Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award Finalist Profile: Welcome to a New, In-Solution Support Experience

Last year, the SAP Digital Business Services organization won the 2017 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award with SAP Transformation Navigator. This year, their hopes of winning the coveted award again rest on “Digital Support Experience (DSX) built-in support.”

The inspiration for creating built-in support came from the ticketing process. SAP’s Josef Schmidt and his team had long been unhappy about the complicated process customers had to go through to report a support incident. Not only did they have to supply a raft of technical information, but they also had to navigate the application component hierarchy (ACH) and select the correct component.

“This unnecessary complexity was the motivation for our team to fundamentally improve the support experience by enabling built-in support,” says Schmidt. For example, customer data is collected and saved automatically as contextual information so that customers no longer have to enter additional details — an important first step on the way to a positive customer experience.

DSX Built-In Support Knows the Best Route

At the heart of built-in support is an intelligent chatbot called DSXbot, which has been integrated into the user interface of SAP CoPilot. When SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers open the SAP CoPilot user interface — which they can do directly from an active application — the support chatbot guides them to the materials and sources they need to answer their questions.

To do this, the DSXbot relies on the conversational artificial intelligence (AI) services of SAP Leonardo, using natural language processing (NLP) technology to select the right route, in much the same way as a vehicle’s navigation system. Other forms of multi-modal interaction, including gesture control, are planned for the future.

This new built-in support means that users can locate and contact experienced key users at their own company. In the future, they will also be able to interact with support specialists at SAP in real time if needed – in chat sessions, known as Expert Chats, enabled by the platform’s underlying microservices architecture. In a nutshell, built-in support aims to offer customers the most efficient ways to link up with specialists to solve their issues. Of course, they can still opt to enter a ticket in a form-based UI if they wish.

DSX built-in support went live with release 1805 of SAP S/4HANA Cloud in May of this year. The integration of the SAP Integrated Business Planning solution took place in release 1811, and work is also under way to connect SAP SuccessFactors software. The ultimate aim is to equip all the products in the intelligent enterprise suite from SAP with built-in support.

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.

Finalist Fast Facts

• Submission Title: Moving Intelligent customer support into our products: DSX – Built in Support
• Board Area: Digital Business Services
• Team: Digital Support Experience Platform (DSX Team)
• Number of Employees: 19 — Josef Schmidt, Kathrin Appel, Nikolay Dimitrov, Alexander Gahr, Michael Rautschka, Li Xu, Lars Riecke, Chen Fuxin, Chen Zhong, Kuiyou Hu, Yang Liu, Angel Qian, Banks Sun, Selena Yang, James You, Dylan You, King Chen, Venkatesh Damodar Pai, Taimur Ali Khan.
• Achievement: Built-in support provides customers with direct in-solution access to support through an intelligent digital assistant and represents a fundamental shift in how SAP Support interacts with customers in the cloud business. It radically simplifies the process of requesting help and resolving the issue through machine learning, sophisticated intent-matching features, and context-sensitive knowledge that provides personalized support.
• Impact: Built-in support improves SAP’s relationships with customers, positively influencing the experience of the user by quickly providing relevant assistance to the search of a resolution of an incident.