In 2020, the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is organized around three new categories, which allow for a better comparability among diverse ideas and offer projects a better chance to stand out. Each category reflects a different type of breakthrough thinking, considering the various ways in which innovation drives SAP’s success.
Here, meet the finalists in the Customer Success category.
The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest
employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO
to an individual or a team.
Finalist: The Intelligent Enterprise Showroom
The Intelligent Enterprise Showroom features key SAP technologies and innovations that have made SAP an intelligent enterprise – and thereby makes the notion of the Intelligent Enterprise readily accessible to internal and external audiences. The SAP Experience Technology team is nominated for the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award for their project, the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom.
The showcase can be experienced physically in SAP offices in Walldorf, and soon in Bangalore and Newtown Square. And in response to pandemic restrictions, it will also be made aviailable digitally or in a hybrid form. The team is proud to have created the digital IT showroom from scratch within weeks. It has had over 4,500 visitors.
From the outset, each member of the team was given the freedom to experiment and challenge each other. As Anja Rosker explains, “We’re about not being selfish and are always supportive of each other.”
Showing Customers They Can Do It Too
Becoming a functioning and future-proof intelligent enterprise can be challenging for any company. “With the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom, we’re showing customers what we can do internally so they see they can do it too,” explains team head Oliver Gutzeit.
What makes the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom innovative? One solution combines the stories, learnings, and experiences from all over SAP. Rosker believes that what they achieved is “fixing the gap between knowing what’s there and knowing where to find and how to use it.”
Because the content comes from within SAP and from many different colleagues, it used to be difficult to access and consume knowledge that stemmed over decades. The team fixed this problem by connecting with 3,500 colleagues from the Intelligent Enterprise Group and merged their topics into one consistent platform.
The showroom is a global offering available for all customer-facing activities as well as units inside SAP and can be consumed in a guided or self-guided way. It presents scalable “SAP runs SAP” storytelling packages to help equip colleagues in the field to win deals.
Finalist Fast Facts
- Submission Title: Feel the Heartbeat of the Unbreakable Business: the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom brings the digital company within reach
- Team: Oliver Gutzeit, Sebastian Lang, Anja Rosker, Stephan Kamps, Zoe Angelova-Stoyanov, Lars Langhammer, Christian von Jutrzenka Trzebiatowski, Matthias Wiench
- Number of employees: Eight
- Achievement: More than 7,500 SAP employees and 1,600 external guests have taken guided tours of the Intelligent Enterprise Showroom and “SAP runs SAP” storytelling packages
- Impact: The showroom enables customers to understand what the Intelligent Enterprise is and how SAP can help them transform, using SAP itself as a reference customer
Finalist: Intelligent Case Routing
“Customer success is everything” is a sentence you will hear frequently when talking to Frantisek Zdvoran and his team, which created the Intelligent Case Routing tool for SAP Concur solutions. The tool was designed to enable support teams to respond to and fix customer issues faster.
“One of the biggest problems in support is getting the issue to the right person,” explains Zdvoran. The group tackled the challenge of simplifying the complex, time-consuming, and manual support triage and case routing process. The team describes the relevance of this goal for overall customer success as “faster and more accurate customer case assignment that leads to faster times to closure and happier customers.”
The application uses machine learning-based text recognition. It is about making the machine understand the issue. In order to do so, it looks at all the closed cases in the past, which means looking at the roughly 200,000 cases the support team handles each year.
Prior to the implementation of Intelligent Case Routing, the repetitive task used to consume some of the most senior support engineers’ attention, which is why the team sought to keep the customers’ and their own team’s resources in mind along the way. The team also emphasizes that the application is not taking jobs or responsibilities away from colleagues, but rather is “a force multiplier and enabling technology,” as it frees up capacity for tackling customers’ larger issues.
Equal Parts Human and Code
When asked why the application is innovative, the team says that the deep understanding of the customer support world and its challenges combined with the strength of SAP’s machine learning services were key ingredients for delivering business value-driven results. Automation and machine learning become vehicles to achieve its goal, not just the goal itself. In short, they say, their solution is innovative because it is equal parts human and code.
The application has already been a success. After they had first met at a Hackathon in the SAP office in Prague two-and-a-half years ago, the team members had been working on the application mostly as a side project, investing their own time. In April 2020, the application went live across multiple support queues within SAP and has been in use since then.
Asked why his team deserves the 2020 award, Zdvoran states confidently: “We’re making our customers happier, we’re helping our colleagues, and we’re saving some money along the way.”
Finalist Fast Facts
- Submission Title: Intelligent Case Routing
- Team: Lukas Tancer, Frantisek Zdvoran, Justin Lew, Alena Bartunkova, and Radovan Murin
- Number of employees: The current project team has five employees, with more than 30 support engineers and other employees contributing during the different phases of the project
- Achievement: The application has improved the overall customer experience by leveraging machine learning SAP technology to classify and automate the triage and routing of labor-intensive customer cases, enabling support engineers to focus on resolving customer issues instead of on categorizing them
- Impact: Enabled for the majority of SAP Concur support cases, the application has improved overall customer and employee experience as well as first contact resolution and time to close, and has the potential to be applied to any team within SAP and extended to customers