SAP SE
SAP Enriches The Customer Experience With AI-Powered Support

When you look at the growth of AI in business services and operations, the customer support function emerges as one of the early adopters of AI in service offerings. For example, we are all familiar with the evolution of in-car voice assistants through two decades – chatty companions guiding us through seemingly simple topics like driving directions.

In recent years, we have seen businesses stepping their AI game up a few notches – moving from descriptive to predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Imagine that your car has low tire pressure, but you have not noticed it as you are distracted by the busy traffic or the lack of caffeine in your system. However, the onboard diagnostic system, the OBD scanner, has registered the problem and notified you before your trip can be compromised by a tire blowout or reduced fuel efficiency.

This tire analogy can surprisingly be applied to our IT systems as well: imagine that you get notified by the customer support system about a potential risk even before it escalates into a full-blown disaster that can crash your business day. Predictive diagnostic reports allow you to fix issues or take suitable measures to prevent potential downtimes and outages.

Predictive intelligence is more and more becoming part of the backbone of SAP’s customer support operations. With its AI-based services, SAP prevents cloud outages and service degradations even before they reach the end user. Those of you who are familiar with SAP’s customer support know that the company has adopted proactive monitoring of exceptions, while providing preventive and proactive solutions.

Harnessing the AI-Powered SAP Landscape

This is just one example of how seamless, AI-driven support is changing the game in today’s customer experience. While businesses are continuously reevaluating their business processes and technology infrastructure to become or remain competitive, the significance of topnotch customer support has grown in parallel. As communication channels multiply and customer expectations continue to evolve, companies have learned that organizations that prioritize and excel in customer support are not only meeting a necessity but are also unlocking strategic advantages which set them apart in the global marketplace.

Customers view support as a critical lifeline for the seamless continuity of their business systems. They expect prompt responses and resolutions, expert guidance, and an effortless AI-driven experience.

SAP has taken a significant leap to rethink its customer support strategy to align with these developments. Their vision for this new era of customer support is maximizing customers’ business value with the fast, simple, and smooth operation of an SAP-centric system landscape.

The Transformation Suite Approach for Customers

SAP’s customers look to them for transitioning their businesses to the cloud. New ERP implementations or migrations to the cloud are intensive processes for businesses. While they offer scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, these processes can be riddled with challenges around data migration, integration, and training.

SAP offers customers a transformation suite approach that helps them maximize business value from their SAP solutions.

The approach provides a tool chain to help businesses transform successfully and to bring the four dimensions—business strategy, processes, solutions, and people—together.

Enterprise architecture management, facilitated by LeanIX, offers capability and enterprise apps landscape planning.

Process modeling, offered through SAP Signavio, helps organizations analyze, visualize, and optimize their business processes.

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is supported by SAP Cloud ALM and supports customers in solution design, build and deployment as well as business, user and integration oriented monitoring and alerting.

“Our support services continuously define the industry standard of what customers should expect from customer support”

And finally, process-centric end user enablement with SAP Enable Now and Built-In Support offers real-time guidance and in-product support.

In addition, transitioning to new solutions requires testing. Powered by Tricentis, this can be efficiently automated – fully integrated with test management in SAP Cloud ALM. And as every solution migration includes data, SAP assists customers in managing data complexities during transformation initiatives, facilitated by the SAP Business Transformation Center. It also serves as a guiding resource for customers in navigating the essential stages of their data migration process.

Tackling the Hybrid Landscape Challenges

The ‘RISE with SAP’ offering allows companies to migrate current ERP data and processes to the cloud, with minimal risk and uncompromised standards. One such company is SNP Deutschland GmbH, who accelerated their transformation journey with the help of SAP Cloud ALM.

This was achieved by facilitating testers in seamlessly creating and executing their cases, while providing test managers with the ability to monitor progress and to ensure quality management throughout the transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.

“It was very quick and easy to set up SAP Cloud ALM. We look forward to using it more intensively to drive operational excellence and data quality in our global solutions,” – Johannes Hurst, Vice President of services, Central Europe at SNP Deutschland GmbH.

Making AI-Based Technology Work for Businesses

But what if a technical issue occurs during implementation or operations? Here, SAP envisions self-healing IT – an environment that allows it to solve issues itself before customers notice them and provide solutions without the customer having to search for them. In the cloud world, this vision is increasingly becoming a reality.

SAP already has outbreak detection in place: Based on AI-enabled analysis, this service enables preventive and targeted customer notifications about major issues. In addition to this, support trend analysis can identify trending support content, like SAP Knowledge Base Articles or SAP Notes, so that customers get proactively informed.

In addition to these, a rich set of self-services spares users the effort of creating a ticket or service request. These services deliver proactive solutions, many of them powered by AI.

In the ‘Get Support’ app on SAP’s support interface SAP for Me, customers get intelligent solution recommendations for product issues based on the description of their issue as they type. Often the answer to their question is only one click away.

Back to the car analogy... Imagine SAP’s new-age customer support as your car's advanced safety system. Just like how the automobile sensors detect potential obstacles and take precautionary measures, the IT system can detect potential issues, notify customers, and initiate remedial actions. This is a great step forward, given that speed and efficiency are pivotal to the transformation initiatives of businesses today.

Real-Time and In-Product Support

Most users have different preferences in getting answers. SAP’s customers can use multiple channels to connect with experts in real time, for example, they can initiate chats or schedule calls, via the new SAP for Me platform.

“Our support services continuously define the industry standard of what customers should expect from customer support,” says Stefan Steinle, EVP, Head of Customer Support and Innovation at SAP SE.

A game-changer in this approach is bi-directional customer interaction, which facilitates proactive communication. This approach thrives on existing, built-in support features and enables SAP in informing users about potential issues and support-critical information directly within the business application. This transforms the customer experience by eliminating the need for customers to raise a support case with SAP.

Being a communication-focused business, SAP's customer support capitalizes on the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) (along with existing support technologies) that help prevent technical issues with predictive support capabilities, enhance self-service rates, and resolve issues with high speed and quality

What’s Next: Leveraging Large Language Models [LLMs] and Integrating for Seamless Business Transformations

SAP aims to further harmonize and expand AI-driven real-time support across its product portfolio using advanced technologies.

“We focus on innovating to create positive and sustainable outcomes for our customers, partners, and SAP employees,” says Steinle. “Every idea has the potential to positively influence thousands and even millions of lives, and our global footprint practically guarantees it.”

One example of such innovation is the use of large language models (LLM) and their ability to handle a wide range of text-related tasks.

According to Steinle, “Being a communication-focused business, SAP's customer support capitalizes on the generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) (along with existing support technologies) that help prevent technical issues with predictive support capabilities, enhance self-service rates, and resolve issues with high speed and quality”.

“Our customers know that SAP will always support them no matter what. We realize that our customer support also comes with lots of technology. But, in the end, it is a people business, and when people interact, it is important to be clear on how we do this. The customer support team works passionately to prevent customer issues, and if they do occur, the team makes it their own issue, driving it to resolution as fast as possible,” says Steinle.