The race to the cloud is on in earnest, and across the world businesses are vying to tap the full potential of digitalization. Businesses that follow the lead of cloud-migration outperformers could unlock up to US$1 trillion in value, according to a recent report by the global consulting firm McKinsey.
As a partner to countless companies undertaking digital transformations, SAP is constantly delivering best-in-class solutions to help unlock that value for customers. A key element of this process is listening to – and taking seriously – the needs expressed by customers. As a result, SAP is now reimagining, simplifying, and sharpening its services and support portfolio by pivoting to focus heavily on adoption and consumption.
The portfolio is built for the cloud, designed to help customers realize value fast and achieve lasting success. To achieve customer lifetime value is the central goal behind all the changes. It is designed to support customers throughout their journey with SAP, in cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. The portfolio also includes services built specifically for partners, to help them supplement and build their capability and capacity and help ensure customer success with SAP by their side. The new services and support portfolio from SAP combined with services from the ecosystem can help customers receive the best of SAP and its partners.
With the introduction of the reimagined portfolio, which is characterized by success experiences, success extensions, and success services, it has never been easier to engage with SAP and to take advantage of project-specific services and mission-critical support. The new portfolio follows the establishment of the Cloud Success Services organization earlier this year.
An Experience for Every Customer Need
SAP introduces success experience levels, which consider the needs of each customer, their desired business outcomes, and their growth timeline. They address the fast and successful adoption and usage of the solution. This is achieved by combining the existing portfolio with new services to create a holistic and comprehensive experience across the customer journey.
With the subscription to a cloud service from SAP, customers can receive a unique experience. The new portfolio offers the possibility to choose the level of intensity of interaction and support from SAP while also adding in additional services to help customers with the exact need they have wherever they are in their adoption journey.
Existing and well-established offerings, such as SAP MaxAttention, SAP Preferred Success, and SAP Enterprise Support services, will remain and continue to evolve, serving as the basis of these success experiences. For example, SAP Preferred Success will cover private cloud deployment models in addition to public cloud. New offerings are also being added, such as embedded launch activities or SAP Business Journeys.
SAP offers three new success experience levels, considering customer needs and deployment approaches.
Essential Success Experience
Centered around SAP Enterprise Support, SAP provides all customers with a rich foundational onboarding and support experience focused on proactive mission-critical support, fast time to first value, collaboration, innovation, application lifecycle management, enablement, self-paced educational offerings, and best practices. Embedded launch activities are included in a cloud service subscription from SAP. This will help customers prioritize and launch the functions that add value, so they and any partner they choose can focus on results, instead of reinventing what’s already been done.
Advanced Success Experience
Leveraging SAP Preferred Success, the advanced success experience level delivers a personalized solution and process expertise for cloud solutions from SAP backed by enhanced support service-level agreements. It is a personal road map for everything from workflows to user experience to culture. SAP Preferred Success provides advanced focused guidance to help customers yield more value from SAP solutions and continuously improve business outcomes. It is a customized vision that can convert metrics and milestones into a tailored success plan. A customer success partner helps customers take full advantage of their SAP solutions.
Select Success Experience
The select success experience level is tailored to the customer’s individual transformational needs and outcomes. It’s a complement to the ongoing, solution-specific essential or advanced success experiences from SAP. It helps drive optimization and value realization of end-to-end, multi-solution business landscapes. Customers can choose a full multi-year strategic engagement with SAP based on SAP MaxAttention, shorter-term engagements focused on key compelling business events with SAP Business Journeys, or a combination of both.
To address specific business challenges, SAP offers SAP Business Journeys, which combine expertise and insight from across SAP into targeted packages with a specific scope, timeline, and cost. SAP Business Journeys can address different aspects of business challenges – from planning to execution or from quality assurance to education and guidance.
In addition, within the select success experience level, SAP MaxAttention is available, which is the most comprehensive, transformational, and strategic engagement experience SAP offers. It can deliver hands-on, in-depth expertise designed to help build a long-term innovation plan – working to tackle the complex challenges that span the systems, teams, and processes a customer’s business depends on.
Success Extensions and Success Services – Tailor Your Experience
In addition to the three success experience levels, SAP offers success extensions that can be combined with different experiences to help provide additional pre- and post-go-live and cloud optimization services for overall success with solutions at scale. With this, the customer can adjust to create the optimum customer experience at any given time for their business and on their journey.
In addition to success experiences and success extensions, customers can handpick individual success services to address the needs for larger transformations, highly complex scenarios, or introducing new technologies. SAP can also provide extension services to the ecosystem to help enable and enhance their customers.
Success in the Ecosystem
The new portfolio represents a huge leap forward in understanding the needs of customers and how to help them achieve the outcomes they need to be successful. It also focuses on the success of the entire SAP ecosystem, which is more important in the cloud than ever before. SAP is developing partner success services that will enable partners to support customers throughout their lifetime experience with SAP.
This next-generation service and support portfolio will evolve over time, taking a transformation journey itself. It will be an exciting time to be part of the SAP ecosystem, marking the start of a new era of working together to create continuous value for customers, right from the start.
Learn more about the new SAP Services and Support portfolio.
Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at SAP SE.
