
– Transactions in an ERP system
– Administration transactions in the CRM system
– BSP Components Workbench
This is at a technical level and typical changes carried out are e.g. Adding a completely new View.
It assist with the Component Enhancements.
– UI Configuration Tool
Allows to make changes such as:
Adding or removing fields
Changing field labels
Adding Headers
Making fields mandatory
Displaying assignment blocks (direct, lazy)
Customer specific changes to the UI must be performed using a Role Configuration Key
– Easy Enhancement Workbench
Easy Enhancement Workbench (EEWB) is a development tool that does not require technical knowledge to be used.
It automatically creates transportable ABAP objects, updates events and implements BADIs.
Q 4. How Do Modification-Free Enhancements Work?
A. You can perform modification-free enhancements at predefined positions in code. There you have anchor points or enhancement options, as they are called in the terminology.
At these points you can insert your enhancements. You can do this without changing the compilation unit that you are enhancing. The inserted implementations are processed at the appropriate position in the compilation unit, but they are themselves not part of this unit.
They cannot, for example, belong to another package. Let us take a look at the example of a source code enhancement in a report in order to illustrate this better. We are not looking at details of coding, but the key steps.
Anchor point, at which you can plug in an enhancement.
Enhancement which is executed here but is itself not a physical part of the code it is plugged into
You can – to a certain extent – compare this enhancement technology with a closet system where you can insert various elements at particular positions. Instead of drilling the wood in the side walls, you can insert various boards and other elements where the manufacturer has already inserted hooks or holders at important positions.
There are different types of holders or attachments at various positions. At each holder type, you can insert exactly one type of element: boards at small dowel positions, CD elements at wider dowel positions, and drawer elements at multiple dowels. It seems like the elements are an integral part of the entire closet but, in fact, they are attached to the closet parts through holders.
The different enhancement technologies correspond to these different types of elements described above. These technologies become attached at different types of anchor points or enhancement options of the Repository objects.
Therefore, you cannot simply insert enhancements into Repository objects at any position you like without modifications, but only where there are so-called enhancement options in place. At these enhancement options, you can also attach only certain elements – so- called enhancement implementation elements.
A concept that standardizes and structures all previous enhancement possibilities cannot do without a certain amount of complexity. The structure it is based on, however, is extremely simple.
• On the one hand, you have hooks or, to put it correctly, enhancement options where you can insert enhancements. There you define enhancement options, which is why one can speak of the definition side.
• On the other hand, you have enhancement implementation elements that you can affix to these hooks or enhancement options.
The rest is simple detail: There are various types of hooks or enhancement options, and there are also various enhancement implementation elements. The enhancement options are grouped together to enhancement spots and these, in turn, to even larger units.
The same applies to units on the implementation side. Between the different units of a side and between those of the implementation and definition side, you have assignments of different cardinality.
Q 5. We are planning to implement Employee Interaction Centre (EIC). We can do it either in CRM or ERP. What is your advice?
A. If the focus is on native HR functionality requiring process depth within your EIC service offering, then the ERP option is recommended.
Relevant functionalities not yet available with the SAP CRM EIC deployment option include the handling of concurrent employment scenarios employee authentication integration to HR processes and forms.
The SAP CRM solution provides greater depth of Interaction Center related functionality that is not available within the ERP solution.
These functionalities include:
• Campaign management
• Case management
• Multi-tenancy capabilities enabling client switch & BPO environments
• Standard help desk processing methodology including service request handling & problem management
• Intent driven interaction
• Billing and charging for delivered services
• User interface flexibility and personalization
Is CRM already in place, planned or a potential future need/consideration? If not, from a technical standpoint – why take on the overhead of CRM?
The ERP based solution is geared towards implementations involving a central HCM system running on ERP 6.0 and customers who want a HR specific call center solution to support HCM Service Delivery.
If so, it is likely that the EIC will ultimately be realized within the context of the SAP CRM Interaction Center. Consideration should also be given to note 1256691 indicating that “the functions provided in Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 for the Employee Interaction Center component (PA-EIC) constitute the final range of functions.”
SAP’s direction is to establish one common shared services platform based on CRM technology and other SAP Business Suite components to offer functions following the latest business trends such as multi-functional shared services.
The CRM technology will thereby be further leveraged to build this shared services platform in additional to providing functional enhancements for comprehensive scenario coverage across shared service center topics.
Q 6. We sell computer hardware, and need to log customer technical issues. We have been debating whether to use Service Tickets, Service Order, Complaints Management or Cases. Could you explain what each of these are and when they might be used?
A.
Service Ticket Management
The service ticket is the most common type of service-related business transaction. Service tickets are commonly used as the default transaction for logging product defects, bugs, or any other technical issues.
After creating a service ticket as a follow-up transaction to the interaction record, agents can perform technical analysis of problems (using multi-level categorization) and provide solutions within defined service-level agreements (SLAs). If necessary, agents can also dispatch or escalate service tickets to second-level support using pre-defined business rules.
Service Order Management
Service orders are very similar to service tickets (in fact they share the same underlying technical structure) but are used whenever it is necessary to schedule a repair, installation, or other field-service related appointment — especially if spare parts/service parts are required.
Unlike service tickets, which do not support spare parts/service parts, the service order allows agents to assign the relevant spare parts/service parts required for a repair, maintenance or installation.
Complaint Management
Complaints are a very specific type of service transaction. In SAP CRM, complaints are created as follow-up documents to support product returns, exchanges, or refunds. A complaint is appropriate when a customer has a problem or issue with delivery shipment or billing invoice.
Agents can create a complaint from a reference document such as sales order or billing invoice. Agents can also generate appropriate follow-on tasks such as credit/debit memos, QM notifications, free-of-charge shipments, and returns.
In SAP, complaints are NOT used to record situations in which a customer is calling to “complain” about bad service or defective products; rather interaction records and service tickets are best suited for such situations.
Case Management
Cases are also a very specific type of service transaction.
In SAP CRM, cases are created as follow-up documents to group together multiple documents or objects related to a single root cause or issue.
For example, a company might create a case for keeping track of all of the service tickets related to a particular product recall, service outage, insurance claim, criminal investigation, etc. Cases are not created to log individual customer issues or problems; rather service tickets are typically used for such situations.
Q 7. What are the difference between Interaction Record and other Business Activities?
A.
When an interaction record is created the system creates an ‘anchor’ document flow link (relationship type INTO with object type CRMCICANCH). This differentiates an interaction record from all other Activity Business Objects (BUS2000126).
This additional anchor is used in navigation: when navigating from the interaction history or inbox to an interaction record, the system will use this anchor to determine whether an activity is of type interaction record or not. An interaction record typically has other screens than a normal business activity.
The BW extractor makes also use of this anchor object to differentiate interaction record related statistics from regular business activities.
Q 8. We are an existing SAP CRM customer upgrading to SAP CRM 7.0 and are debating whether to convert all of your pending Interaction Center (IC) service tickets to the new CRM Web Client service request format. What would be your advice?
A.
Prior to SAP CRM 7.0, the service ticket was the business transaction recommended by SAP for service issues related to the Help Desk in the IC.
However, as of SAP CRM 7.0, SAP introduced a new business object type called the service request, which can be used in the Interaction Center, as well as in other CRM business roles such as the Service Professional role.
New customers should use the service request rather than the service ticket.
Existing customers who are already using the service ticket should migrate to the new service request when possible (although you can still continue to utilize the IC service ticket). In order to facilitate the migration, it may be necessary to create a custom report to handle the conversion of open (pending) service tickets to service requests.
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110 SAP CRM Interview Questions with Answers & Explanations – eBook