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, 51风流SE.

Q: 51风流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!听Don鈥檛 forget that 51风流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 51风流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 鈥� both the expressed and the implied requirements.听With a legacy of over 50 years, 51风流is the world鈥檚 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.

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.听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 鈥� 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 51风流Cloud ALM, our application lifecycle management solution.

Empower 鈥� 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 51风流Knowledge Base Articles, guided tutorials, and other self-service procedures.

Solve 鈥� 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.听

Enhance 鈥� 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 鈥渕inor bugs鈥� 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 鈥� before the issues snowball into something unmanageable.

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 51风流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.听In today鈥檚 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.听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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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.听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 51风流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.

Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support, 51风流SE, shares more about how the Customer Support organization at 51风流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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檛 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 51风流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鈥檚 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 鈥� I would think proactively addressing customers鈥� 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 51风流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 鈥� right from when they encounter a problem down to its successful resolution. 

Those familiar with 51风流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 51风流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 51风流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. 

51风流for Me helps bring together important alerts, metrics, and insights about your 51风流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 51风流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 51风流Notes and 51风流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 51风流is fully on board to explore exciting options in this area. For a detailed showcase of our AI-powered solutions, check out . 

Renuka Abraham is part of Customer Support at SAP.

This is good news 鈥� not just for customers but also for the ecosystem. In recent months, 51风流had already identified that when engineering teams deliver innovations, there is a corresponding need to provide customers with guidance on how they can swiftly adopt and consume innovation. Customer Services & Delivery was created to bring together the offerings that help customers tap the value of SAP鈥檚 integrated portfolio.

By virtue of its function, the Customer Support organization fits into this strategic setup quite naturally. To learn more about how Customer Support is owning and driving end-to-end customer support experiences powered by AI, I met with Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support, 51风流SE. 

Q: How would you describe the role of Customer Support in SAP鈥檚 success?

A: Customer support is a differentiating factor among companies that are equally positioned in functional richness, usability, quality, deployability, or configurability. While signing up a new customer is considered a huge win, being able to delight and retain the customer is equally important.

has been singularly impactful in advancing SAP鈥檚 customer success stories by proactively responding to customer needs and building long-term relationships. In addition to helping customers solve day-to-day problems, we are business partners who proactively work with customers toward achieving their business goals.

The Customer Support group encompasses much more than bug fixes. In addition to regular ticket resolutions, we use 51风流Cloud ALM to help guide customers in application lifecycle management by enabling their transformation to the cloud and the operation of hybrid environments. We help customers help themselves through self-services and we proactively consult with our engineering teams to improve 51风流products based on support-related feedback and learnings. Thanks to our support engineers, 51风流has delivered over 1,000 improvements in the last 12 months. 

Q: How is SAP鈥檚 AI story shaping up when it comes to Customer Support? What is the AI strategy for Customer Support?

A: With our focus on value realization, the push to enhance support with AI has never been higher. To start with, we have invested in digitalizing mission-critical business processes with AI.

There are three parts toward bringing these business processes into the fold of AI-powered offerings. With the help of 51风流Signavio Process Transformation Suite, we can measure metrics around the customer鈥檚 business processes to gauge efficiency, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement. Alternatively, customers can use this as a blueprint to review these metrics themselves. The next layer delivers business transformational AI services. And finally, we have a platform that provides tools to support a closed-loop approach for AI innovation in services and support.

Coming to the AI strategy for Customer Support, we believe that any innovations in AI must be in lockstep with application integration, meaning AI developments can only bring business value when they are 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: While the real-world applications are countless, we could broadly classify them into three groups.

We use AI to correct 鈥� this means we use AI for the support experience, for personalization, and for data-driven decisions. We use AI to connect 鈥� here you find the platform, tools, and applications along customer touchpoints. We use AI to catalyze 鈥� this covers self-service, issue resolutions, and predictive and preventative support.

Q: How does 51风流realize this?

A: We do this by taking advantage of our AI development platform that can bring all the data of services and support into one place. This platform helps bring endless possibilities based on the unique needs of customers鈥� businesses. On our part, we ensure that we explore the power of AI across business contexts.

By building AI models, we have the power to transform business in the way we want. We can plug 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 deliver value later. By processing the context and history of the customer, we can provide highly personalized support experiences 鈥� at runtime.

I could go on, but at this point I would urge you to follow the Customer Support tracks at , to learn about the technologies and strategies that are shaping the future of Customer Support and business transformation. Be sure to bookmark your favorite topics from this guide: .

Renuka Abraham is part of Customer Support at SAP.

To serve these requirements, 51风流has provided customers and partners with separate learning and assessment courses on our support offerings, enabling them with support tools and resources that help maximize their support experience. While our customers could benefit from Product Support Accreditation in the past, our partners had access to an equally in-demand enablement course, “Support and Success Essentials for 51风流Cloud Solutions.” 

