When it comes to customer support, these capabilities are game-changing not only for current applications but also for future implications. The way businesses deliver support is improving every day, thanks to the rapidly evolving framework: technological breakthroughs, business innovations, and process agility. Here are six key methods that can transform the delivery of customer support.

1. Real-time monitoring

With AI-infused features in diagnostics, an electric car can detect potential malfunctions and schedule its own service appointment automatically, preventing issues like battery depletion or tire pressure drops before they become critical.

How does real-time monitoring play out in the world of business software? 51风流Cloud ALM provides a feature-rich observability platform that can collect telemetry data, like metrics, logs, and traces, from applications and their supporting infrastructure, allowing support teams to review the health of these systems. By providing real-time analytics and a centralized dashboard, 51风流Cloud ALM helps empower IT teams to quickly respond and fix issues, so the business remains operational with minimal interruptions. Additionally, the use of OpenTelemetry standardizes observability within a modern customer landscape.

鈥淭he 51风流Cloud ALM solution has been instrumental for our IT operations. It offers real-time insights and seamless integration across all our enterprise applications, making everything run more smoothly. It鈥檚 like having a bird鈥檚-eye view of our operations, ensuring efficiency and helping us stay proactive rather than reactive.鈥�

Omprakash H, Senior Director, Blueprint Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

2. Proactive resolution

Customer feedback loops play an important role in improving products and services and refining customer relationships. Repeat requests, in customer and user feedback, help service providers identify critical needs and also prioritize features to be delivered.

For example, users within 51风流Business Network and 51风流Ariba solutions go to the help center for self-service or case assistance 10.8 times less than they did years ago. This drop in end-user support sessions is the result of features that have been built into the product, based on customer feedback.

AI-enabled outbreak detection is another significant process in proactive resolution that allows support teams to address unexpected increases in anomalies, customer complaints, or issues.

“We continuously identify the reasons for frequent customer demands and challenges from inquiries raised to 51风流support. This allows 51风流to proactively deliver the most impactful product changes before they become a challenge for more customers. This way, we improve our products while also focusing on key product capabilities used by our customers today.鈥�

Alexey Ukrainsky, Solution Support Architect, 51风流MCC

3. Predictive analytics

In the retail industry, predictive analytics is used effectively for proactive and preventative support. One prominent example is SAP’s holiday season readiness program, which helps position 51风流as a front-runner in AI-driven, predictive, and proactive support solutions. With the goal of issue prevention at its core, the program can provide a comprehensive, 360-degree customer support profile, helping to accelerate issue detection and anticipate potential problems with AI-driven features like a virtual support assistant, resource prediction,鈥痺eb traffic prediction, a鈥痳ecommendation engine, case history analysis, issue correlation, and pattern recognition.

鈥淒uring Cyber Week 2024, SAP鈥檚 holiday reason readiness program equipped our support and ops teams to achieve 100% uptime for our customers with the predictive, proactive, and bi-directional support model implemented by the program.鈥�

Tarun Luthra, Head of Support, I&CX Solutions

4. Customer journey mapping

51风流Signavio solutions can help businesses visualize the end-to-end customer journey, tracking interactions across different touchpoints. This enables companies to identify areas of improvement in their customer support processes, leading to more personalized and effective interactions.

With the help of 51风流Signavio Process Intelligence, 51风流can successfully map support processes to help implement AI improvements for optimizing our services. The result: a 100% increase reported in customer value.

For example, a business that struggles with connecting customer experience data and operational data can take advantage of the 51风流Signavio Journey-to-Process Analytics solution to help reduce time to insight and uncover anomalies and trends.

鈥淭he challenge in increasing our customer experience lies in the direct link between process and journey activities. I see 51风流Signavio solutions as the perfect tools for consolidating these two perspectives to develop operational excellence in step with customer experience.鈥�

Stefan Gammel, Business Process Consultant, Hilti Group

5. In-app support

Seamlessly integrating support features in a product, service, or system gives users easy access to directly request assistance within the interface, without needing to contact a support team or leave the platform. Built-In Support can include contextual, AI-assisted, self-service options like help application-specific documentation, troubleshooting tools, knowledge bases, and FAQs or real-time options like live chats with support engineers.

For example, WalkMe solutions and Built-In Support鈥攍ayered over multiple applications in a business workflow鈥攃an provide real-time, proactive, in-app guidance to users, helping to significantly reduce the need for live assistance or support tickets.

鈥淐ontext significantly enhances the quality of support. Built-In Support works like a pit stop at a racetrack. The repair crew is right where the action is. The interruption is brief and far less disruptive than taking your car to the workshop, ensuring a smoother return to your activities. In the context of your company, this helps you win your business race.鈥� 

Wilhelm J眉tte, Chief Product Owner, Customer Support, SAP

6. Proactive mindset

None of the tools and processes that we deploy to implement a proactive and preventative support strategy are sustainable if our teams are not tuned to a proactive mindset. I believe high-performing support teams deliver the best results with a combination of human-machine collaboration, in a culture that promotes a forward-thinking, outcome-driven, service-oriented, and data-driven mindset. 

At the end of the day, the best issue is the issue that we can prevent. Proactive and preventative support is not just about solving problems, but about creating peace of mind for end users, customers, partners, and support engineers so every customer receives custom care, even before they need help.

“Knowledge management within support is not just about enabling self-service through portals to deflect incoming tickets, but about eliminating the need to come to the support portal in the first place.”

Derek Matthews, Technical Support 鈥� Procurement Chief Innovation Officer, SAP

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.

The has mandated manufacturers to improve traceability, which is essential for ensuring that medicines reach patients safely. 51风流Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences is designed to help meet these demands by streamlining the tracking process. However, as the network of users has grown, support challenges have surfaced. To address these issues, 51风流introduced Built-In Support into the hub to help provide direct, seamless assistance to life sciences companies and their partners.

I had the opportunity to interview Tarun Luthra, head of Support 鈥� Industries & CX, and Andreas Krummlauf, vice president and head of Product Management Life Sciences, Health and Ecosystem, about the project鈥檚 impact. Here’s how Built-In Support is helping to enhance operational efficiency for network users in the life sciences industry.

Q: How did this project come about?

Krummlauf: , manufacturers of medicine needed to develop the ability to uniquely identify every pack of medicine they sell in those countries. This is to avoid counterfeiting in the legitimate supply chain. To support this requirement, SAP’s serialization portfolio was initiated in 2015 with the 51风流Advanced Track and Trace for Pharmaceuticals application, a corporate serialization repository.

51风流Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences started in 2016 with a focused goal: to manage traceability and serialization data exchange for our customers and a couple of hundred of their business partners. In 2021, the hub won the Hasso Plattner Founders鈥� Award.

As the network expanded to tens of thousands of partners, a key limitation emerged: we did not have a simple way for business partners, acting as network end users, to directly interact with 51风流support in case of critical issues, even without having a support contract with 51风流in place.

Q: What support challenges were network end users facing?

Luthra: The challenge arose from supporting an increasing number of network end users that were not direct 51风流customers. Without access to SAP鈥檚 support system, the network end users had to rely on their customers to resolve issues, adding unnecessary steps and risked communication gaps. This presented an opportunity to implement Built-In Support to support our customers鈥� business partners as network end users when they use 51风流Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences.

Q: How does Built-In Support make a difference for network end users?

Luthra: We are now providing network end users with a direct entry point from within 51风流Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences, enabling them to easily contact the support team. Built-In Support is seamlessly integrated into the hub. The network end user can find help by searching 51风流Knowledge Base Articles or submitting a case.

Krummlauf: This streamlined process can enhance the support experience and helps ensure users can quickly find the help they need. Network end users can now resolve issues independently or submit a case without involving customers in the resolution process. This improvement leads to faster response times. Users can efficiently search for relevant product information and potentially resolve issues on their own. This autonomy helps enhance the overall support experience and empowers users to find solutions quickly and effectively.

Built-In Support Enhances User Experience and Support Efficiency

In conclusion, marks a significant advancement in enhancing user experience and support efficiency. When network end users are empowered to directly access support resources and resolve issues independently, we not only help to streamline the support process but also reinforce SAP’s commitment to improving lives through better life sciences solutions. As regulatory demands evolve, our innovative approaches will continue to drive progress and collaboration in the life sciences sector. For more insights, stay connected with SAP’s ongoing developments.

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!聽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.聽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.聽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.聽

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.聽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.聽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.聽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.

