Looking to close what it called the “disappointment gap” between customer expectations and actual outcomes, SAP has launched a new board-level team led by former product chief Thomas Saueressig and focused on helping customers adopt SAP products and services more rapidly and successfully.
Called Customer Services & Delivery, the new organization was rolled out this week after being announced earlier this year. In a blog post on SAP’s website, Saueressig this week offered a first look at his new team’s goal, objectives, and offerings.
I’ll get to some of those details in a moment — and of course, AI is at the center of the action — but first want to offer a few thoughts on why I think this new organization will be a big success for SAP and how it underscores SAP’s hard-earned status as being one of the Cloud Wars Top 10’s most-innovative companies in creating customer-oriented programs designed to drive successful implementations and most of all business outcomes for customers.
The Customer Services & Delivery team serves as a post-sale bookend to SAP’s hugely successful RISE with SAP program for large-enterprise SAP customers and also the GROW with SAP program aimed at smaller companies using SAP for the first time. Plus, the acquisitions a few years ago of Signavio and more recently of LeanIX have both given customers new and high-value insights into how to map out the most-effective business and technology transformations.
All of those innovations and the thinking behind them have played crucial roles in SAP’s emergence as a high-growth leader in the cloud, and were certainly vital factors in my choice of CEO Christian Klein as the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2023.
We can be sure that Klein and Saueressig had many conversations throughout 2023 on the need for yet another big commitment to highly successful cloud-based business transformations and how it should be structured to complement the company’s existing offerings around customer success. Those efforts have been led quite capably by executive board member and chief revenue officer Scott Russell, whose board area is broadly described as Customer Success.
For this new initiative, Saueressig’s rich experiences at SAP over the past decade — first as CIO and, more recently, as head of all product engineering — plus his extensive and deep engagements with customers certainly provided him with unique insights into the wide range of issues customers use to evaluate the relative levels of success their projects with SAP have had.
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The Disappointment Gap
Saueressig’s April 2 blog post laid out the thinking behind the new Customer Delivery & Services team:
- Closing the gap: “Disappointment is often described as the gap between expectations and reality,” Saueressig wrote. “When software adoption is low and expectations for digital transformation outcomes are high, disappointment is almost guaranteed.”
- Boosting adoption: “Adoption is our main lever for increasing customer satisfaction by ensuring we deliver on the promise of large-scale transformation.”
- The new team’s goal: “My goal leading our new Customer Services & Delivery Board area is to make it easier and faster for customers to adopt our solutions. We want to ensure that customers get all the benefits they are expecting out of their large-scale cloud transformation by reducing the hurdles and ensuring long-term value. We are fully committed to ensuring that new digital opportunities are not only introduced, but also used to their full potential.”
- The power of AI: ” AI innovation is a catalyst for us to enhance adoption, and we are seizing the moment with determined steps toward providing SAP Business AI. But for our valued customers to benefit from all the advantages of SAP Business AI, we really need to be there for them throughout their cloud transformation journey, because AI innovation only happens in the cloud.”
- The team’s objective: “Our overarching objective is customer satisfaction. We are committed to increasing it through comprehensive and innovative post-sales technical delivery services or partner-led implementations to drive our customers’ business transformation and deliver measurable value, which is ‘business speak’ for absolutely delighting them!”
- Benefits for customers: “new possibilities for business-model innovation” and also “increased competitiveness, cost savings, employee satisfaction,” and faster time to value.
Final Thought
Saueressig’s blog post offers significant detail on the various functional areas incorporated into the new team, including professional services, premium engagements, customer innovations, and customer support. As I mentioned earlier, I believe this all rolls up into a powerful breakthrough for SAP and its customers because Saueressig has both the internal expertise and the external awareness to ensure that SAP is putting extra muscle behind the issues that are most important to customers.
After all, there’s a lot at stake: As noted above from Saueressig’s blog post, “Disappointment is often described as the gap between expectations and reality.”
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