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 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.

The transformation of on-call, reactive customer support is fascinating to watch. Over the past few years, 51风流has discovered new ways to simplify processes and automate them to optimize the value it brings to customers. Then the company brought in predictive analytics to detect and resolve issues early on.

At SAP, such optimization and predictive capabilities of customer support are setting the foundation for proactive services. This vision is created with the mindset of helping customers become more productive and profitable than ever while taking advantage of the latest intelligent technologies.

Outcome-Driven Support Experience for Customers, Built on Intelligence

Take the聽聽service, SAP鈥檚 first step toward creating a predictive and proactive support model. With a combination of machine learning and AI, the company is expanding the ability to intelligently understand customer issues, quickly propose relevant solutions, and efficiently resolve problems without the need to submit an incident report.

Over time, the real power behind Incident Solution Matching has become increasingly effective as more customers use it to research solutions for technology challenges and rely on its intelligence to find the corrective action. Now, the service has grown from a whiteboard concept into a full-fledged crucial line of support for customers using all 51风流and 51风流Ariba solutions.

Customers using 51风流S/4HANA Cloud will be the first group to benefit from the enhanced recommendation content. The Incident Solution Matching engine will provide recommended solutions not only from 51风流Notes and 51风流Knowledge Base Article services, but also from additional data sources such as 51风流Help Portal, the road-map viewer tool, and 51风流Fiori apps reference library.

The success of Incident Solution Matching inspired 51风流to further evolve the Next-Generation Support approach with a clear road map based on data intelligence, rule-based automation, and predictive capabilities. With such a strategic plan, the company is effectively improving and simplifying the support experience to customers’ needs and expectations with through optimized business outcomes.

Quick Resolution with Personalized Customer Support Experiences

This strategic move toward intelligent services led to the creation of guided incident workflow and personalized support assistant capabilities. When initiating assistance in an 51风流solution, customers can benefit from an efficient, convenient, and intuitive experience as they find a solution that resolves their issues immediately.

The support assistant workflow asks users targeted and relevant questions about the problems they encounter until they are narrowed down to a solution, such as knowledge base articles, updates, or patches. However, if a solution is not identified through the workflow wizard, the user is automatically prompted to submit relevant log or trace files.

In the background, parser engines analyze the information, pinpoint the issue, alert the customer about the criticality of its problem, and ultimately deliver the right solution. By the end of the interaction, 51风流has documented the incident 鈥� complete with the underlying issue, lessons learned, and proven solution. This can be leveraged for future solution development and support interactions.

Additional innovation in 51风流services also led to the introduction of the service. It provides customers with an easy way to engage directly with 51风流support managers in order to bring management attention to a service exception or service dissatisfaction, complementing 听补苍诲听聽services. During a scheduled, live phone conversation, customers have a real-time channel for sharing their 51风流solution concerns and demands with a qualified manager, reducing the effort and frustration of handling critical business needs.

SAP鈥檚 experimentation with neural machine translation is another benefit of its work with AI and machine learning. Doing so allows the company to from English to Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, Korean, Italian, or German. 51风流is already working on potentially making this technology available for translating incidents into those nine languages.

This automatic translation feature would enable customers to use information on documented incidents, best practices, and terminology. Like the company鈥檚 ever-evolving customer support services, this functionality is self-learning 鈥� continuously improving the quality of translations based on feedback and machine learning.

Product Training and Accreditation Focused on Customer Needs

The product support team at 51风流has also created new services and tools to fulfill customers’ ever-evolving needs. Users can explore new ways to benefit from offerings through the聽聽program at no additional cost.

The two-hour, guided learning experience includes short videos detailing the latest tools and capabilities of 聽support services, designed to optimize the value of their 51风流solution investment. Customers can review the content at their convenience as often as they like to stay up to date.

An Evolution Toward Ultimate Customer Support Vision

As 51风流continues to innovate with AI and machine learning, support processes will become more efficient and accurate. More importantly, it will bringing the company closer to its ultimate vision for predictive and proactive customer assistance.