In this interview, Gaurav Dabur, head of Support for 51风流SuccessFactors Employee Central, Analytics and Integrations, gives insight into what 51风流SuccessFactors customers and users can look forward to.

Q: What does this mean for users?

A: In the past, if customers using an 51风流solution needed to raise a case or find information, they needed to leave the application and go to either the or the for answers. With the introduction of , users can stay within the 51风流SuccessFactors solution and find the right information, which is based on enhanced search capabilities powered by artificial intelligence (AI). AI pulls the context directly from the application. This enables it to provide a tailored search experience that can recommend the specific content to best solve their issue.

Our focus is to give customers a consistent support experience and help them get their answers more quickly. Customers can get direct access to support content, tools, and channels from 51风流support 鈥� right at their fingertips and with no implementation efforts required.

What will 51风流SuccessFactors customers notice that’s different?

Let me give three key examples. First, Built-In Support can provide live recommendations and access to more personalized support content and the latest and most-used knowledge sources directly within the 51风流SuccessFactors solution.

Second, it also provides a personalized and guided support experience that can shorten the time to resolve issues. This means users can get their issues solved on their own without needing to wait on support. The feature also has comprehensive case management, which helps the user better manage their cases directly within the 51风流SuccessFactors solution.

And finally, users can really collaborate with 51风流experts in real time using our channels.

Why is Built-In Support valuable for customers?

Built-In Support helps provide customers with an industry-leading, harmonized, in-product experience that is available in many 51风流products. Customers that use multiple 51风流products can have a homogenized and harmonized experience across different applications.

Within 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, customers can now make use of the enhanced self-service options that leverage our internal, AI-based search mechanism. This helps provide more comprehensive, focused, and personalized search results. Customers can be more self-sufficient and can get their issues solved more quickly.

I encourage users to explore the new functionality of Built-In Support and to take advantage of 51风流support’s knowledge base and content repository as they explore the 51风流self-service solutions. They can also read more about the availability for 51风流SuccessFactors solutions in 鈥溾�� and this .

Regina Postman is part of Customer Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.

鈥淚n the past, users first selected the communication channel to raise a case before describing their issue. This was not always the most efficient way to solve their issues,鈥� states John Bowley, product manager, 51风流for Me Support Applications. 鈥淭o better direct the case to the supporting organization, it makes more sense to have customers first describe their issue and then be recommended the communication channel that would help solve it quickly.鈥�

In this interview, Bowley gives more insight into how the latest usage improvement of 51风流for Me is doing just that.

Q: What has been improved within 51风流for Me?

A: Our focus is to continuously find ways to minimize customer effort when contacting 51风流for help and that customers can quickly get the support they need. One important milestone is to simplify and streamline the end-to-end case creation and management process. 51风流users can now engage with 51风流support through the new application in and its use of artificial intelligence (AI). The focus is to provide suggestions, such as how to fill in values on the screen or how to best contact 51风流for help and support. AI helps predict all these values based on the system that鈥檚 been selected.

This new flow means we鈥檝e altered the order of how we route a support issue to the most appropriate place for quick answering. AI analyzes the information received and then gives the customer suggested values for the product information and product function. This means the customer鈥檚 issue is narrowed down to which product it relates to and then within what area of the product the issue is actually occurring. AI also suggests how the connection to 51风流support should best be made and to which channel 鈥� whether that鈥檚 , , or maybe opening a question in . This is what we call the channel recommender. The issue is then routed to the correct support engineer or team of support engineers.

What type of simplification does the get support application provide?

We鈥檝e rearranged the accessibility to existing Real-Time Support channels. On the previous platform, 51风流ONE Support Launchpad, customers were first asked to choose the support channel before describing the issue. For instance, the customer might have decided to do an Expert Chat and then started to describe the issue. What sometimes happened was the customer changed their mind, got pulled away, or any other circumstance. This caused a delay or break in the momentum of solving their issue.

The new get support application first asks customers to describe their issue. The system then recommends the best channel to take. Customers can choose to use this channel or decide that another channel may be a better fit.

In the future of get support there will be enhancements to help drive the AI to provide better and clearer support or assistance to customers. Our ongoing focus is to reduce customer effort and provide them with the information they need.

How does the get support application within 51风流for Me relate to Built-In Support?

Both the get support application and work in harmony with each other. Customers can create a support case within Built-In Support and they will also see it listed in 51风流for Me. The same for the reverse as well. The convenience of Built-In Support is to be able to post an issue from directly inside the application in use. Alternatively, there may be times where an issue may need to be raised or a question asked outside of Built-In Support; 51风流for Me would be ideal then.

Customers working within 51风流for Me will see the convenience of first telling us their issue and then being recommended the best channel to get it resolved. There are offered regularly to introduce customers to the get support application on 51风流for Me.

Regina Postman is part of Customer Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.

鈥淎t 51风流and our Real-Time Support channels, support engineers are in the driver鈥檚 seat to provide this experience,鈥� states Becky Doyle, global vice president and head of Product Support 鈥� People at SAP, the organization that supports human experience management (HXM) solutions from SAP, including 51风流SuccessFactors solutions. 鈥淧utting the 鈥榬eal鈥� in Real-Time Support is key as we continue to move into the future of how we help our customers, especially in the cloud solution world.鈥�

In this interview, Doyle explains the 鈥渞eal鈥� aspect of Real-Time Support and how it influences the possibilities behind always-on.

Q: Can you tell us a bit more about what you mean by the 鈥渞eal鈥� aspect?

A: Our approach offers an always-on support experience. This means that our customers can contact 51风流support experts for any problem they have. Sure, we use some cool technology to help make sure we have the answers in the best possible way. But at the heart, it鈥檚 a real and human interaction. Anytime a customer gets to work with a real person to solve an issue it creates a feeling of connection. This interaction could be a live voice call with the service, through a , or any other Real-Time Support channel. Embedded into the 51风流solution with , this real-time interaction can create a fantastic connection between customers and our support experts.

This connection is important and is sometimes a missed opportunity. We need to think of both our customers and support experts as people who work together to solve any problems and make sure the customer鈥檚 business runs as smoothly as possible. This feeling of connection through the live channels is valuable for both. My colleague, Mohammed Ajouz, described the criticality of in a Forbes article.

Partnering in real time gives our support experts an increased sense of purpose. It also connects them to what the customer wants to get accomplished. It鈥檚 different from having to submit a ticket to then walk through the problem and get the questions answered. The support experts can help a person, a human, with whatever they need to get done and the process can be faster as it solves the problem within a conversation. This is really powerful.

You mentioned the human side of the Real-Time Support approach. Is there data to show its benefits to the customer experience?

There鈥檚 a significant story to tell when we look at the experience our customers have with Real-Time Support. I already talked about the human aspect and the human element of it. When we look at the data, our customers typically get their cases solved faster through Real-Time Support and have a better overall experience. These also often get solved in a single interaction.

Imagine you have an issue and get your interaction solved as soon as you reach out to somebody. You get your answer in real time, when you need it. We can, of course, tie this time to money. Real-Time Support helps make sure our customers鈥� business continues to transact and flow the way they need it to. We believe the time-to-value of getting a problem solved helps reduce costs for the customer.

One key indicator we look at is the overall customer effort. As described in an , customer effort score is defined as the ease with which customers can use a product or service, resolve a support issue, or find the information they need. When we talk about Real-Time Support, we typically see the customer effort score really improve overall. Customers feel they need to put less effort into their overall support experience or work with our solutions to meet their business needs. This is a powerful human connection to the way we measure how good we are as an organization.

Real-Time Support holds particular importance for our customers in the HR world. What does this human interaction mean from a human experience management perspective?

I am excited about where things are headed for HXM customers. That 鈥淴鈥� in the abbreviation really brings out that experience 鈥� our human experience management. This is such a powerful shift in the HR space. As our HR solution suite becomes more digital and customers submit cases, more often it鈥檚 HR professionals that submit them. These are business users and not necessarily technical contacts. The experience goes beyond fixing the product from a technical perspective; it gets down to how customers use our 51风流solutions and what they need to best run their business. Real-Time Support can play a perfect part in bringing that experience home for our customers and our support experts. Being able to support them in real time helps make the overall experience simpler and more personal.

