A house is one of the scariest purchases anyone can make, no matter if you’re a first-time home buyer or an experienced professional. There are structural elements – from the foundation to internal systems and appliances – that must be used and maintained regularly, which can be overwhelming if you do not know their functions or how to operate them. For this reason, many buyers look for home warranties that guarantee the swift, nondisruptive resolution of major and minor issues.
Such peace of mind is also valuable when implementing new technology and moving to the cloud. Our customers invest considerable money, time, and effort in creating a digital landscape that will support their strategic visions for years to come. Outcomes and bottom-line growth – not increasing the risk of downtime, siloed information, and broken technical and functional connections – are the objectives of these initiatives.
Many of our customers enjoy the ease of knowing that their digital investments are secure and protected through our accelerated support services offered in the New SAP MaxAttention engagement model. I reached out to Mischa Orlowski, engagement architect and global program owner at SAP, to discuss how the services help our customers’ digital systems meet their unique business needs.
Q: How do our customers’ support demands change as they migrate on-premise IT operations to the cloud?
A: The cloud world is unlike that of on-premise. There are different implications when issues, such as diminished performance, system malfunction, or unexpected software behavior, emerge.
For example, on-premise landscapes are often supported by IT teams with the expertise and knowledge to create patches, modify code, or implement extensions and connectors. However, businesses that leverage cloud technology are interested in those details but want to have the provider handle them. As a result, trust is a critical part of the cloud experience. Companies need to trust that their cloud provider will resolve issues faster than they could and help their solutions run without any downtime.
These differences are not due to a lack of knowledge. Instead, the expectations and promises of the cloud are not the same as those of on-premise environments. Our customers invest in us to help create a secure and protected cloud landscape. In turn, they only need to understand the business capabilities and opportunities enabled by the latest technology in the cloud. With this insight, they can plan to adopt what technologies make sense for their business needs and how to help their hybrid applications run seamlessly.
Q: How do our accelerated support services help customers avoid business disruption commonly associated with cloud migrations?
A: With personalization and purpose, the services add an element of standard support and global incident handling. We do not change already existing processes, but we do offer additional engagement responsibilities that meet the demands of the productive and associated systems that our premium engagement customers rely on, including:
- De-escalation architect: Receives the initial support request and orchestrates resolution provisioning of high-priority incidents
- Incident manager: Provides regular alignment, reporting, and direction on high-priority incidents to engage the right experts and help resolve issues quickly and effectively
- Product engineer: Offers an additional, yet optional, level of care, knowledge, and guidance to help move the resolution process along
By accessing a designated point of contact, our customers can take advantage of this integrated team to quickly resolve incidents based on predefined terms, such as qualified response and corrective action times and 24/7 support. Furthermore, they gain direct access to insight that helps fulfill specific support requirements as well as on-call duties to safeguard special project situations.
Q: Our customers often tell us that they value their access and interaction with our de-escalation architects, incident managers, and product engineers. Can you explain how this experience empowers them to move forward in their digital maturity?
A: At the most basic level, our customers experience a personalized incident management process that is fast and precise. They can leverage support offerings and instructions that meet their unique needs while avoiding unnecessary, repetitive feedback loops.
For customers that decide they want more assistance, we offer extended incident management services, such as root-cause analysis and pattern detection, to tackle very complex business scenarios. Furthermore, we work with our customers to establish standard and premium service-level agreements for on-premise incident processing.
Optional, special-purpose, accelerated support services are also offered to our customers on top of any engagement level. On-call duty services support critical activities, such as upgrades. Secure support services address the needs of highly regulated industries. And perhaps most valuable of all is on-demand access to ad hoc advice for specific solutions and business cases from our product engineers.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve offered a real-world view of focus topics that can help to acquire the foundation and capabilities of an intelligent enterprise. To discover the opportunities ahead for your business, visit the series landing page, read the overview, “Customer Success for the Intelligent Enterprise,” or reach out via email at maxattention@sap.com.
Christian Leja is director of SAP MaxAttention Solution Marketing. Follow him on LinkedIn.
Mischa Orlowski is engagement architect and global program owner. Follow him on LinkedIn.