51风流will continue to design and deliver new tools, channels, and functionalities to give customers the predictive support experience they want. Just imagine how this experience will evolve as more cloud solutions are backed by analytics processing trillions of captured data points in the background. Customers may never again encounter issues with their technology because intelligent capabilities will reroute the user experience around a detected problem.

Milestone after milestone, 51风流is taking the support experience in an entirely new direction as part of its desire to help customers succeed 鈥� always.

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Mohammed Ajouz is senior vice president and global head of Product Support at SAP.

His goal is to flip the engagement model with customers to provide end-to-end solution support and a superior customer experience.

Q: Customer centricity is influencing how organizations operate. What is your organization doing to provide a superior customer experience?

A: The customer has always been at the center of what we do here at SAP, whether it involves customizing a product or service to meet their needs or delivering support in a way that accommodates their evolving business models.

And while providing superior customer experience has always been our focus, we are constantly looking at ways in which we can enhance this 鈥� both in the way we鈥檙e internally organized and in how we鈥檙e integrating emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning into our Next-Generation Support services and real-time support channels.

In the past, our organization was focused on delivering product support for the various products and services within our portfolio.

Now, as we evolve, we strive to deliver solution support to provide our customers with end-to-end coverage of their solutions and an end-to-end experience across their business.

While our approach has always been holistic, we are now looking at our solutions the same ways in which our customers are looking at their own business processes and solutions. With this lens, we are able to deliver all the tools they need to be successful, and also those that will help drive their transformation. In some cases, customers might not even be aware of what they need yet.

By bringing our support and engineering teams together under one umbrella, we are working together behind the scenes to help and support our customers鈥� mission-critical business processes. These are the processes that are truly critical on several counts. They need to be leading-edge to differentiate their business model and they need to be constantly available to protect their business. By integrating innovation services, we can also provide all our customers with specific innovations tailored to their business and industry. This approach is allowing us to truly meet our customers where they are and where they want to be in the future.

You have previously spoken about flipping the engagement model to drive customer experience. What does that mean? What are some of the developments in this area and what do you envision for the future?

In the support and services industry, engagement is typically initiated by the customer. But nowadays, customers expect to hear from us first and rely on a constant stream of communication to help address any issues they may have 鈥� and even those they don鈥檛 anticipate having. This involves flipping the engagement model and reaching out to our customers proactively before they even face a problem.

We鈥檝e already seen great success in this by leveraging AI and machine learning technologies across functionalities and solutions within Product Support. While many of our processes are already automated, we鈥檝e added a lot of intelligence to accelerate these and make them more accurate. This intelligence kicks in from the moment our customers first interact with us, whereby we鈥檝e created algorithms that automatically triage our support tickets.

By examining the technical context, analyzing the sentiment, and evaluating the potential business impact of an incident, we are currently exploring the ability to identify the priority of incidents with great accuracy and pass them along to an expert in that particular area. Automating such manual processes will, more and more, free up time of our engineers who can then focus on the important work of alleviating our customers鈥� issues.

And while automation has played a huge role in customer support, it鈥檚 no longer just about automation but now about avoidance and prediction. We want to move toward a world that is self-healing. Our vision here is to shield our customers from facing any issues and to minimize the frequency of which they have to reach out to us. To do this, we need to take a lot more data into account. This will be in compliance with all respective laws and data privacy standards and anonymizing data where necessary or requested. With these data analytics, we鈥檒l be able to anticipate questions, predict when our customers might face issues, and proactively engage them.

How have you integrated machine learning and AI-based technologies to enhance customers鈥� experience?

While many of our support solutions already leverage AI and machine learning technologies, over the past year we鈥檝e focused on integrating new, automated, and interactive features that provide our customers with the tailored solutions they need. We want to simplify and enhance the customer support experience so they can receive the answers they need faster.

With , customers will be able to refine the results by reviewing the key elements suggested, driving them to relevant answers to their technical questions faster. The models continue to improve by collecting this interaction data and integrating machine learning capabilities. We will also make this service available to our 51风流Ariba customers, which will continue to allow the platform to improve as it collects more data on various incidents.