Real-Time Support helps us be more effective and helps our customers with that human and real interaction. When I talk about it from an HXM perspective, our 51风流products and solutions are interconnected to the world鈥檚 most important resources 鈥� the people using them. We help people get hired faster, trained better, and help them more effectively manage their performance. More importantly, we help provide for their families when our 51风流solutions facilitate their pay or can help them make smart decisions on their own career path. When it comes to support, there鈥檚 nothing more real than to enable our people to help our customers help their people.

Where do you see the future direction of Real-Time Support?

In the cloud space, support can鈥檛 simply be an island of helping customers when they come to us. We have the responsibility to work with product management, development, and operations teams across 51风流solutions. This close collaboration lets us influence 51风流product innovations to make our support more real and to provide that seamless support experience.

One focus of Real-Time Support is to embed artificial intelligence-driven self-service knowledge capabilities into our 51风流products as part of Built-In Support. Not only will customers have that true human interaction, they鈥檒l also be able to receive support information relevant to the 51风流solution in use.

Another future direction in our support transformation goals is to make support more personal for customers and to open a two-way channel of communication from within the 51风流product. The goal is to implement resolutions before business disruption can occur and proactively make customers aware of things before they happen. We want to directly connect them with information that鈥檚 relevant to the application in use or provide access to a real-time channel directly from within the 51风流solution. Both of these capabilities are pretty cool.

What do you feel is important to remember?

I encourage our customers to get 鈥渞eal鈥� with us through Real-Time Support. Try out Real-Time Support channels, especially when the topic could use that human touch. See how it feels to connect with us. Get real information and immediate answers to help you on your way faster.

Learn more about .

Regina Postman is part of Customer Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.

Introducing the idea of bi-directional support.

Two-Way Support Communication with Bi-Directional Support

The vision behind bi-directional support is to provide proactive, two-way support communication. This means actively informing about support-critical information and potential issues related to the 51风流solution in use and well before you recognize that a problem might arise. Bi-directional support no longer waits until you reach out to us; it changes the way we interact with you.

Consider an example of what you may experience in daily life. Think of the times when something wasn鈥檛 working right on your cell phone. You likely preferred to search the Internet to fix the problem and avoid a call center with waiting times and back-and-forth. Even better is when you were made aware of what might affect your phone鈥檚 performance 鈥� such as bad reception, low memory, or a restart required to avoid an issue. This is the aim of bi-directional support within Built-In Support.

Live Recommendations Help Avoid System Interruptions

One of the key features to make Built-In Support bi-directional will be to provide live recommendations within the application or page in use. Live recommendations are pushed into Built-In Support to provide targeted information, support knowledge documents, and even hot support alerts. They鈥檒l inform users about critical 51风流solution issues that others may be experiencing. The information will also be relevant to the user鈥檚 role, such as for the key user or end user.

Live recommendations within Built-In Support are curated, published, and updated by 51风流in real time and supported by predictive artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. The news and alerts can be pushed out immediately to all screens and can be pulled back or exchanged at any point in time.

Continuing the real-life example, live recommendations are like the “breaking news鈥� section of a news portal app on your cell phone, only for your 51风流solution. Don鈥檛 want to miss critical information? Want it at your fingertips and, if needed, just a click away? Then you might like the new live recommendations.

The live recommendations are application-focused and only visible where needed. We鈥檙e not distracting you with news or content unrelated to what you鈥檙e working on. It keeps troubleshooting efforts to a minimum while giving you the latest and most relevant support updates. Currently, bi-directional support is being tried out for 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Over time, it will be expanded for all 51风流solutions that are integrated with Built-In Support.

Customer Effort Score, a Driver behind Bi-Directional Support

Happy customers are those that need little support interaction because their 51风流solutions run fine. Low interaction means low customer effort. As described in an , the customer effort score is defined as the ease with which customers can use a product or service, resolve a support issue, or find the information they need.

51风流uses the customer effort score as a customer satisfaction measurement. When answering tickets, we ask customers what their effort was behind their interaction with us to get the problem solved. Our focus is to solve any problems fast and to give customers an effortless support experience.

Additional Support Convenience with Bi-Directional Support

Bi-directional support builds on the existing Built-In Support features, such as initiating an , searching for knowledge, or creating a ticket for 51风流support. No changes need to be made to your 51风流applications and there鈥檚 nothing to install. Live recommendations are another convenient way of how 51风流support interacts with you. We continue to respond to the growing need for preventative and proactive support in the cloud to help shorten the time to solve your problems.

Built-In Support is the place to go should a problem arise in the application or on the page you鈥檙e using. It’s likely you鈥檒l find live recommendations already there to help you right away. Bi-directional support is taking another step forward in making Built-In Support more precise, accurate, and relevant about what鈥檚 affected and what you need to do. It鈥檚 convenient to get easy-to-access support information at the point of need and personalized to the application or page being used. That鈥檚 simple, that鈥檚 intuitive, that鈥檚 Built-In Support.

Learn more about .

Regina Postman is part of Customer Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.

鈥淭he support industry has been severely disrupted over the past decade, but much, much more in just the last few years since the pandemic started,鈥� stated Mohammed Ajouz, senior vice president and global head of at SAP. 鈥淲e have experienced more change in the last two years than we’ve had probably in two decades. We have watched support go from an afterthought to top of mind for CIOs, as they have seen how vulnerable their business could be with unforeseen or unpredicted crises.鈥�

The need to transform is further accelerated by the abundant availability of new technologies 鈥� such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, Big Data, in-memory computing, and hyperconnectivity, to name just a few. All these changes also have an impact on customer support. Having an outdated support model is no longer an option. In this interview, Ajouz describes why it鈥檚 key to give immediate support, why it鈥檚 important to predict potential issues before they could occur, and why an enterprise support organization needs to be more proactive in providing bidirectional support.

Q: Why is Real-Time Support valuable for customers?

A: Let me first provide some context around the disruption in the support industry. Technology is more complex and integrated. In the past, customers used to have a single mission-critical application. Today, most processes are mission critical and everything needs to be made available around the clock. What was once considered a luxury 鈥� such as offering 24×7 support 鈥� is now an expectation and customers are demanding their vendors take more responsibility for delivering business outcomes.

Customers today have much higher expectations of support, especially when it comes to real-time. Because expectations have changed so dramatically, creating a support case and waiting one or two days for a response is no longer an option. This is why 51风流created and fine-tuned with the basic objective of being available when the customer needs us most. That, in its simplest form, is the premise of what we鈥檙e doing with Real-Time Support.

Why is it important to strike the right balance between proactive and preventative versus real-time?

When a customer faces a problem, they expect 51风流to be there for them. Whether it鈥檚 through or , customers are working with the same pool of experts that typically process their cases. But we鈥檙e taking this one step further. What if we contacted customers before they even became aware of their problem? We are not only there in real time, but we are also pivoting from reactive support models to predictive and proactive support. The true value of those services lies in our ability to predict and solve customer problems before they cause any business interruption. This is the evolution of our Real-Time Support approach toward delivering better business outcomes.

We can tap into our vast repositories of information to analyze and understand the trends and patterns behind our customers鈥� system and software usage and drive differentiated customer experiences. The vast amounts of data about customer behavior and preferences previously collected but not effectively utilized is the foundation of our . The power behind the data lake, powered with AI, is our ability to incorporate this information into highly personalized customer experiences and learn from the past to predict the future. With access to this valuable knowledge, we will transform the support experience into one where support prevents an issue from becoming a business-impacting event.

Being proactive and preventative is our ultimate vision with Real-Time Support: not only to be there when you need us, but to be there before you even know you need us.

What will be the long-term impact of investing in real-time channels and in proactive, preventative support?

We expect our investments in Real-Time Support to improve our ability to better support the needs of our customers. Many market and industry studies have shown a direct correlation between customer loyalty and customer effort. As we reduce the amount of effort a customer experiences, the more loyal that customer is going to be. This relates to the as described by Gartner. This balance between effort and value becomes more critical with cloud customers. The reason? Cloud customers, unlike traditional IT departments, are business users and end users. We have simplified the interaction and made it easier and simpler for them to interact with support.

In the days of on-premise software, we communicated with IT power users who understood the technology and complications behind it. Those power users knew that a support case could take a few days to resolve. Our cloud customers鈥� expectations are significantly different and, as a result, our services have evolved to cater for these needs in the cloud. This is why Real-Time Support is so critical. It increases the value of solutions by lowering cloud customer effort to obtain them.

The premise of predictive and preventative support is a reduction in customer effort. And if there isn鈥檛 a problem because we resolved it ahead of time, that is the ultimate effortless experience we strive to deliver to our customers. Value and effort are directly correlated: more effort means less value, less effort means more value.

