Earlier this year, SAP announced a comprehensive set of resources and services to help customers build a cloud-first business strategy. SAP also announced the infusion of business AI capabilities throughout its portfolio of business applications.
To learn more about how these enhanced strategies impact the customer support strategy, I met with Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support, SAP SE.
Q: SAP has an ambitious goal of being No. 1 in the enterprise applications and business AI space, and it is already clear that the support strategy must be equally ambitious. To what extent does our corporate strategy influence the support strategy?
A: To a great extent! Don’t forget that SAP is also on track to be No. 1 in market share, No. 1 in customer satisfaction, No. 1 in customer lifetime value, and No. 1 in portfolio adoption. Yes, the heavy hitters required for impact are all part of our company goal.
Right from its inception, our Customer Support organization has distinguished itself as a team with an expanded business function that goes beyond bug fixes and issue resolutions. Solving tickets and resolving customer issues are the day-to-day tasks to achieve our larger goal of helping customers maximize their business value, secure their existing investments, and optimize their SAP operations. In a nutshell, we are a business partner that proactively works with customers to achieve their business goals.
Q: What do customers want from Customer Support?
A: As guardians of customer business value, our primary focus is to understand what customers expect from us – both the expressed and the implied requirements. With a legacy of over 50 years, SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software, which also makes us a trusted advisor for over 437,000 customers across 190 countries. Customers rely on our rich expertise for guidance on how to run their business transformation.
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In a support engagement, nobody likes surprises. Customers want us to be proactive, especially with respect to ease of implementation and implementation quality. They also expect us to identify potential issues early, prevent them, and inform them of applicable solutions and workarounds that we have used for other customers. As with any customer/provider relationship, they expect us to adhere to SLAs, quick response times, and quality benchmarks.
Our customers want us to process their feedback beyond the scope of issue resolutions. They expect us to cascade this feedback back to our development teams to improve product quality, supportability, and usability.
Q: How do we address these expectations?
A: We have a four-fold approach: guide, empower, solve, enhance.
Guide – by drawing on more than 50 years of expertise
We provide guidance by offering the tools, methodologies, and processes to help customers transform their processes and IT landscape. We help them transform their solution in the cloud with the help of SAP Cloud ALM, our application lifecycle management solution.
Empower – because customers love self-service options
I can speak for myself that when I am a consumer, I would choose a five-click self-service option any day over a five-minute phone call. I find that I am not alone here: our customers love self-help. They prefer DIY fixes to raising a ticket. We help address this by providing detailed SAP Knowledge Base Articles, guided tutorials, and other self-service procedures.
Solve – and get the business workflow back on track
Issues that need specialist skills or technical expertise are immediately assigned to support engineers who can resolve the problem at hand while working to ensure that we help our customers with quick, reliable, and high-quality solutions.
Enhance – by mining customer and end user feedback
Imagine that you are the developer of a mobile app and some of your users have notified you of minor bugs that they have managed to bypass because they are techies. You know that not all users are tech-savvy, and the so-called “minor bugs” could end up being showstoppers for most users. This makes a solid business case for you to set aside resources to convert user feedback into proactive product improvements in your next release. Regular mining of customer and user feedback helps refine your products in quality, supportability, and usability – before the issues snowball into something unmanageable.
Customer Support at SAP has set up a system among our Product Management, Engineering, and Cloud Operations teams to feed customer requests back into the product, helping to ensure that we can monitor and prevent issues from happening in the first place.
Q: What is it about Customer Support at SAP that really delights the customer?
A: Four keywords: self-service, real-time, built-in, and bi-directional!
Time is at a premium and customers are vocal about it. In today’s fast-paced society where consumers are spoiled for choice with real-time options, such as collaboration tools, e-booking, flight tracking, QR code payments, or digital health records, it is only natural that support services are also available in real time. Market pressures and the nature of businesses have evolved to a stage that real-time actions are the order of the day. Real-time processing is no longer a unique offering; it is a basic expectation.
With SAP’s live channels, customers can chat in real-time using Expert Chat or Schedule an Expert with the same technical experts who would also be processing the ticket. You would be surprised that this is not such a common offering in our business segment.
Built-In Support moves support right into the product, providing one consistent support experience no matter what application or solution you are in. SAP’s support is also bi-directional, with smart AI solutions constantly monitoring application and support data, allowing us to proactively reach out to customers to help prevent issues from arising in the first place. This approach takes Customer Support beyond the scope of traditional reactive support. It leverages AI to predict and prevent issues, helping to reduce downtimes and customer effort and establish a collaborative relationship with operational efficiency. Note that all of these offerings are part of every cloud subscription through SAP Enterprise Support.
Our AI-powered Real-Time Support is designed along the concept that the customer needs support anytime, every time, and all the time.
Renuka Abraham is part of Customer Support at SAP.
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