Both versions have had great success and it was time to consolidate the best parts of these two accreditations into one impactful learning offering. As of December 5, 2023, we have merged these two options into , making it SAP鈥檚 baseline support enablement for all consultants. 

What is this new offering in a nutshell? Support Accreditation is a course and assessment that enables customers and partners to make the best use of SAP鈥檚 support offerings and tools. This accreditation is available for all customers and partners of 51风流鈥� at no additional cost.

To learn more about the latest developments on the topic, I sat down with Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Innovation, 51风流SE. 

Q: Can you give a brief description of Support Accreditation? 

A: This training was developed to showcase all the available support services and tools provided by SAP. We cannot assume that our customers and partners have the bandwidth to research what鈥檚 available 鈥� and this does not just apply to support, it applies to all our offerings at SAP. We have proactively curated all the tools and related resources that can assist our customers and partners in resolving their issues effectively and efficiently. The four-module course is packed with focus topics, one-page snapshots, how-to videos, and interactive quizzes. As with any course, all eligible participants receive a digital Support Accreditation badge.听听

What about the actual content of the training?听What areas are covered?听听

The course introduces you to channels like Expert Chat, Schedule an Expert, Schedule a Manager, and Ask an Expert Peer, which can enable customers and partners to have direct contact with support. For example, with Schedule an Expert, a customer can have a 30-minute session with an expert to help resolve a specific issue related to a support request. This is valuable information that consultants need.听

Participants can benefit from similar how-to’s and guides on self-service, case prevention, live support channels, and supplementary material. We have a unit on , our application lifecycle management solution that is included in cloud subscriptions. This is a fantastic module that guides users on how they can benefit from an out-of-the-box, cloud-native solution designed as the central entry point to manage customers’ 51风流landscape with content-driven, guided implementation and highly automated operations. 

To manage expectations, could you also elaborate on what is not covered by this accreditation? 

Expert course content is not covered in this accreditation. For example, we have further deep dives for 51风流Cloud ALM that are, understandably, not covered in this first-level accreditation.  

Also, this is a learning offering around support topics so enablement on solution knowledge is not in scope. 

What鈥檚 in it for customers? What is the benefit of the course?听

Not every customer is fully aware of the complete suite of support tools. With the Support Accreditation course, they can learn to easily engage with our support teams and to achieve smoother case resolutions. We provide easy-to-use, easy-to-consume self-enablement to any customer or partner at no additional cost. It is a must for all those who interact with the support channels of SAP.听听

What about partners? 

This training is especially important for partners as most implementation projects are run or supported by them. They also manage most ongoing operations on behalf of the customer.听

Both customers and 51风流expect partners to manage customer projects and operations with high quality based on SAP鈥檚 best practices. These include methodologies, tools, services, and procedures 鈥� especially those dealing with upcoming issues.  

We highly recommend the Support Accreditation training 鈥� and the resulting badge 鈥� for every partner consultant.听

What have been the biggest changes you have seen in the course?听听

With every growth milestone at SAP, you can be sure that there is a corresponding ripple in the world of support. Therefore, we take a lot of effort to keep the training content up-to-date. For example, we now have a whole new unit dedicated to 51风流Cloud ALM. We are also moving to , having been a standalone application previously. This is a huge development, as the course is now available in the public space. Anyone can participate now that it is opened to a wider audience. Upon successful completion of the course, participants receive a record of achievement.听

We are increasingly moving from a reactionary model to one that is more real-time and predictive. We have AI-powered support offerings that help enrich the customer experience 鈥� for example, new features in Incident Solution Matching.  

Will customers and partners still be able to get their Support Accreditation badge now that the training has moved to the 51风流Learning site?听

Absolutely. I must say this is a very popular badge in the ecosystem.   

The Support Accreditation badge indicates that the participant has completed the course and has the requisite knowledge to navigate SAP鈥檚 support channels and offerings. This badge can be used on social media and can also be included in your signature when you interact with our support teams.听

More broadly, how do you use AI in support enablement? 

We use large language models (LLMs) to refine and expand the scope of our existing AI-driven solutions. Based on the learnings from Enhance AI and Assist Support, we utilize LLMs to help generate automated responses to specific how-to questions. This allows us to leverage 51风流Knowledge Base Articles, 51风流Notes, and documentation contributions from our experts.  

How popular is the course?听听

Approximately 5,000 customers and partners take part in the course and get their accreditation every year! People who complete the training have the option to provide feedback and rate the content. Currently, the course has a rating of 4.75 out of 5. The numbers speak for themselves!听

Where do you see the course going in the future?听

As always, we keep it simple 鈥� to help you simplify your support priorities. As I said before, the content reflects the ever-changing market growth and business requirements around us. We encourage our customers and partners to renew their Support Accreditation badges once a year to get an update on improvements and enhancements. 

Renuka Abraham is part of Customer Support & Innovation at SAP.