Getting Support Your Way: Next-Generation Support And Self-Service

Admittedly, customer self-service isn’t exactly earth shattering news. On the other hand, I still see a lot of self-service scenarios that clearly were not designed with the customer in mind. So, let’s get one thing out of the way right now – customer self-service is not about customers doing the work that customer support should be doing. It is all about giving customers more choice on how to solve their problems.

Imagine you are facing a technical issue with an appliance at home. What do you usually do to get help? Well, it probably depends on the issue. For a washing machine that is leaking, you may probably get immediate expert help. For a more standard issue on, let’s say, your mobile phone, you may search on the web if anyone else had that same issue before and how it was solved – and likely you will get an answer that solves your problem within minutes. With Next-Generation Support, SAP aims to do the same: Providing answers to your questions in the way you prefer.

Including self-help from SAP? Yes. Essentially, self-service scenarios are just one option. Self-service is a scenario that makes a lot of sense in certain situations, for specific use cases, where it is much better than human interaction. If you want an answer on a specific case, be it that you are in urgent need of technical support for a problem, or you just have a question that you urgently need an answer for, or you have a question where getting an answer can wait some time – there are different ways available to get that answer.

Besides logging an incident, of course, you can use our live support channels. Directly chatting to an expert is one option; Expert Chat provides immediate assistance from the very best SAP support expert at hand in real-time. You may also make an appointment with that same expert using our new Schedule an Expert function.

And you can have a “chat with the SAP support infrastructure”. Basically, our infrastructure offers a dialog that helps you to go down to the bottom of your question, your inquiry or your problem in a very structured way. We launched our new Guided Answers service at SAPPHIRE NOW this year, using decision trees to provide answers even for quite complex questions; for convenience, it is integrated into our standard search on the SAP Support Portal. In addition, Guided Answers allows you to get valuable information that you may not be asking for initially. It allows us, once we understand the nature of your inquiry or question, to provide much more context, answers and feedback – that may even exceed what you originally expected to get. This may be web sessions that are offered, white papers or other assets.

What about looking on the web? Sure. You can use your preferred search engine to find answers, directly from SAP. We are sharing our know-how in Knowledge Base Articles (KBAs), with new KBAs added to our knowledge base every day. We have re-designed our knowledge base to allow searching through Google, which has already indexed over 70,000 of our more than 150,000 KBAs. You can also find many answers in the SAP Community. We offer information on social media like Twitter and Facebook. You can subscribe to specific topics via WhatsApp. And you can use intelligent tools for troubleshooting.

Speed

Obviously, the speed of self-service is what makes it very attractive. If there is a straight answer to a question, the fastest possible way of doing this is through a self-service that gives you the answer instantaneously. This is much more efficient than even having to chat or sending a ticket where you must wait for a reply.

What makes a beneficial self-service – providing a choice of channels

We use multiple ways to make these answers available in our knowledge base – because different people have different preferences how they work in their daily life. A successful self-service cannot mean that you force customers to go to a certain channel or to basically only offer a very limited choice of channels. With a successful self-service, you should allow customers to do it whichever way they are used to in their everyday interactions, be it private or professional.

The technical means of achieving a good self-service scenario would be either in the product, it would be a mobile solution, it would be offered on a portal as well, it would be a community based approach – all these are possible channels that make self-service beneficial. From a design point of view, a great self-service is very different from just making the existing internal tools available to customers. I think a bad shortcut some companies take on self-service is when they just make their internal search engines and tools available to customers.

In my opinion a successful self-service needs to provide a much more intuitive way of working. It means you need to anticipate what use cases may be relevant for a customer. You have to anticipate the different nature of potential scenarios your self-service needs to cater for. If the nature of the problem is highly technical the approach may be fundamentally different to a pure business question or a configuration related inquiry.

The type of questions that can be answered

Any type of question can potentially be answered in a self-service scenario. It can be a very deep technical topic that may best be solved in a dialog. With Guided Answers, this is what you get: Going through a tree of questions and answers, you are guided down a certain path to resolution.

The spectrum of users for all these self-help scenarios is wide – from the highly technical, very text-heavy IT engineer to purely business users like an HR Business Partner for instance. The nature of their questions will be fundamentally different, the way they work will be fundamentally different, the expectation towards the experience they will have in that process will be fundamentally different – so we are permanently working on anticipating all these different “personas” and defining new use-cases or scenarios.

What can customers expect in the future?

With our Next-Generation Support approach, our support workforce is currently going through a fundamental mindset shift. Knowledge management is an area where we invest substantially in upskilling – enabling a support engineer to not only be the “artist” solving a problem, but at the same time the “curator” for knowledge in a specific area. The idea behind: An answer to a question that SAP has provided once should be made readily available to our customers and other support engineers for any future inquiry – using assets like Knowledge Base Articles.

We are constantly working on extending the value of SAP’s support and we are investing more than ever in innovations, including new self-service options. Our customers use SAP’s products and services to digitalize their businesses. SAP Support is doing just the same alongside them, always with the customer in mind. We are continuously driven by a few essential questions: How can we provide a service that delights our customers, always – and what are our customers’ needs in the “digital era”?

Some of our solutions are already offered today, some will be available short-term, and others will still take us a while if we want to bring them to a level that we think is good enough to offer them.

We have a strong innovation pipeline and customers will benefit from a continuous release of new supporting features. Our ongoing projects that leverage machine learning and cognitive computing are very much advanced already and customers will soon start to benefit. We provided a preview at SAPPHIRE NOW of how this could look like in the future – essentially moving support into the product, right where you need it.

Self-Service, if done right, is a valuable channel that customers appreciate. Our customers have given us very positive feedback and we are encouraged by it to take self-service to the next level – always true to the SAP Support vision: Delight Customers. Always.