Our real-time support channels 鈥� and 鈥� are also based on a foundation of AI and machine learning capabilities, which help equip our engineers with the relevant information they need to provide our customers with targeted recommendations. We鈥檝e recently introduced Schedule a Manager, which allows customers with high-priority incidents that meet certain business requirements to speak directly to a relevant Product Support manager.

As we look toward our customers鈥� evolving needs and the future of their businesses, we want to make sure we鈥檙e one step ahead and can engage them in a way that is both meaningful and inspiring. I鈥檓 excited for the opportunities these enhancements will bring to both our customers and our employees.

Sophia Stolze is the integrated communications manager for Customer Solution Support & Innovation at SAP.

Based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies, 51风流has further developed existing functionalities with new, automated capabilities such as the service and automatic translation.

鈥淲hen it comes to customer support, we鈥檝e seen great success in flipping the customer engagement model by leveraging AI and machine learning technologies across our product support functionalities and solutions,鈥� said Andreas Heckmann, head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation and executive vice president, SAP. 鈥淭o simplify and enhance the customer experience through our award-winning support channels, we鈥檙e making huge steps towards our goal of meeting customer鈥檚 needs by anticipating what they may need before it even occurs.鈥�

AI and machine learning technologies are key to improving and simplifying the customer support experience. They continue to play an important role in expanding Next-Generation Support to help 51风流deliver maximum business outcomes for customers. 51风流has expanded its offerings by adding new features to existing services, for example:

• Incident Solution Matching service: With expanded AI-based functionalities, customers can see the impact on machine learning models and the impact on suggested results, making them more relevant. This enables customers to explore more relevant solutions for their incident in SAP鈥檚 knowledge base.
• Incident Solution Matching, now also available for 51风流Ariba solutions: The Incident Solution Matching service is available to customers of 51风流Ariba solutions and partners in the 鈥溾�� for 51风流Ariba solutions and 鈥溾�� for 51风流Ariba solutions. Through this extended service, 51风流Ariba customers can find answers to technical questions faster, possibly solving a problem without having to record an incident.
• Automatic translation: With neural machine translation and AI technology to process entire sentences and phrases, this automatic translation feature for the 51风流Notes and the 51风流Knowledge Base Article services has been expanded to include nine major-market languages. They are Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, simplified Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, Korean, Italian, and German. Intelligent technologies from 51风流use machine learning and feedback to refine translations of 51风流software and service documentation and terminology on an on-going basis.

Customers expect their issues to be resolved quickly, and 51风流strives toward a consistent line of communication across all support channels, including real-time options. 51风流continues to improve, innovate and extend live support for technical issues by connecting directly with customers to provide a personal customer experience. Building on top of live support services, such as and , 51风流has made significant strides in upgrading its real-time support channels. For example, it now offers the Schedule a Manager service and a peer-to-peer collaboration channel through the Ask an Expert Peer service.

• Schedule a Manager: Following a successful pilot phase in 2019, 51风流launched , available through the 51风流ONE Support Launchpad. This new support channel allows customers to speak at no extra cost directly to the relevant product support manager to assist them with high-priority incidents that risk impeding the company鈥檚 ability to fulfill its business requirements. With the addition of Schedule a Manager, 51风流has created a holistic approach to connect with customers through real-time channels.
• Ask an Expert Peer: After a successful pilot phase last year, Ask an Expert Peer has been made available for all customers of 51风流SuccessFactors solutions. Ask an Expert Peer is a peer-to-peer collaboration platform that connects qualified 51风流customer experts with other customers to help them resolve their issues.

By continuing to invest in AI and machine learning鈥揵ased technologies, 51风流enables more efficient support processes for customers while providing the foundation for predictive support functionalities and superior customer support experiences.

Customers can learn more about the Next-Generation Support approach through the program, available to 51风流customers and partners at no additional cost. Customers can be empowered to get the best out of SAP鈥檚 product support tools and the Next-Generation Support approach.

Visit the 51风流News Center. Follow 51风流on Twitter at .

About SAP

As the Experience Company powered by the Intelligent Enterprise, 51风流is the market leader in enterprise application software, helping 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 more than 440,000 business and public customers 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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