Making support smart

In this day and age, not only humans can be labeled as “smart” anymore. Everything around us – including phones, watches and cars – has become smart. Customers have come to expect the convenience delivered by this intelligence, albeit artificial, in every aspect of their lives – and B2B consumers are no different.

As enterprise software applications become more sophisticated, businesses need customer support that is just as intuitive, predictive and proactive as a smart device. This is especially true as Gen-Z – a demographic that has grown up with these smart technologies – enters the workforce, and expects these convenient qualities in their work life. Luckily, with the continued advancement in SAP’s digital support experience, SAP is making the intelligent enterprise a reality.

Bringing support to where you are

In a perfect world, support wouldn’t be necessary, and all problems would be avoided before they occur. Until then, however, the most convenient form of support is one that meets the customer where they are, when they need it. Through the expansion of built-in support for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP customers are getting just that.

Instead of having to leave the specific SAP solution to seek support in a separate window or application, users can now open a support chat window right where they are through the click of a button, giving them access to built-in support through SAP’s own digital assistant – SAP CoPilot.

Similar to a smartphone’s ability to pick up on your location and make restaurant recommendations within your vicinity, built-in support is aware of where you are in your SAP solution, and can make support recommendations to speed up problem resolution accordingly. Through the use of SAP Leonardo Machine Learning and artificial intelligence (AI), built-in support quickly analyzes informal support messages and enriches them with context information. This information is then used for a personalized, conversational support experience within the SAP CoPilot chat window, where users are able to do everything from accessing relevant documentation from SAP’s knowledge base, to filing an incident.

The current use cases are just the beginning of built-in support. We plan to expand it to other SAP solutions. Soon, customers will have in-solution access to directly connect with SAP support experts in real-time using the Expert Chat and Schedule an Expert services. And additional sources of information will be added to tap into SAP’s comprehensive knowledge base.

Streamlined support – inside and out

In order to facilitate an intelligent customer-facing support experience, the same needs to happen on the back end. Next-Generation Support also takes this into account, and is using machine learning and AI to enhance the role of SAP experts and support personnel.

You can think of these technologies as the support specialists’ “smart watch.” Just like these smart devices can read the wearer’s vitals and identify specific health issues, using natural language processing, machine learning and AI that work on the back end of support at SAP accurately interpret the customer’s issue based on their unique solution environment, the language used in their support request and the urgency of the issue at hand. This condensed, directive information is then passed onto the support specialist who is assigned the incident, enabling them to narrow down hundreds of possible solutions to only the most relevant and customer-specific options. As a result, the customer receives a definitive solution in no time, without sacrificing precision. 

Support that speaks your language

While virtually any device can be equipped with “smart” qualities, the capabilities that these enable mean nothing if they are not delivered in a language that the user understands. The same is true for customer support. Since the SAP user ecosystem spans borders and cultures, we’ve equipped support with expanded translation capabilities – not only in the built-in support service.

Through automatic translation generated by SAP Translation Hub, SAP customers can now translate incident and solution-specific articles in SAP’s knowledge base into other languages. Prefer getting your SAP Knowledge Base Article in Japanese or Brazilian Portuguese? – One click, no probem.

Are you interested to learn more? See today’s announcement in the SAP News Center. Going to visit this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Orlando, Florida (June 5-7, 2018)? We’re excited to be able to highlight and demo how you can transition from ticket-based to AI-driven real-time support in my keynote. On the show floor, in the SAP Digital Business Services area, you can get in-depth information in sessions and at information booths on Next-Generation Support, SAP Enterprise Support, application lifecycle management with SAP Solution Manager, and much more.

And, we’re even more excited to watch the delight it brings to our customers, and the innovation that it enables for them.