In today’s business landscape, technology plays a pivotal role in solving customer problems and driving growth. But simply purchasing software doesn’t ensure resolution of the business issue.
Consider this: your business implements new software intended to speed up processes but finds out that your processes are instead stalling. Why? Because your employees never fully adopted the solutions. Now you may ultimately decide to stop using that software. To avoid this scenario, more and more software vendors are turning to an adoption-focused mindset that empowers customers to make the most of their software investments.
In fact, 85% of businesses say adoption and utilization data is the most valuable information in determining a software renewal. Yet, only one-third of software vendors on the market have a documented adoption framework to assess how well specific customers are adopting their technology. Enter telemetry, which can help organizations make more informed decisions, optimize business processes, and realize the full potential of emerging technologies.
Telemetry Helps Us Help You
Telemetry often refers to the automatic collection of data measurements from physical equipment. Telemetry has had profound impacts on Industry 4.0, as it’s adopted by not only manufacturers but also by any business that uses virtually any kind of equipment. But with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and its seamless integration into many cloud applications, companies from all industries can consume AI-driven insights and capabilities. These innovations are transforming the way businesses operate, creating new opportunities, and driving efficiencies.
Increasingly though, telemetry is also helping software vendors gather data on the performance and use of their customers’ deployments of their software. This includes SAP. Just like Industry 4.0 data analytics help your business optimize equipment, telemetry from your SAP software helps us see where you could best use our solutions to meet your unique goals, how it can be optimized, and where further enhancements may be necessary.
The ever-expanding landscape of intelligent software and next-generation technology has opened many new doors for businesses, but all these opportunities can be overwhelming and even confusing. Telemetry empowers software vendors – including SAP – to help their customers understand the full potential presented by new software solutions.
Telemetry-Driven Customer Success
Telemetry is a game-changer in the realm of customer success. It provides a more accurate, near-real-time look at how software investments are performing. For software vendors, telemetry’s greatest advantages to help our customers include:
- Identifying user patterns: Telemetry can provide a real look at user behavior with our software. By tracking navigation patterns and time spent on specific tasks, we can gain a comprehensive understanding of how your users work every day – and how they should work instead. With this insight, businesses can make data-driven decisions to enhance user experiences and drive greater adoption, which drives greater value.
- Optimizing business processes and performance: Using telemetry, we can see how your software is performing across environments. It helps us discover process bottlenecks, frequently occurring errors, and system resource usage. With these insights, we’re better prepared to help you find out what processes simply aren’t working and why.
- Analyzing feature use: Find out what features are most popular among your users – and which ones aren’t. Using this information, we can encourage users to take advantage of the features you’ve implemented or implement new ones that help users work more efficiently.
- Predictive analytics: Telemetry data can be leveraged to create predictive models, anticipating potential issues or opportunities before they arise. This can help businesses stay one step ahead, ensuring smooth technology adoption and minimizing disruptions.
Telemetry serves as a source of 360-degree signal interpretation, and it provides you with opportunities for intervention in the moments that matter most. Building off the above benefits, you can use telemetry to take advantage of predictive analytics for feature development, feedback-driven iterations, and customized user training.
Bridge the “Hype-Reality” Gap
Telemetry and data analysis are helping us help our customers solve arguably the greatest threat to solution adoption: the “hype-reality” gap. Often, businesses hype up their latest software investment to users, claiming they’ll save employees time and effort. But when users don’t see results, they get disappointed – and they stop using the new software. Telemetry, by providing insight into how real users have been using your new software, is a critical way to show real-time results and get the entire business on board.
In addition, telemetry builds on the increasing value of partnership between software vendors and their customers. By harnessing the power of real-time insights right from our customers’ own deployments of our software, we’re better prepared to steer the future of our software toward outcomes that support our customers. As organizations combine telemetry with advances in generative AI, they have a powerful tool at their disposal to drive customer technology adoption and success with data-driven insights.
Claudio Muruzabal is chief business officer at SAP.