Oguzhan Genis, business product owner of SAP for Me, answers five questions about the portal.
Q: How would you describe the experience of using SAP for Me?
A: As a customer, it’s your digital portal. It’s basically the same thing you probably have with your utility provider or bank. You log into a private environment, and you can see your account, manage your preferences, and more. This portal is, of course, more complex, but generally speaking, it is your digital access into your relationship with your supplier.
What sparked the creation of the portal, and why was it a priority?
The impetus for the project was customer feedback saying that it was challenging to do business with SAP at that time because it felt like dealing with multiple enterprises. We had acquired some new companies and they all had their own processes with their own tools, their own environment, and their own engagement. It was difficult for customers to see SAP as a unified solution.
I took over the project when we were still calling it My Home. The goal all along has been nothing less than to change the way customers do business with SAP. Customer experience is so important, even more so in the cloud because there are many digital touchpoints. We wanted every interaction between us and the customer to improve their experience and provide them with better outcomes. That’s why we believe that the introduction of SAP for Me marks the beginning of a new customer experience.
What happens with other entry points now that SAP has streamlined down to just SAP.com, SAP Community, and SAP for Me?
The others become what we are calling secondary entry points. One example would be the Cloud Availability Center service. We are still in the process of determining exactly how these will be accessed because they contain great relevant content, but they are siloed from one another, which runs counter to our customer experience goal. In some cases, certain applications will be migrated or integrated into one of the three primary entry points. A few will be retired. Others will remain as a content provider but will be accessible through one of the main entry points. There are many applications in the support area, like the example with Cloud Availability Center, which we are already integrating successfully into SAP for Me.
Will SAP for Me also be the go-to place for engagement with SAP support?
Yes. Getting SAP support is an important element that SAP wants to enable customers and partners to do in SAP for Me. Therefore, it is planned to transition all support features from SAP ONE Support Launchpad to SAP for Me in a phased approach. As a first step, we have recently released the newly designed services and support and systems and provisioning dashboards. With this, more than one million support users can now perform all their support-related tasks by accessing the support applications directly via SAP for Me.
What are some of the benefits of SAP for Me?
Internally, we created an employee view so that our relevant employees can see exactly what the customer can see now, which is great for our colleagues. It allows us to answer customer questions easily and to find information much more quickly.
For our customers, it empowers them to answer questions on their own, especially for certain recurring activities. For example, with regards to tenants, how many do I have on my list of licenses? And how much did I consume? These are standard questions, but it was difficult for a customer to find this out on their own previously, and it was time consuming for both parties when they regularly had to inquire with us. It’s also much easier for customers to know who to contact with specific questions, which, again, will increase efficiency for both our colleagues and our customers.
And there are, of course, many more benefits, such as easily purchasing additional licenses for over 1,400 cloud solutions from SAP with your individually pre-negotiated terms and conditions and tracking details of each order including renewal periods and fees, license materials by order and contract, payment details, and addresses.
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Martin Gwisdalla is part of Global PR at SAP.