Every complaint is an opportunity

Every CRM minded person knows complaints are excellent opportunities to engage your customers even more. To exploit these opportunities to its fullest potential a good registration is a key success factor. And that’s the point where C4C comes into play.

Looking at the common Order-to-Cash process, it is important to relate complaints to documents from this process. For example, if a customer complaint about an incorrect invoice, this invoice should be the starting point of the complaint process and therefore linked to the complaint. Unfortunately, in standard C4C complaint processing functionality it is only possible to relate a complaint to an ECC Sales Order. Besides this, the process in standard C4C starts from the order search in C4C. Above requirements were critical for several of our customers and therefore we realized them in C4C with some enhancements. In this blog the process in C4C related to complaint processing on ECC orders, invoices and deliveries is explained as well as the activities you have to perform in different systems to realize a mature complaint management process. For this the scenario of a customer complaint about an invoice is used.

Complaint intake

A customer is complaining about a too high amount of a received invoice. The process of an invoice complaint, for a lot of our customers, starts with creating the ticket and after this link it to the ECC-document. A custom tab/facet on the ticket is created for this. The complaint in C4C is registered via a ticket. In this blog and this blog, my colleagues Mark and Jeroen explain more about the other service functionality in the ticket.

Ticket Enhancements

This ECC Search facet on ticket level contains the search options for the different ECC document types:

• Sales Order

• Invoice

• Delivery

Besides the document types the Document ID, Customer ID and Purchase order ID are made available to search on. Off course there is the possibility to add more search fields here but please keep in mind to add them to the underlying interface. The interface behind this screen is custom made based on the standard ECC Order Search interface. One of our integration experts, Amber Badam, explains in this How-to-Guide what needs to be done to get this into place with HCI.

So after the adjustments in the middleware some customizations in ECC needs to be done. The standard solution only retrieves Sales Orders but for the mentioned scenario there is also the requirement to retrieve Invoices and Deliveries. To meet this requirment, the standard function module which collects sales orders is enhanced so it also collects the other ECC document types. This function module is called by the custom interface.

Ticket Processing with ECC data

After the data is send back to C4C Ticket the user can select the different line-items/products and assign them to the ticket. When an item is assigned, 2 things will happen:

1. The document ID is assigned to Overview Facet in the Ticket

2. The item/product is assigned to the Service and Repair Facet in the Ticket

From the Service and Repair Facet the process can be continued. In our example, a ticket was created based on the invoice complaint from a customer. After assigning the complaint related items/products and some further investigations about the complaint the Customer Service agents decides the customer complaint is funded. To correct the invoice, the Customer Service agent request the pricing from the ECC system and releases the document to ECC. In ECC the correction billing document is now created.

The standard integrated C4C Complaint management functionality will cover a basic process, which probably will not cover your business requirements. Talking to some of our customers they complained 😉 about two major shortcomings:

• Registers complaints on Invoices and Deliveries, not only on Sales Orders
• The start of the process should be from creating a ticket, not searching for a ECC document

To meet this requirements, the basic process needs to be enhanced. For this some SDK developments in C4C, a new interface in our middleware (SAP PI) and enhancing some ECC logic were needed. Start a project like this? Please make sure you have the right people in your team!

Engage your complaining customers!!