What are some recent enhancements of Real-Time Support?

Adding to the existing portfolio of Real-Time Support channels, we recently introduced . This service is supported by certified, external peers. This is ideal for asking non-critical questions and getting insights from experts outside of SAP. We initially started with 51风流SuccessFactors solutions and recently expanded it to include some of our core enterprise resource planning (ERP) and 51风流Business Technology Platform products. We are seeing a lot of momentum building among our customers.

Another enhancement is with . It has been expanded to also include medium-priority tickets for those times where customers need to speak with a manager. And finally, with our migration from our to 鈥�,鈥� the new single-entry point to 51风流support, the support case creation process can be much easier and powered by cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This helps reduce the effort of our customers and ultimately provides them with an almost effortless experience.

Can you give us a sneak peek of what we can expect in the future of Real-Time Support?

Let me come back to the point that cloud customers expect a simpler, faster, and effortless experience in interacting with support. One of the key initiatives we鈥檙e working on is with . The basis of Built-In Support is to bring the entire support experience customers know from 51风流Support Portal or 51风流ONE Support Launchpad directly into the product. Rather than going to a portal to log a support case, query an existing case, initiate a chat, or search our knowledge base, we鈥檙e putting the power and full functionality of 51风流support within the product and at the customers鈥� fingertips.

Another aspect of our Real-Time Support approach is the move from the traditional unidirectional support 鈥� of customers reaching out to us when they need us 鈥� to bidirectional support. Not only can we communicate directly with customers, we can give them timely and relevant information about product issues or alerts, upcoming releases, product trainings, or any other information that enhances their experience with support at SAP. All this information would be relevant to the customer鈥檚 platform, product, or version and curated specifically to their personas. This is how we see 51风流support in the future: bidirectional, predictive, and effortless.

Follow Mohammed Ajouz on and .
Regina Postman is part of Customer Solution Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.

51风流is moving into the second year of its transformation of support. Andreas Heckmann, executive vice president and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP, is excited about all that鈥檚 planned. 鈥淲e鈥檙e making great progress on our comprehensive vision to serve customers better along the entire lifecycle. We look forward to providing an even better experience around customer self-services,鈥� says Heckmann. 鈥淭his year is going to be a year of getting even more prescriptive and offering even more guidance to our customers. Functionality will be substantially expanded with a lot more content added for new products.鈥�

In this conversation, Heckmann gave more details on the goals and progress of this vision.

Q: 51风流Business Transformation Center will be introduced at this year鈥檚 51风流Sapphire, held in Orlando, Florida. Can you give details on what鈥檚 planned?

A: Customers will see a first version of what we call 51风流Business Transformation Center. This is part of the business transformation suite. The focus is to support customers in the planning stage of their 51风流S/4HANA software transformation. With this, customers can simulate their transformation and plan and anticipate what the transformation could look like when complete. Let me give an example. If a customer says, 鈥淲hat will it look like if we exclude certain company codes or business data?鈥� they will see in real time what this means to the amount of data and information needing to be transformed. The ultimate result is up-front insights that help customers shape and drive their transformation planning.

Can you share what鈥檚 planned around 51风流Cloud ALM?

We鈥檒l deeply embed business process modeling capabilities of the 51风流Signavio portfolio in 鈥� our strategic cloud-based platform for customers to manage their entire application lifecycle. Customers can get access to a world-leading business process management solution to discover and adapt 51风流best practices for accelerated solution delivery. Our focus is to give customers the best possible experience for their business users.

We鈥檙e also extending access to the to our 51风流Enterprise Support on-premise and cloud edition customers at no extra cost. Our customers can use the solution to help automate testing during their 51风流projects and validate their business processes when new 51风流releases are applied to the 51风流solution landscape. We expect to seamlessly integrate the Tricentis testing capabilities with a fully automated setup within 51风流Cloud ALM. These cloud-based test automation capabilities will help ease the testing of the 51风流solutions and help facilitate the adoption of 51风流cloud product releases.

In a world where we want to innovate and deliver value to end users and customers at an always higher speed, 51风流and Tricentis are significantly lowering the barrier to test automation. I鈥檓 very satisfied with the great partnership with Tricentis. This unique solution now brings test automation capabilities fully integrated in our business transformation suite for 51风流Enterprise Support customers.

You mentioned plans for new support functionality. Can you give some examples?

We are reshaping our content and knowledge management strategy to give customers a more robust search experience that leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning optimizations, and analytics functionalities. This search index scans knowledge from many different data sources during a single search. “” will be the main entry point to 51风流support and for searches. Additional features help us understand and optimize the search and knowledge relevancy at every step of the support journey.

Within , we expect to see progress on the bidirectional dialogue in and 51风流for Me. This proactive, two-way communication will help keep customers informed about news related to the solutions they are using, alert them to potential issues to watch out for, and deliver support-critical information they need to know.

Furthermore, our focus for Built-In Support is to provide predictive and preventative support. Our biggest wins are when we resolve potential problems without customers even knowing a problem might exist or could have occurred. Our AI services help us continuously improve the quality of real-time recommendations for when customers search for a solution to an issue or create a case for support.

This year, Built-In Support will expand into more 51风流solutions and will grow the functionality and adoption across our cloud solutions.

There鈥檚 also a lot going on in 51风流internally as part of the transformation of support that indirectly benefits customers. Can you describe a few of these indirect benefits?

An important internal change is that we鈥檙e increasing our capability of cross-expert interaction. More and more cases require close collaboration of various experts with different knowledge, experience, perspectives, and so on. We鈥檝e introduced an internal framework and technology that lets experts dynamically assemble and quickly collaborate on the same problem. This reduces redundancy, eliminates handover delays, and collapses the time it takes to get experts aligned. That obviously accelerates the resolution substantially for our customers.

We鈥檝e greatly improved the predictive capabilities of our cloud solutions. These predictive capabilities will give us early indications when something isn鈥檛 right. This, in turn, prompts us to start analyzing the situation and take steps to mitigate and resolve issues before the customer even recognizes or experiences problems or service degradation on their end.

These capabilities have been successfully tested and applied to a set of our solutions. This year we鈥檒l extend the reach of these technologies and onboard increasingly more solutions. Plus, we鈥檒l also integrate this more closely into our processes so our experts can respond swiftly to evolving situations.

What suggestions do you have for customers in 2023?

While our focus is to be more prescriptive and provide more guidance to our customers, it鈥檚 important that they also make an effort to stay up to speed on the things we鈥檙e doing. Follow closely on what we鈥檙e doing, embrace the new ideas and improvements, and start consuming them. It鈥檚 my motto to 鈥渄elight customers always,鈥� and we鈥檝e had the customer in mind with all the improvements that we provide and whatever we do.

Customers should talk within their organizations about how they can use all of these improvements. If you have questions, reach out to us. Let鈥檚 explore together how you can make best use of them. At the end of the day, we can invent the best features and options, but if customers stick to their old ways and don鈥檛 embrace new approaches, they鈥檙e missing out on the many benefits that can make their work lives easier. That would be a shame.

Follow Andreas Heckmann on and .
Regina Postman is part of Customer Solution Support and Innovation Communications at SAP.

When we started to talk, Andreas Heckmann, executive vice president and head of Customer Solution Support & Innovation at SAP, stated, 鈥淎lthough it was one of the most challenging years in my professional history, it was still a year filled with opportunities. We are seeing traction in the transformation of customer support I described 11 months ago, and we delivered a great amount of product innovations to our customers.鈥�

In this interview, Heckmann gives insight into how the transformation is continuing.

Q: How has 2022 been going for you in the transformation?

A: I鈥檓 proud of the notable, award-winning product releases that are directly relevant to supporting economic needs and helping with sustainability. Take, for example, the solution. We鈥檙e enabling agribusinesses to tap into their vast source of farming data by leveraging data science and machine learning. This farming intelligence helps them leverage processes and services to better forecast and increase farming yields and quality. It will also help them use the right balance of water resources and help keep fertilizer and crop protection to a minimum. This will help agribusinesses play their part in becoming more sustainable and efficient.

Let me also point out the Hasso Plattner Founders鈥� Award-winning . It鈥檚 helping prevent pharmaceutical drug counterfeiting by enabling traceability and verification of products. With an estimated 50% or more of drugs in Africa being counterfeit, this product is definitely helping businesses to protect their intellectual property and, more importantly, people鈥檚 health and lives.

