April 1, 2024, SAP shape Customer Services and Delivery – a new board area that will focus on maximizing innovation adoption and customer value in the cloud.
This is good news, not only for customers but also for the ecosystem. Over the past few months, SAP had already identified that when engineering teams deliver innovations, there is a corresponding need to provide customers with guidance on how they can quickly adopt and consume the innovation. Customer Services & Delivery was created to bring together offerings that help customers realize the value of SAP’s integrated portfolio.
Due to its function, the Customer Support organization is a natural part of this strategic system. To learn more about how Customer Support owns and manages end-to-end customer support experiences powered by AI, I sat down with Stefan Steinle, Executive Vice President and Head of Customer Support, SAP SE.
Q: How would you describe the role of customer support in SAP’s success?
A: Customer support is a differentiating factor among companies that are also positioned in terms of functional richness, user-friendliness, quality, deployability or configurability. While signing up a new customer is considered a huge win, being able to delight and retain the customer is just as important.
Support at SAP has had a singular impact on evolving SAP’s customer success stories by proactively responding to customer needs and building long-term relationships. In addition to helping our customers solve their everyday problems, we are business partners who proactively work with our customers to achieve their business goals.
The customer support group encompasses much more than bug fixing. In addition to regular ticket resolutions, we use SAP Cloud ALM to guide customers in managing the lifecycle of applications by enabling their transformation to the cloud and operating hybrid environments. We help our customers help themselves through self-services and we proactively consult with our engineering teams to improve SAP products based on support feedback and learnings. Thanks to our support engineers, SAP has made over 1,000 improvements in the last 12 months.
Q: How is SAP’s AI story evolving in customer support? What is the AI strategy for customer support?
A: With a focus on realizing value, the drive to improve support through AI has never been greater. To start, we invested in digitalizing critical business processes using AI.
Integrating these business processes into AI-enabled offerings involves three steps. With the help of SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, we can measure metrics regarding the client’s business processes to assess efficiency, bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. Customers can also use this as a template to review these metrics themselves. The next layer provides transformational AI services for the enterprise. And finally, we have a platform that provides tools to support a closed-loop approach to AI innovation in services and support.
When it comes to AI strategy for customer support, we believe that any AI innovation must be in line with application integration, which means that AI developments cannot bring business value only when infused and integrated into the applications used in a business process or scenario.
Q: In the context of customer support, could you give some examples of how AI brings business value?
A: Although the concrete applications are countless, we could classify them into three groups.
We use AI to remediate – this means we use AI for the support experience, for personalization, and for data-driven decisions. We use AI to connect – here you will find the platform, tools and applications along customer touchpoints. We use AI to catalyze – this covers self-service, problem resolution and predictive and preventive support.
Q: How does SAP achieve this?
A: We do this by leveraging our AI development platform which can bring all service and support data together in one place. This platform helps deliver endless possibilities based on customers’ unique business needs. For our part, we make sure to explore the power of AI in all business contexts.
By creating AI models, we have the power to transform our business the way we want. We can integrate these models into support systems and portals to extract the full value of AI in support. By collecting data and events from support systems and portals, we can even train AI models that can provide value later. By processing customer context and history, we can deliver highly personalized support experiences – at runtime.
I could go on, but at this point I invite you to follow the customer support leads on SAP Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference in Orlando, June 3-5, 2024, to learn more about the technologies and strategies shaping the future of customer support and business transformation. Be sure to bookmark your favorite topics from this guide: Your Ultimate Guide to SAP Sapphire Orlando in 2024.
Renuka Abraham is part of customer support at SAP.
