Customer First

Our path to a world-class customer success organization.

SAP puts customers at the center of everything

SAP has always prioritized customer needs and we recognize that expectations have evolved. Customers want a trusted partner that is easy to work with, focused on business outcomes, and equipped with the expertise and technology to enable their vision. With Customer First, our customers benefit from a proactive end-to-end engagement experience that focuses on their success with a holistic and structured approach.

Improve time to value for new capabilities
Apply global best practices
Mitigate risk and improve ROI
Achieve value-based outcomes and lower cost of adoption

Read the strategy paper

Vision and Mission

Create the best customer experience in the software industry – embedded in the Intelligent Enterprise.

Customer First is a transformational shift in how we partner with and care for our customers across all of SAP, where the purchase of software is just the beginning of a truly collaborative journey with SAP. Our mission is to help our customers run at their best with a unified and outcome-focused experience. With the power of industry-leading Experience Management (XM) technology, SAP is focused on delivering positive, proactive, end-to-end experiences. To maximize customer value, we are embedding customer success into our organizational DNA with a prevailing customer-first mindset.

Adaire Fox-Martin

Executive Board Member, Customer Success
SAP

Customers do not come to SAP to buy technology. They come to buy outcomes and value. The whole premise of the customer first mindset is about keeping our promise to deliver valuable business outcomes to customers while making it easier for our sales people and partners to succeed on that journey. This is why we have implemented Customer First.

Engagement Methodology

The Customer First customer engagement methodology is value-oriented, and adoption and business results-centric. This engagement model delivers a simple, holistic experience and prescriptive success plans that focus on the customer’s strategic objectives and eliminate barriers to achieve business value and innovate faster.

Orchestrate customer success as one SAP

A team of empowered customer success, sales, services, and support colleagues collaborate to deliver the customer’s desired business outcomes in a holistic, structured way. Customers receive a single point of contact who is responsible for orchestrating customer success. All 100,000 employees within SAP must be focused on the long-term success of our customers as well.

Understand strategic objectives and assess the customer relationship

A core component of customer success is a deep understanding of the customer’s business, goals, and expectations. The customer and SAP complete a collaborative and thorough assessment of the SAP-customer relationship and identify areas for improvement.

Deliver success plans and manage ongoing governance and communication

Create actionable outcome success plans to address obstacles and opportunities and eliminate business value detractors. Progress is monitored regularly, and ongoing communication and transparency is maintained to ensure customer success.

Read the engagement methodology brief

Frequently Asked Questions

What is different about the Customer First approach?

While SAP has always put customer needs at the forefront of our strategy, Customer First elevates our focus on customer success. The approach aims to deliver the best customer experience in the industry by leveraging our people, processes, and technology.

People: Customer success resources as well as sales, services, support, and engineering colleagues work together to deliver customer business outcomes while providing a holistic, coordinated, and smooth customer experience. While customer success resources are not new to SAP, we are doubling down on customer success, expanding our teams and creating a cultural shift where everyone in SAP is accountable for customer outcomes across the lifecycle. To drive this transformation, SAP is investing heavily in training, tools, and resources to deliver customer success at scale.
Processes: We’ve introduced an engagement model that assesses the customer relationship and identifies areas for improvement, delivering prescriptive success plans that help customers achieve business value and innovate faster. Digital engagement strategies allow us to scale our engagement approach to reach more customers. Our partners also play an important role in Customer First and we must enable them to deliver customer success on our behalf.
Technology: Our engagement process is powered by a unified customer success platform that aggregates data from multiple sources to create a 360-degree view of customers. Analytics is embedded in every step of the customer journey. Powerful machine learning and predictive analytics capabilities help the team engage proactively and impactfully. We also use Experience Management solutions from SAP to collect and take action with customer intelligence to capitalize on the moments that matter.

This is only the beginning of our transformation into a world-class customer success organization. By putting customer success in focus, we will continue to drive change to enhance our customer experience – not just after the sale but throughout the relationship with SAP.

What success resources do SAP customers receive?

With the Customer First approach, we bring in the right people armed with the right tools to achieve the customer’s business outcomes, while presenting a unified, one-SAP, front. Customer First professionals collaborate across functional business areas, including sales, services and support, and engineering as well as with SAP partners, to enable customers to achieve maximum value from SAP investments via harmonized, value-based engagement. Armed with intelligent technologies, customer engagement professionals to drive customer satisfaction by:

Providing expert guidance, tools, and resources
Initiating networking opportunities with other customers
Helping navigate SAP resources and services
Communicating new product releases and other important information
Removing roadblocks to user adoption
Acting as the voice of the customer, relaying feedback to product engineering.

In addition, customer success resources orchestrate the holistic SAP-customer relationship as a single point of contact accountable for success across the entire lifecycle. Their goal is to support customers’ journey to the Intelligent Enterprise by engaging proactively, continuously assessing the relationship, and ensuring customer outcomes are delivered at every stage.

Additionally, customers receive services and support resources in accordance with their plans. SAP also provides significant online, self-service resources that customers are given access to as part of the onboarding process.