Another exciting sustainability-focused app release this year is the . In this project, we developed a solution extension to help neutralize carbon emissions. Our customers can access data collected from business travel and consider ways to watch their carbon footprint.

All of these solutions make me proud of our Customer Solution Support & Innovation organization and underscores the many ways we have our customers鈥� goals and priorities front of mind.

With 51风流Cloud ALM being available for a while now, how do you see it being taken up?

is the strategic platform to help customers manage their entire application lifecycle, both on premise and in the cloud. We will close out this year seeing quite an amazing uptake and increasingly more customers using the solution to help implement and operate their cloud and hybrid environments. There鈥檚 a big uptake on 51风流Cloud ALM, with functions being used more intensely for managing project teams and business processes. And it鈥檚 also getting third-party products integrated to give customers even more access to content such as guidance, tools, and checklists for their implementation projects and operations.

What progress are you making around Real-Time Support during this transformation?

We鈥檙e seeing momentum in continuously transforming the support experience for customers towards a more personalized and preventative experience. This could be when they search for a support answer in or , or when they report an issue. At the beginning of this year, we received a for the innovative way we鈥檙e capturing our customer problems in a structured and guided fashion. It鈥檚 what we call support assistant. This assistant guides customers through the process of logging an incident. Machine learning functionality suggests answers from our knowledge repositories along the way. Often the answer is found in the first bunch of suggestions and no incident needs to be created.

If no answer can be provided instantaneously, the incident information collected is packaged for a support engineer to process further during a or a scheduled appointment. We found that real-time interactions get completed on average within 30 minutes and two of every three issues are solved in the first chat. And these interactions support nine different languages, allowing for multi-language dialogues in real time. For either way the customer decides to go, the support assistant and help customers get their issues resolved much more quickly and efficiently.

Now imagine, we鈥檙e already working on the next generation of the entire support experience for customers to look forward to. With Built-In Support, we鈥檙e making significant progress as the tool for continuous two-way dialogue with customers. It鈥檚 our goal to proactively notify customers about critical issues or relevant new features and to take care of any potential problem before a customer becomes aware of it. We鈥檙e also eagerly awaiting the go-live of our new customer facing portal, 51风流for Me, with its completely redesigned user experience.

51风流is getting into customer-centric observability. What does this mean?

Customers trust us with their critical business processes. Service availability is the foundation of that trust and naturally a prime topic for us. We see it as a prerequisite for customer success. A focus of our transformation is to become more predictive and proactive. It鈥檚 what we鈥檙e calling customer-centric observability. This is a methodology that focuses on observing real user experience and outcomes to get advanced warnings ahead of customer-reported incidents and to quickly react upon them. By monitoring 1.5 billion system actions daily, we鈥檙e proactively watching for potential issues and preventing them from happening.

What can we expect for 2023?

Personally, I’m excited to see the launch of the bi-directional dialogue in Built-In Support and 51风流for Me. This means customers can look forward to getting an even better support experience in 2023. In addition, they should expect to get significantly improved results and optimized recommendations when searching for solutions or creating incident tickets for support. Plus, there will be more times when potential problems are resolved without customers even knowing any problems existed. While we will certainly not be done next year, given all we鈥檝e planned for our customers, I鈥檓 confident that we鈥檒l already begin reaping the harvest.

Follow Andreas Heckmann on and .
Regina Postman is part of Customer Solution Support & Innovation Communications at SAP.

Let me describe three big examples of innovation developed to make your lives easier: continuous updates that are no longer disruptive to the business; artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that produce more precise search results; and real-time support at your fingertips that is built into your application.

Continuous Updates That Are No Longer Disruptive

System updates are important as they provide new or improved functionality, enhance stability and security, and enrich the user experience. However, what鈥檚 been a challenge in the past for on-premise software is the downtime, test efforts, and spike in system issues that often followed a bigger release cycle. For cloud solutions, you should 鈥� and already can 鈥� expect ready-to-use, manageable updates with minimum disruption.

With the , our application lifecycle management platform developed on 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP), we solved that issue by introducing 鈥渄eploy with confidence鈥� as a new way of how we develop this solution. Deploy with confidence works to increase developer productivity and helps ensure high quality while delivering daily system updates. From a technical side, it incorporates many development tools to help automate the daily deliveries of multi-microservice software-as-a-service applications like 51风流Cloud ALM.

All this allows us to provide regular feature updates to 51风流Cloud ALM with daily deployment and enables a robust lifecycle without disruption or downtime. Additionally, as our teams are in continuous exchange with customers using 51风流Cloud ALM, we can quickly bring their feedback into the solution to further improve our software quality. Introducing deploy with confidence as the development method for 51风流Cloud ALM is a great example where we as a team leveraged innovation to increase productivity and quality while at the same time lifting customer experience to a whole new level.

AI and Machine Learning: More Precise Search Results

Continuous updates are one thing. What about using technology to get answers faster? With companies working in a faster-paced digital world, making decisions and finding answers also need to move faster. This is also the case when business processes aren鈥檛 running as expected.

Think about yourself and if you are someone who prefers to find answers on your own and not wait on support to respond. You鈥檒l be happy to know we have various ways to help you find the right answer. When you search in or 鈥�,鈥� you can get an increasingly personalized search experience that considers the topics most relevant for you. As this applies machine learning to improve search relevance and we are continually optimizing our knowledge base for better discoverability, you鈥檙e more likely to get the needed answer instantaneously 鈥� listed as a proposed solution within the first bunch of search results.

When you actually contact 51风流support directly, your request and all of its context, such as system and product information, text input, and soon even attachment data, are evaluated in real time by a highly optimized, AI-powered algorithm to provide you with precise solution recommendations. This Incident Solution Matching algorithm helps to make sure you are shown the best available solutions even before you send a ticket to 51风流or start an Expert Chat session. This helps reduce your effort to solve the problem.

Real-Time Support and Answers at Your Fingertips

It鈥檚 definitely an advantage to tap into modern technology for finding the answers you need. How about the convenience behind it and having answers at your fingertips? One of the things we鈥檝e learned from research and talking with customers is how annoying it can be when you must drop everything you were doing and leave your IT workspace to raise a ticket in a central support portal. This meant you would need to rethink what you were doing when the issue came up and where it happened. Plus, you needed to enter all the contextual information the portal doesn鈥檛 have, such as the system where it happened or the application you were using when running into problems.

We鈥檝e made this obsolete and convenient: is available in many of our cloud solutions and can be used right away, if needed. It鈥檚 a click of a button to ask a question, search for solutions, get tailored recommendations for your problem, or to just report an issue. Built-In Support knows where you were working when the issue came up and what you were doing when you got the error message. Through the usage of AI and machine learning technologies, the tool either already finds possible answers while you are typing in your issue, or it pulls together the necessary information for the support engineer. This is a more personalized support experience tailored to your specific situation. How convenient to not need to post a ticket elsewhere or explain your situation.

And even better, this click can get you connected in a or a scheduled appointment with a support expert. You can more quickly describe and resolve your question or problem 鈥� avoiding the ping-pong back-and-forth happening through a traditional ticket resolution. Talk about a way to free up time and resources to focus on the business.

On top of this, Built-In Support will evolve towards bi-directional communication: if there鈥檚 a brand-new solution to a critical issue in the application you are currently working with, why not get it shared with you right away? And if there is supporting information around a new or changed feature in the app you might have questions about, why not see it published proactively before you run into problems? This is exactly the future-looking direction of Built-In Support. Tailored to every screen of your application, it can proactively provide you answers and solutions and not wait until you run in to a problem and need to report it. Built-In Support is ending the one-way communication. If we know a customer has a problem but isn鈥檛 yet aware of it, we鈥檒l proactively take care of it.

In Summary

All this sounds smart, right? Let me summarize my key messages to you. You鈥檝e learned that 51风流system updates are important as they bring you new functionality, but they don鈥檛 need to be disruptive. Finding answers to your support problems is just as quick as what you know from a regular Web search. And finally, you鈥檒l experience the convenience of having support at your fingertips and getting your support questions and issues quickly worked out without needing to leave the application you are working in.

I hope I got you excited about some of the existing support innovations that will further improve your support experience. And we鈥檙e not stopping there. We鈥檙e already working on more great things.

Andreas Heckmann is executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP. Follow him on and .

