On April 1, 2024, SAP established Customer Service & Delivery. This is a new board area focused on introducing innovation and maximizing customer value in the cloud.
This is good news not only for customers but also for the ecosystem. In recent months, SAP has recognized that as engineering teams innovate, they must respond by providing guidance on how customers can quickly adopt and leverage innovations. Customer Services & Delivery was created to bring together services that help customers leverage the value of SAP's integrated portfolio.
Customer support organizations fit very naturally into this strategic arrangement because of their capabilities. To learn more about how Customer Support enables and powers an AI-powered end-to-end customer support experience, we spoke with Stefan Steinle, Executive Vice President and Head of Customer Support at SAP SE.
Q: How would you describe the role of customer support in SAP's success?
answer: Customer support is a differentiator among similarly positioned companies in terms of feature richness, ease of use, quality, deployability, and configurability. Onboarding new customers is considered a huge success, but being able to please and retain customers is equally important.
SAP support has been highly impactful in advancing SAP customer success stories by proactively addressing customer needs and building long-term relationships. We are a business partner that not only helps our customers solve their everyday problems, but actively collaborates with them to achieve their business goals.
Our customer support group is about more than just bug fixes. In addition to regular ticket resolution, we use his SAP Cloud ALM to enable our customers to migrate to the cloud, operate hybrid environments, and assist with application lifecycle management. We help customers self-resolve through self-service and proactively consult with engineering teams to improve SAP products based on support-related feedback and learnings. Thanks to support engineers, SAP has delivered over 1,000 improvements in the past 12 months.
Q: How is SAP's AI story shaping up when it comes to customer support? What is the AI strategy in customer support?
answer: With a focus on value realization, efforts to enhance AI support are at an all-time high. First, we have invested in using AI to digitize mission-critical business processes.
There are three parts to incorporating these business processes into AI-powered services. SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite allows you to measure metrics about your business processes to assess efficiencies, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement. Alternatively, customers can use this as a blueprint to review these metrics themselves. The next layer provides AI services that transform your business. And finally, we provide a platform that provides tools to support a closed-loop approach to AI innovation in service and support.
When it comes to customer support AI strategies, we believe AI innovation must go hand in hand with application integration. This means that AI developments can only deliver business value when they are injected and integrated into the applications used in business processes and scenarios.
Q: Can you give some examples of how AI can deliver business value in the context of customer support?
answer: There are countless real-world applications, but they can be broadly categorized into three groups.
Use AI to fix it. This means using AI for support experiences, personalization, and data-driven decision-making. Connect using AI. Here you'll find platforms, tools, and applications that align with your customer touchpoints. Use AI to catalyze. This includes self-service, problem-solving, predictive and preventive support.
Q: How does SAP recognize this?
answer: This is achieved by leveraging an AI development platform that allows you to centralize all your service and support data in one place. This platform helps customers unlock endless possibilities based on their business-specific needs. On our part, we will definitely explore the power of AI in every aspect of our business.
By building AI models, we have the power to transform our businesses in any way we want. Connect these models to support systems and portals to maximize the value of AI in support. By collecting data and events from support systems and portals, you can also train AI models that can later provide value. By processing customer context and history, you can provide a highly personalized support experience at runtime.
There's more to come, but for now, join us on the Customer Support Track at the SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference Orlando, June 3-5, 2024, to learn more about the technologies and strategies shaping the future of customer support and business transformation. I encourage you to learn. Bookmark your favorite topics in this guide: The Ultimate Guide to SAP Sapphire Orlando in 2024.
Renuka Abraham works in Customer Support at SAP.
