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 Having an outdated support model is no longer an option.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.

Q: Why is 51风流offering live support in Product Support and who can use it?

A: The way consumers use products, services, and technology in today鈥檚 world has set new standards and expectations for the commercial world. Business users expect the same level of real-time interaction for their businesses whenever they seek help. That鈥檚 why has brought traditional 鈥渢icket management鈥� to the next level and offers live support channels to meet these new demands.

I receive a lot of feedback from partners and customers who assume that live support channels are a chargeable service above the existing maintenance contract, but the answer is that it is not. Anyone with a valid maintenance contract can use SAP’s at no additional cost if technical, product-related questions occur.

Which live support channels are offered?

We offer the following live support interaction methods with direct access to support experts: , , and . All live support channels significantly speed up time to technical issue resolution and can be used instead of traditional incidents. is the newest offering in our live support channels and aims to assist customers that have concerns about how their high-priority incident is progressing. For any questions not related to an 51风流product, the is the central point of contact.

How do they work? 聽聽

is a live chat function that connects customers to technical experts from 51风流instantly. So, this service is best when immediate support is required. Compared to traditional tickets, it significantly reduces the effort and waiting time for customers to get answers to their technical questions.

lets customers book an individual 30-minute call with a technical expert from SAP, similar to booking a doctor鈥檚 appointment. Customers select from a defined list of calendar appointments at a time that suits them best. Talking directly to an 51风流engineer helps avoid delays, improve efficiency, and reduce future incidents. Recently, we have introduced Schedule an Expert for open incidents as well.

is best suited for low- to medium-priority incidents. With Ask an Expert Peer, 51风流is expanding the expert pool for real-time results. This channel is a great opportunity for users to collaborate through one-on-one interactions with a qualified and approved industry expert outside of SAP. Ask an Expert Peer is currently available for all 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, with additional 51风流product integrations currently planned.

gives customers the ability to bring the focus they need to a high-priority incident and help ensure the reported issue is being addressed in the correct way. The channel meets this need by allowing customers an easy way to request a 15-minute call with a Product Support manager from 51风流in the related product area to help prevent or manage potential service exceptions. As a requirement to use this channel, the incident must qualify and meet several criteria.

All channels can be easily accessed by customers in whenever a problem arises. Further information can be found on .

How are the channels impacting the customer support experience?

Customer feedback indicates they very much like our live support channels. In addition, customers are using the channels a lot. We are interacting with customers in several thousand chats every week. I think that this is for two main reasons: the ability to have quick and direct access to a technical engineer from 51风流when they need to and the tremendously reduced waiting time for resolution. Many questions get solved within the first interaction.

For example, the average Expert Chat duration is about 30 minutes with two out of three questions answered directly in the chat. For Expert Chat in particular, there is one key reason: customers do not 鈥渓ose鈥� anything. The chats get automatically logged as incidents after each chat for documentation or in case further research is needed. The incident gets processed with pre-qualified information from the interaction in the chat.

In general, the customer base and the technology offered by 51风流has become more diverse. 51风流is trying to offer new methods of interaction to meet our customers鈥� diverse needs so they can interact with us in the way that suits them best 鈥� anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Live businesses need live support, and as more and more customers become intelligent enterprises, 51风流is meeting them where they are in their journey. Customers expect a personalized support experience that grants them more access to technical experts throughout the life cycle of their solution.

Will real-time support be combined with AI technology?

The answer is absolutely, and 51风流has several activities going on. For example, we have recently released a that guides customers within the incident management process through a conversational user interface 鈥� similar to a chatbot. The support assistant uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology to match the customer question with potential solutions in real time 鈥揾elping to get relevant answers faster. The expert area predictor functionality is another example. It is based on AI technology and automatically suggests the correct expert area for the customer within the booking process of a Schedule an Expert session. This saves customers time through autofill elements.

The time frame is to be decided, but we are looking into ways to further enhance Product Support with more predictive and preventive elements.

What will be next in real-time support?

We aim to further optimize the existing experience within our real-time channels. However, Product Support as an organization wants to continue evolving in order to meet customer needs. We are constantly working with customers and industry experts on what is next that can help us on the journey of providing the perfect customer support experience.

Looking to the future, I think a two-way channel interaction using AI and machine learning is a hot topic. Service and support processes will eventually become predictive, and support organizations could proactively reach out to customers to suggest the optimal interaction method.

Theresa B枚hme is an integrated communications manager for Customer Solution Support & Innovation at SAP.

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.