A smooth support experience and efficient support teams work together to delight and retain customers when it comes to customer support.

Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support, SAP SE, shares more about how the Customer Support organization at SAP is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to help bring innovative improvements and deliver value to businesses.

Q: What are your views on the idea that businesses need to look beyond the customer to deliver outstanding customer support? 

A: Customer support is a differentiating factor in the success of any business, as it directly impacts customer satisfaction and in turn customer retention.  

While the primary role of customer support is to fix customer issues promptly and effectively, it is equally important to address the needs of support engineers. I would even go one step further and say that customer support is not just about customers. Yes, you heard that right. It may seem counterintuitive, but there’s another side to the story of retaining customers. The customer’s support experience and the engineer’s support efficiency are two sides of the same coin.

Support engineers are responsible for resolving complex issues and ensuring customer satisfaction. They are the first line of defense in protecting the company’s reputation. By investing in the well-being of support engineers, customer support can significantly elevate the customer support experience. 

Q: What constitutes a great support experience for customers? 

A: I can’t emphasize this enough: customers love self-help. They find satisfaction in testing workarounds, playing around with tips and tricks, and arriving at a solution without raising a ticket. What does this mean for us? It is our job to provide comprehensive SAP Knowledge Base Articles, guided tutorials, and other self-service options. 

Next, we need to accept that customer preferences are diverse. Not everybody has the same choice when it comes to interacting with support teams. Some like tickets, some prefer live agents to bots, and some like talking on the phone. We address this by offering multichannel support. 

Time is always a huge factor in a customer’s support experience. Maybe the issue they are facing is a minor speedbump or a major showstopper. Our job is to get them back on track. This includes personalization and the sharing of engagement history across support channels, to help ensure the customer is not forced to repeat its complaint at every desk. 

There are many more, but if you asked me to pick one – I would think proactively addressing customers’ issues, even before they realize there is a problem, constitutes a great support experience.   

Q: What can improve support efficiency among support teams and engineers? 

A: Any business that takes pride in offering exceptional customer support would address three areas and ask the following questions to ensure that their support teams are fully empowered:  

• People: Are your teams well-trained? How is the culture? Are employees collaborating and sharing knowledge? Are your systems set up to spotlight engineers who handle complex tickets with high quality solutions? 
• Processes: How well do you minimize manual efforts and automate repetitive tasks? Do you have clear protocols and escalation paths?  
• Technology and infrastructure: How robust is your ITSM system in managing and tracking customer queries? What productivity improvements have you implemented?  

Q: How has SAP elevated support experiences among customers?  

A: While we are invested in fine-tuning our Customer Support systems and processes regularly across multiple criteria, I would like to focus on our AI-powered solutions. 

When it comes to elevating support experiences among customers, our efforts are toward providing a smooth journey – right from when they encounter a problem down to its successful resolution. 

Those familiar with SAP systems know that our products are mapped to product functions, which you select when you create a new ticket. Now with AI, the system can predict the product function related to your case, and you can have the option to narrow your selection down very quickly. The system can also automatically suggest products when you try to select a product in the case creation form in SAP for Me. Similarly, the system can automatically route your ticket to the right queue by suggesting application components sorted by relevance for your new case. 

Another valuable AI-powered service is customer solution matching, where the system displays solutions provided to other customers that match your customer profile. With Incident Solution Matching, the system provides suggestions in the side panel of the get support app on SAP for Me. You can also see the top content suggestions related to your issue description. Our predictors and categorization machine learning models help enhance Incident Solution Matching recommendations by providing the correct contexts for a given issue description. 

SAP for Me helps bring together important alerts, metrics, and insights about your SAP product portfolio with a single access point. Built-In Support can embed the support experience into the product experience, offering context-aware guidance integrated into the user interface of cloud solutions from SAP. 

At the end of the day, all of these translate to a smooth and effortless experience for end users trying to log a support request. 

Q: How has SAP improved support efficiency among support teams and engineers? 

A: When it comes to improving the efficiency of support engineers, we lean on minimizing tedious, manual efforts and automating what can be automated. 

For example, with the expert finder, engineers can view a list of relevant experts who can handle the topic best. When intelligent swarming is applicable, the system can sort relevant swarming areas and experts by relevance, considering historical data. Given a case assigned to a category, the system can propose the most granular application component to which the ticket can be assigned. 

Support engineers can view top SAP Notes and SAP Knowledge Base Articles matching the topic of the issues they’re handling. The system can detect outbreaks by matching a case with other cases where the same issue was reported. The system can also predict outbreaks by reviewing customers with similar profiles.