As digital transformation became ever more critical to enterprises around the world, 51风流Services and Support took a leading role in helping clients to avoid disruption and maintain critical functions and infrastructure. This steady hand through troubled times did not go unnoticed. 鈥淚’m hearing from customers that they are a combination of relieved and impressed that we didn’t let them down and really upheld our operations,鈥� said Andreas Heckmann, executive vice president and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP. 鈥淭here was no disruption whatsoever, quite the opposite since we reached historical highs in customer satisfaction in recent quarters.鈥�

Here, Heckmann discusses the lessons learned last year and his goals for customer support in 2022 and beyond, including everything from the future of to new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) to why this is the 鈥渂iggest moment of transformation鈥� that support has ever seen.

Q: What are you most excited about for support in the year ahead?

A: I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say the biggest transformation in support鈥檚 history will commence in 2022. For one thing, we will further harmonize our acquisitions, working on infrastructure and joint 鈥渘ext practices鈥� so that our customers have an even more streamlined experience. It will truly be one SAP. Machine learning has advanced substantially, and we are now set to provide some of the greatest innovations imaginable. Also, support will become much more prescriptive. Along the entire solution life cycle, we want to answer the question, 鈥榃hat’s the client鈥檚 best option here?鈥�

We’ve been super successful in 2021 with advancing 51风流Cloud ALM. It’s evolved wonderfully and ahead of schedule, so now we want to start offering it to customers as a default 鈥� right from the very first project. Then they鈥檒l continue with data migration, handing over to operations, doing optimization, monitoring, and things like that.

I’m very excited that in 2022 we will start moving all these pieces of the puzzle together to create a fully integrated, end-to-end experience. During the entire customer life cycle, we will be able to take customers by the hand better than we’ve ever done before and offer a lot of technology on top of our already great customer service.

Why are these changes happening now?

It’s definitely driven by customer insights. We are focusing on the things that we know customers are struggling with most, and we are thinking of the different personas we are now interacting with through support. Years ago, we mostly dealt with IT departments 鈥� with 51风流competence centers. And while they are still there, the mix is changing fast. We see a lot more business users. They have very different expectations on how they want to interact. They’re not very technical. They don’t want clumsy user interfaces (UI).

We want to provide them with the best possible, consumer-grade experience 鈥� a really delightful experience. And yes, evolving technology helps us with that, for sure. It’s a lot easier for us to do it now than it was five years ago. But the impetus comes from meeting customer needs, not using technology for its own sake.

We’re entering a fundamentally different game now. In the past, it was a finite game. Now, with the cloud, we are finding ourselves in an infinite game. We have to win our customers time and again, and their life cycle keeps repeating itself. So mainly what we’re trying to do now is meet all these customer requirements by anticipating the needs that we encounter ourselves.

Can you share a little bit about why you鈥檙e excited about Built-In Support in 2022?

I鈥檓 very excited about this service right now. In the past, if a user had a question or ran into a problem, they would have to leave the space they work in completely and open a different portal. Then they would need to authenticate, choose the type of problem they’re experiencing, and work their way through the process.

This process was good for us. But it wasn’t necessarily providing the best customer experience. I would say that the most intuitive experience would be if you’re experiencing a problem, you shouldn’t have to tell us where the problem is, right? If you are right there working, then we can take the context of your working environment with no effort from you. It should be an integrated UI and it should support you seamlessly, starting a meaningful dialogue right there on the spot. That is the vision we had for Built-In Support. It took several attempts to optimize it, but today it is an absolutely beautiful, lightweight UI. It鈥檚 like a little helper that flies in over your software.

And another good thing is that it’s technically not part of the product code. We created it this way because we wanted to provide a unified experience 鈥� the exact same thing should happen no matter what solution you use. So, we developed a tool outside of the products and made it very easy for our development units to integrate this support tool with local integration. That way, they can focus 100% on developing the actual product, and we can focus 100% on developing all the supporting functions. I think that’s quite revolutionary. I’m not aware anyone else is doing that. I think we get the best of all worlds.

How have AI and machine learning become more integral to support processes?

We now have a very potent data lake with a lot of detailed information and with that, we are able to do a lot more complex AI and machine learning. And we are also technologically capable of responding in a split second to things that are happening. The use cases we are working on right now are to help us become truly predictive. I’ll give you an example. If we see a customer encounter a problem, and we see a second customer sending a problem that pretty much sounds the same, and then another, and another, we automatically detect the pattern. Then we can easily identify what other customers have the same criteria and will encounter the same problem, thereby stopping it before it occurs. Once we identify them, we can be truly proactive by going to the customer before they come to us.

If the problem is within our control, we could enter into a world that is typically described as self-healing. In other words, we could make all the corrections as soon as we detect the pattern, so that the customer will never even know that they were about to experience a problem.

What鈥檚 your greatest hope for 2022?

My number one priority for the year is getting this vision on the road. And it’s going to take us a few years to complete all of these ambitious goals. But this year, I want to have the groundwork done. I want to have early successes; I want to make it tangible for our first customers. That’s by far my number one wish.

Martin Gwisdalla is part of Global Public Relations at SAP.

In a of U.S.-based CIOs, 85% of respondents said that moving to the cloud was the foundation for a future-ready enterprise, enabling improved productivity and providing the speed and flexibility businesses need to respond quickly to changing conditions. The more insecure environments get 鈥� and the pandemic, climate change, and many other elements today contribute strongly to insecurity 鈥� the more cloud benefits like flexibility and less bundled commitments to technology will play a role.

Moving to the cloud is not like flipping a switch. Having built up extensive and customized on-premise hardware and software landscapes over time, many companies will need time to move their business processes to a cloud-based environment, especially taking into account the more standardized nature of software as a service (SaaS). This will result in having many different software deployment and consumption models: some will be public cloud, some private cloud or on hyperscalers, some staying on-premise at least in the mid-term. Despite such mixed IT landscapes, customers expect a seamless end-to-end experience from their vendor 鈥� especially in support.

At SAP, this expectation is nothing new. In fact, this has always been core to our support strategy. Even before the days of cloud, 51风流strove to offer a comprehensive set of business solutions tightly integrated for end-to-end business processes, with seamless experiences on user interfaces, data, and support. This core principle still fits perfectly in the cloud world and provides enormous opportunity for customer value in landscapes that are hybrid or in transition.

So, what does end-to-end support mean? At SAP, this is about having a unified approach to all aspects of support. The goal is one feature-rich, foundational support offering, one customer-facing support interface, one support infrastructure, and one support organization that maintains a strong global culture of service and expertise.

Currently, 51风流solutions are accompanied by our flagship support offering , which is embedded in cloud subscriptions and is the offering of choice for on-premise 51风流software solutions. This can provide our customers with the confidence that they will receive the same high-quality of support for their entire landscape, no matter the 51风流solution they happen to be using at any given moment. We understand that one end-to-end business process might touch several systems and 51风流software solutions and, therefore, a support issue will not exist in a vacuum of a single product only. We have the expertise and culture of collaboration to look at problems holistically across an integrated 51风流environment.

Here are some recent examples of our continued expansion of customer value:

• In 2020 we launched , SAP鈥檚 next-generation cloud-based application lifecycle management solution that includes best practices and mechanisms to manage and monitor integrated landscapes, not siloed by specific products. Developed to support the implementation and operation of 51风流solutions, it is continually expanding its coverage of cloud and on-premise deployments.
• We are always striving to find new ways of making access to support easier for our customers. In 2020, 51风流launched a new unified 鈥渄igital front door鈥� called . The vision for this personalized portal is that customers and partners can access all information, insights, and tasks related to SAP. During the next year, many more support-related tasks and reports will also be made available on 51风流for Me to help give customers an end-to-end view of their 51风流assets, services, interactions, and more.
• In the last few years, we have introduced new ways for customers to get direct access to support experts and managers. It started with 鈥� here, 51风流has recently delivered the . Customers can start a chat directly with a technical support engineer or at their convenience. They can even schedule a .
• Sometimes it鈥檚 even better if you can get a solution automatically. As you would expect from an industry leader, 51风流is exploring the next frontier of support innovation: artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the service analyzes a customer鈥檚 problem description while they are typing it into the support case and suggests potential solutions. , with its digital support assistant, is already available in 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and will be integrated into more products in time. We have launched the and support assets like . And artificial intelligence can also help spot problems before they occur and provide recommendations to prevent future issues.

