During one of my consulting assignment, customer was in a dilemma, whether to implement SAP ICM or SAP Loyalty management for their business need. During the product evaluation discussions, as myself spent on couple of implementations on Loyalty management and worked on SAP ICM, I could not straight away justify the solution. This thought process, invoked me to analyze and provide my take to the customer. Below contents explains my understandings.
SAP Loyalty Management:
- Used to track customer behavior to identity which customers are more valuable, take steps to retain and encourage specific customer behavior.
- Loyalty management is more of a customer (B2B / B2C) centric solution
- Enables Program partner’s participation in the loyalty program through which customer can earn / redeem loyalty points.
- Benefits to generate more customer insights and generate more revenue
- Multi-channel enabled loyalty business process like Interaction center, Web channel, Mobile etc.,
- Self- service portal for customers to manage loyalty points, earn and redemption
- Easy to set up Reward rules for Earn / Redeem / Tier change etc.,
- Sales orders and Complaints management integrated with Loyalty solution
- High volumes of transaction supported for Loyalty Engine
SAP Incentive and Commission Management (ICM):
- Used to monitor partners and employees with monetary incentives
- ICM maps all types of variable remuneration such as bonuses and brokerage
- Develop commission contracts & Individualize the calculation rules as appropriate
- Manage employees and partners by mapping your enterprise organization in the system based on sales territory
- Calculate and process commissions according to company’s product and service offerings.
- Commission recipients can see current status of their earned and anticipated remuneration.
With above answers, I could able to come to conclusion that, SAP ICM is more for partners / employees, whereas SAP Loyalty management is exclusively for customers. Finally I must tell you that, customer is implementing both solutions as they felt both are equally important.