Other services include automatic translation, communication assistants, text extractors, channel recommenders, and solution recommenders. These are just a few examples of how AI is making the day-to-day of a support engineer a little bit better. And SAP is fully on board to explore exciting options in this area. For a detailed showcase of our AI-powered solutions, check out Your Ultimate Guide for SAP Sapphire Orlando in 2024. 

Renuka Abraham is part of Customer Support at SAP.

At a time when many companies are still using guesswork and spreadsheets as the basis of territory and sales quota planning and commission calculations, top-performing sales teams use science. With the right modern tools and data-backed methodology, planning doesn’t need to be overly complicated or time-consuming to deliver a powerful incentive for sales reps through clarity and transparency.

When global technology services company Kyndryl Holdings Inc. was spun out of IBM in November 2021, it became the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services. The company has over 80,000 employees in 60 countries and 3,500 sales reps. With a focus on continuously improving the vital systems at the heart of the digital economy, Kyndryl works with partners and customers worldwide to co-create solutions to help enterprises reach their peak digital performance.

When Kyndryl spun from IBM, a transition service agreement (TSA) was put in place with a two-year deadline for Kyndryl to complete the disengagement of its IT systems from IBM. One of the challenges Kyndryl faced during the separation was how to transition tools over and apply them in the best way for the new business. This was not an insignificant task given its sales operations extended to more than 60 countries.

Kishore Kancharla, director of Sales and Incentive Systems at Kyndryl, was tasked with working out how best to clone these systems and work on the go-to-market transformation. “When we separated from IBM, we had close to 100 people supporting these mainframe applications, which were very expensive to maintain. As the legacy systems were built for IBM’s operations, there was significant complexity,” he explains. “We wanted to simplify the systems and streamline the processes as well, but it was also very difficult to make changes to support our needs as a new company.”

The nature of sales incentives means there are many dependencies on other core systems. In the planning stages, reliable data is needed to set up territories and quotas and then track sales and calculate commissions, making sure sales reps get paid accurately and on time. The company also had to factor in the transition service agreement exit in terms of sunsetting the legacy applications and moving to stand-alone applications while complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).

Seeking another way, Kyndryl evaluated several different products against its needs, making the decision to invest in sales performance management solutions in the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio. The portfolio offers integrated solutions for compensation and territory and quota management in the form of SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management and SAP SuccessFactors Territory and Quota.

But one major challenge stood in its way. The company needed to go-live with the sales performance management solutions before the start of its fiscal year beginning in April 2023. This was well ahead of its TSA deadline in October 2023 and gave the company less than a year.

To make it happen, Kyndryl worked closely with the team from SAP and an SI partner Municons, a company from Munich that specializes in SPM implementations, to implement both solutions. The company also drew on additional support from a systems integrator partner to configure SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management.

“The team from SAP was a wonderful partner all through the project. In the beginning, I was not 100% confident because of the scale of the task. The idea of replacing the entire legacy solution we inherited seemed daunting, but we had the right people come together with the right skills to make the impossible possible,” Kancharla reflects.

With the successful go-live before the start of its fiscal year, Kyndryl untangled a labyrinth of more than 45 legacy modules supporting sales performance management, now needing just one integrated solution. It moved from 10 different applications to feed sales quota business flows into one. It moved from cluttered and replicated data in multiple places to a streamlined and simplified data landscape, centralizing all sales data in one place. In addition, Kyndryl simplified territory and quota processes, reducing complexity in its business processes by more than 60%. The streamlined business processes also drove savings in operating expenses and mitigated business continuity risks for financially significant applications.

Elsewhere, integrated functionality from DocuSign helped eliminate the need for in-person signatures and the company has simplified support staff roles to clear separation of duties (SoD) conflicts. With the new setup, Kyndryl has minimized the potential for errors and non-compliance while enabling its business teams to develop intricate sales strategies through user-friendly, drag-and-drop interfaces and ready-made templates. And commission details are now accessible through dashboards that are available anytime, anywhere though a mobile app.

At an operational level, the company has reduced the processing time needed to execute the monthly commissions cycle and streamlined integration with its HR system for delivery of pay files. By streamlining year-end close activities, Kyndryl saved weeks of effort from both business and technical teams.

The close relationship with SAP has continued past the initial go-live date. SAP participated in multiple workshops to understand intricacies for some of Kyndryl’s most challenging business processes related to territory and quota and financial planning. A second-year fiscal planning process is already taking advantage of these new offerings, further simplifying and streamlining the company’s complex processes.

Learn more about sales performance management solutions in the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio.

Rahul Iyer is general manager of Sales Performance Management at SAP.