Through it all, 51风流provides the flexibility customers need to make the most of their business while saving time and resources. Whether a company is moving to the public cloud, balancing cloud and on-premise solutions, or just exploring cloud elements at its edges, we can provide the support it needs to be agile and resilient in today鈥檚 markets.

The next generation of support is the baseline. It is seamless, end-to-end, proactive, multi-channeled, and intelligent in order to let our customers focus on what matters most to them: driving their business.

In other words, great AI must be paired with a great user experience. So how do non-technical factors, such as design and acceptance, impact the efficacy of AI? How does the increasing use of cloud solutions change how AI is deployed? To understand the role of AI and machine learning today, it鈥檚 important to understand the context in which it is being employed 鈥� and the importance of context itself.

We sat down with Jens Trotzky, head of Artificial Intelligence Technology for Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP, to discuss the acceptance and application scenarios of AI-driven support. How can AI and machine learning-based features, solutions, and processes change the game and why is an AI mindset key for developing new solutions?

Q: Do you find that consumers are more attracted to AI than they were in previous years?

A: I would say there is strong interest and an uptick in customers approaching us to ask about our automation, AI, and machine learning capabilities. But I also think it’s a bit of a split topic when it comes to getting the actual end users to adopt the services that AI and machine learning provide. We still have to bridge the gap between the high-level executive view 鈥� which says 鈥淲e want AI鈥� 鈥� and the more day-to-day operations view, which asks how to make it actually work. There is a lot of education needed from our side for our customers, partners, and other stakeholders.

Additionally, I also see the expectation from customers that AI is somehow everywhere. Smart recommendations and smart helpers are expected. However, it can be a challenge to implement these functions so that they also achieve the targets we want. Of course, we want AI to add to a positive user experience, but we also want to improve processes for our users 鈥� to enhance them and speed them up. The challenge then becomes how to best integrate AI features in a way that both creates an attractive user experience and achieves these hard goals or KPIs.

Could you give an example of that?

Let’s take the support assistant. Support assistant is a guided workflow, in which a user creates a support request and is guided through the whole process. The user receives AI-based suggestions on the site and goes through an interactive dialogue. That sounds good and customers like it, but we also need to look at the numbers. What does this do to the number of tickets being created? We need to see the outcome of that process 鈥� it looks good on paper, but does it translate into tangible business results? For us, it turned out that a lot more process and AI optimization was needed. It can sound very nice to have AI in your processes, and customers want that, but at the end of the day it must also translate into tangible process optimizations for the customer.

What differs in how your team thinks about AI today?

鈥淐ontext鈥� is the key word, which increasingly moves us toward a world where every individual user can receive personalized support. For example, now we can determine what product the user is using. With the breakthrough of , we can capture the application context that caused the user problems and take that information into account. AI and machine learning allow us to tap into this vast knowledge of support history that we have about the customer. It helps us to connect the dots, like having some super support engineer on the 51风流side that can magically sift through billions of pages of support documents that are out there and then pick up on the right cues at the right time to bring everything together. And with the help of the contextual window of Built-In Support, we can make all these connections in real time. And I mean literally real time. AI is a game changer for support because it allows us to know our customers, provide real-time insight, and help to mitigate a customer challenge before it becomes one.

Are you seeing a different type of user interacting with your AI these days?

Yes, for our on-premise software solutions the audience tends to be more technical 鈥� more subject matter experts themselves. With our software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings in the cloud, we deal more with business users, rather than a technical person. We are, accordingly, trying to serve the right audience the right content.

This is exactly what we have in mind when we talk about Built-In Support because we realize that we are increasingly dealing with business users. The question is, what can we offer to business users? This is where integration comes in 鈥� realizing when and why a user is running into a problem and what happens next. Will they create a ticket? Do they want immediate support? Maybe it’s a simple how-to question. Then we need to offer whatever is appropriate: perhaps an answer using an AI-enhanced search algorithm, but maybe also offer a community solution. If, instead, we have a key user in front of that application, then we should offer the option of using things that might require key user credentials, such as a real-time chat session with an expert or the ability to create a ticket. This all happens because of context and personalization. In the end, we need to focus on the user out there and ask ourselves, what is their role? What is the task? What is the goal? I think the exciting part of support is shaping the interface between the user and the context.

There鈥檚 also the aspect of getting a unified user experience. In the end, the customer expectation is to have a single user experience anywhere in the 51风流product portfolio. Here, Built-In Support can play a major role because by having the context, including history, the user experience can be truly unified. As a user, whenever I open Built-In Support, I can have the same experience, which can be customized or optimized for a specific product. The effort required to interact with support can be reduced and access to information can be faster than ever. I think that’s what most customers want: to help themselves.

What has been one of your biggest lessons from the last year?

I would highlight the role of integration. We have started to focus a lot more on the integration of AI and machine learning. We’ve learned the hard way how important it is to get the integration right. Often, it’s the integration that ultimately drives adoption.

Ultimately, the success of artificial intelligence is summed up in the equation user adoption multiplied by AI model accuracy equals realized business value. If you don’t have user adoption, then the value is limited. And often the biggest lever we have to drive user adoption is tightly tied to our ability to blend AI seamlessly into the user experience.

Sophia Stolze is part of Integrated Communications within Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP.

That is why today, 51风流is using innovative functions enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time support with cutting-edge Built-In Support, built directly into the application, to provide customers with a rapid and intuitive experience that is paving the way for increasingly predictive and preventative support.

鈥淭oday, user experience matters more than ever in the support context. Users expect a seamless end-to-end customer experience, and we are committed to providing it to them by offering connected and holistic support,鈥� said Andreas Heckmann, executive vice president and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP. 鈥淭his means meeting the customer inside the application with contextually aware features.鈥�

This innovative customer experience leverages AI and machine learning to deliver intuitive experiences that users have come to expect from consumer applications, but with the full might of SAP鈥檚 engineering powering the interaction behind the scenes.

Here, Heckmann goes deeper on how these innovations came to be and how they can show us the future of support.

Q: There has recently been an evolution in Built-In Support as part of SAP鈥檚 Next-Generation Support approach. Could you tell us about what鈥檚 changed?

A: Built-In Support, which means support that is available within the application, has been substantially enhanced recently, including a complete re-platforming, making it a lot more feature-rich by adding AI functions and real-time chats. That means customers don鈥檛 have to leave the application to experience these cutting-edge innovations; it’s all right there for them, and it鈥檚 contextualized because we know where they are in the application. So if you ask to chat with an expert inside the application, it won鈥檛 take you to some unrelated person. The AI system will know what type of question you probably have.

How does Built-In Support impact user experience, and why is user experience (UX) or user interface (UI) so important today?

With Built-In Support, I can now interact with support the same way I interact with my smartphone as a consumer. Normally when I’m using my smartphone, I have an expectation that everything is there on the spot, easy, intuitive, fast. That鈥檚 what Built-In Support feels like to the user.

In the past, we in support mostly interacted with IT departments, which were filled with very experienced IT professionals. For them, clumsy UI wasn鈥檛 much of a problem. Nowadays, we are interacting with business users from any line of business more and more. And those users increasingly belong to an age group that consists of 鈥渄igital natives,鈥� hence having an entirely different expectation on user interface and experience. To meet all our users on eye level and provide them with the same consumer-grade experience, we invented a solution like Built-In Support, making it easy and seamless to engage with product support, no matter if you are an IT expert or an expert in your specific line of business. Our sophisticated technology is designed to back this all up.

With AI and machine learning helping to simplify, improve, and accelerate processes and workflows — just to mention a few advantages — what is unique in how 51风流employs AI?

Today, already every single one of the interactions we have with customers is monitored, processed, and analyzed by our AI system because we embedded it in our incident management process. That means that customers are typing away and describing their problem and we are analyzing the likely cause in real time. They don’t even have to press a button or activate something. They just go through the normal process like they always did. That鈥檚 pretty unique because 51风流is not a one product company, not a 10-product company, but a hundreds-of-products company. In that context, being able to give answers very, very precisely and to be right most of the time, that’s quite unique in the industry, and we were only able to get there by developing several of our own algorithms to work seamlessly with our proprietary systems and data.

Did your team encounter setbacks as you established this AI program?

To be honest, more things didn’t work out than did work out. When we first began using AI, we thought it would be relatively easy, just applying some algorithms. It didn’t work at all. We learned the hard way that because of the many products we have and because many different technical terms employ the same words but sometimes with different meanings, traditional approaches to AI didn’t work for us.

