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Former Member
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In CRM 7.0, internal users (e.g. Sales Reps and Call Center Agents) can access CRM Web Channel Product Catalog UI from CRM Web UI - Order Management and Quotation Management. This added feature enables Sales Reps and Call Center Agents to call Product Catalog UI from CRM Sales Order or Quotation screen for browsing, searching, comparing and configuring products, as well as running ATP checks. Products can also be selected and placed in a temporary basket and ransferred/ copied back to the originating Sales Order or Quotation screen in CRM Web UI. To get a better understanding of how important this feature is let us look at how products are added to a Sales Order in CRM 2007 and then compare it to CRM 7.0.

 

CRM 2007 and prior

 

Prior to CRM 7.0, searching and adding products to Sales Orders entailed either entering the product IDs directly in the Items block, or searching for them by clicking F4 (Help), which launched the advanced search screen (see screenshot below).  As expected, standard CRM Advanced Search UI did not offer the features provided in CRM Web Channel Catalog UI for finding products. Nice features offered to external users (B2C and B2B customers) in CRM Web Channel, such as browsing the product categories and sub-categories, getting detail information about products (including multi-media files), product comparison and configuration, running ATP checks, etc. were not available to internal users. Of course, it was possible to access the Product Catalog UI in the Web Channel application separately, but not possible to select products and copy them back to the CRM Sales Order (standard integration was not available).

 

 

CRM 7.0

 

In CRM 7.0 Web UI, CRM Web Channel Catalog UI is integrated with CRM Sales Order and Quotation Management. To launch the product catalog, a new option, "Insert from Product Catalog", was added to the "More" drop down box on the Items block header, enabling CRM internal users (employees) to have another option for searching and selecting products (standard Advanced Search is still available).  Upon selecting this option - demonstrated in step 1 in the screenshot below - the Product Catalog UI is launched. The following tasks can then be performed in the Product Catalog UI:

 

  • Browse the product categories and sub-categories
  • Search for products (simple and advanced search supported)
  • See product detail and attached multi-media files
  • Compare products
  • Configure products
  • Run ATP checks
  • See up-sell and cross-sell product recommendations
  • Select products and place them in a temporary basket

When done selecting all the products, the CRM user clicks on "Return to Standard Order" button (the label for this button may vary depending on the order type) and goes back to the originating Sales Order and sees selected products copied to the Items block (step 3). Screenshots below from CRM 7.0 illustrate how this process works:

 

 

In summary, Product Catalog UI provides a nice interface for finding the right products & accessories, for which an order or quotation needs to be created.  Features, such as product comparison, list of accessories, up-sell and cross-sell recommendations, and ATP check are powerful features for IC Agents and Sales Reps that create sales orders or quotations in CRM Web UI.

To see a demonstration of this new feature, you can watch this video.

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