Take, for example, the word 鈥渢ransport.鈥� What does transport mean? We have a logistics system, and within that, if a customer discusses a transport, she is probably referring to transporting items on a truck, on a ship, or on a plane. But it could also mean the transport of a piece of software from one system to another, because we have software transport systems as well. It could refer to moving data or it could refer to moving people.

That was the nut we had to crack. And we had to learn that AI is always made for the data you are using. At the very beginning, I didn’t get AI. I looked at it more like a search engine, a better search engine with a smarter filter, but that鈥檚 completely wrong. For any type of data and every use case you must build your algorithm and then you must train your algorithm. You must find the patterns within. Each situation is somewhat unique. That’s the biggest lesson we learned.

How have AI and other emerging technologies paved the way for predictive support?

AI is a bit like a key ingredient that we need to prepare the meal, which is predictive support. All the things we鈥檝e been discussing 鈥� real-time support, AI, and so on 鈥� all of it is the innovation that brought us to the current status quo. So why do we already regard this as the old world? Because the customer is still experiencing the problem, and we are just getting much better, faster, and more creative in how we respond.

What we are trying to do now and for the time to come is combine real-time support and AI and other innovations to find the problem before the customer even knows they have it. Say a customer reports a problem, and then another customer reports that same problem, a short time after, and maybe a third customer reports the problem. Today, we will automatically detect that and conclude, “Hey, something’s happening. We have three customers reporting this type of problem. What can we learn?” And we look automatically at these customers and discover they are all using a specific functionality in a specific configuration. And in that constellation, they are running into that problem. Then we can automatically determine which other customers have that module, use it in that very specific constellation and solve the problem for them before it even occurs, and provide a predictive and preventative service to help those customers before they even experience the problem.

Embedded in business applications, Built-In Support provides direct access to support channels, knowledge, and expertise in ways that are relevant, seamless, context-aware, and, most importantly, productive.

Think about your last support experience when using an application at work. Perhaps you submitted an IT ticket into the company portal, visited a provider鈥檚 information site, interacted with multiple support experts, or engaged with a chatbot to find answers to your questions. Whatever the method, it was likely a complex interaction that might have lacked relevance, speed, and a satisfactory solution from a user point of view.

It is unlikely for most of us to achieve deep focus while continually switching back and forth between different types of tasks, which usually span across multiple systems and user experiences. In the case of support interactions, one major challenge is how to collect, prepare, and transfer relevant, contextual information into the appropriate support channel. To perform your challenging business tasks optimally, you need to reach , where you give your complete attention to your main activity while having everything else available in a sidecar that is seamlessly integrated and easily accessible.

When support is extended and integrated throughout an application, users can get the help they need without having to leave the application, efficiently solving issues or answering questions much faster. And best of all, with more preventative support features accessible over time, they might not even have to ask questions, instead receiving trending information proactively on certain topics.

Does it sound too good to be true? Not for businesses that have adopted cloud solutions from SAP, such as 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Over time, more and more cloud solutions from 51风流will integrate Built-In Support.

Delivering Support That Is Embedded, Seamless, and Relevant

When considering new software, self-assist support services are inevitably listed as a key feature. However, those options are rarely sophisticated enough to guide users to a viable resolution quickly. The majority provide basic field definitions and instructions, a search for product documentation, or a basic ticketing submission process.

Most users require a more responsive, proactive, and predictive support experience 鈥� whether they are a new employee learning how to use a new technology or a seasoned expert encountering a problem. Furthermore, all these capabilities must be accessible within the application without switching systems and impacting productivity and performance.

With an advanced version of Built-In Support, users no longer need the integration of Built-In Support via 51风流CoPilot; they can acquire the guidance necessary to optimize the value of our suite of intelligent and cloud-based solutions. This approach simplifies the integration of a combination of support services into any 51风流Web-based user interface that users can access with a click of a button.

The Built-In Support approach includes a wide range of support services, such as:

Self-Service and Incident Prevention

• 51风流documentation, 51风流Knowledge Base Articles, and many more information sources can be accessed directly from within Built-In Support.
• Structured decision trees can be leveraged to find technical answers or to enrich contextual issue description with business process-related information.
• You can get artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled solution recommendations of incident solutions matched with similar support incidents or requests.

Real-Time Interaction

For fast incident resolution and prevention, users can obtain help directly from 51风流support experts through the seamless integration of Expert Chat.

Personalized, Context-Sensitive Support

In Built-In Support, every interaction is context aware. This means the technical information of your underlying business application is known and used to provide the best-fit content, solution proposals, chatbot conversation, or support channel. Just think of how much time you can save by knowing exactly where to get the information that can help prioritize and resolve your problem.

Offering Variety in One Place

One of the most significant advantages of relying on 51风流support services is the wide variety of channels. But when all those formats are accessible in the application being used and automated to deliver the right assistance, users can gain an edge in their work performance. Furthermore, this approach works to further incentivize and accelerate long-term user adoption.

Now couldn鈥檛 be a better time to take advantage of such a comprehensive digital support approach. As executives take a quantum leap in digitalization to get their businesses back on track, employees can be well-positioned to embrace new technology confidently, productively, and successfully.

Josef Schmidt is chief support architect at SAP.

To meet customers wherever they are, Built-In Support has driven the delivery of cutting-edge tools and access to live support from experts in fewer steps, helping to improve business outcomes and increase value for 51风流customers.

鈥淥ur overarching goal is to make support not only effortless but also available how and where customers want it 鈥� within the application 鈥� and contextually aware of their needs,鈥� said Andreas Heckmann, executive vice president and head, Customer Solution Support & Innovation, 51风流SE. 鈥淛ust as the RISE with 51风流package brings together everything you need to transform your business in the cloud that works best for the customer, 51风流now offers a matching intuitive, connected and holistic support experience that helps make it easy for businesses to improve operational reliability and efficiency.鈥�

This innovative customer experience leverages AI and machine learning to deliver the intuitive experiences that users have come to expect from smart phones but with the full might of SAP鈥檚 engineering powering the interaction behind the scenes. With the latest advances, the intelligent, customized support 51风流has been pioneering for years with enterprise software now provides an easy-to-engage consumer-grade experience for customers.

Built-In Support Connects Customers to AI-Enabled Help

Based on the Built-In Support approach, an embedded, contextually aware digital support assistant is currently available for 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Following the Built-In Support approach, contextually aware digital support will soon be embedded in additional solutions, including the 51风流Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain and 51风流Cloud ALM solutions.

Key features of the contextually aware embedded support include:

• Intelligent search and the Incident Solution Matching service: These features answer users鈥� questions faster using an intelligent search feature that knows where the customer is and automatically suggests personalized solutions.
• Expert Chat service: Without leaving the application, users can easily initiate a chat session using the Expert Chat service to contact a domain expert who can help solve issues much faster.

Thanks to historical data of past usage, preventative services are inching closer to reality. By analyzing performance and error data, cloud health redefines traditional monitoring and enables preventative action, helping businesses avoid costly disruptions and time-consuming incidents. These advances have helped move 51风流one step closer to offering fully predictive support that can anticipate and solve a problem before it occurs.

Effortless Interaction

Today鈥檚 users are often not the IT experts of yesteryear. Any user may need support, and they increasingly are expecting to access prompt and proper support without leaving the application. This kind of in-context support helps reduce disruptions and costly downtime and improve efficiency, while providing a much more intuitive and streamlined support experience.

Keep Up Customers鈥� Business Continuity

51风流Cloud ALM has already been included in a subscription for 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and is one of the key components of the RISE with 51风流program. The application lifecycle management capabilities provided by 51风流Cloud ALM help customers implement 51风流S/4HANA Cloud quickly and standardize its operations for increased efficiency.

These new solutions and tools are part of the next generation of support technology and customer experience, available now from SAP.

Visit the . Follow 51风流on Twitter at .

About SAP

SAP鈥檚 strategy is to help every business run as an intelligent enterprise. As a market leader in enterprise application software, we help companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 77% of the world鈥檚 transaction revenue touches an 51风流system. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers鈥� businesses into intelligent enterprises. 51风流helps give people and organizations deep business insight and fosters collaboration that helps them stay ahead of their competition. We simplify technology for companies so they can consume our software the way they want 鈥� without disruption. Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables business and public customers across 25 industries globally to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, 51风流helps the world run better and improve people鈥檚 lives. For more information, visit .

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