SAP serves cus­tomers in more than 140 coun­tries across mul­ti­ple indus­tries and lines of busi­ness. Every SAP cus­tomer expe­ri­ences unique chal­lenges and requires a solu­tion focused on their needs. How does an orga­ni­za­tion that big put its cus­tomers first?

ASUG News inter­views SAP lead­ers for our series, Meet an SAP Exec­u­tive, where we share what these indi­vid­u­als con­tribute to the com­pa­ny and what this means for cus­tomers. In our first install­ment, we inter­viewed Bertram Schulte, chief dig­i­tal offi­cer for SAP.

Next, we spoke to Mar­tin Mru­gal, glob­al head of Cus­tomer First, SAP. He has worked at SAP for more than 20 years in var­i­ous roles, includ­ing chief inno­va­tion offi­cer, before head­ing up the rel­a­tive­ly new cus­tomer first orga­ni­za­tion at SAP.

He talked to us about what cus­tomer first means to SAP and what it will ulti­mate­ly mean for SAP customers.

Sharon: Can you tell us about your role as glob­al head of Cus­tomer First and what that involves?

Mar­tin: Sim­ply put, I lead SAP’s Cus­tomer First orga­ni­za­tion. Our goal is to con­tin­ue trans­form­ing the way SAP engages with and cares for its cus­tomers through­out the entire life cycle. The Cus­tomer First team is now a for­mal orga­ni­za­tion and ini­tia­tive, and includes rep­re­sen­ta­tives from on-premise, cloud, and all line-of-busi­ness prod­ucts SAP offers under one umbrel­la. At the end of the day, our sole focus is cus­tomer suc­cess made pos­si­ble by empow­er­ing our employees.

Sharon: What does cus­tomer first mean at SAP?

Mar­tin: Cus­tomer first for SAP means always putting the cus­tomer at the cen­ter of every­thing we do. The goal being that we under­stand those moments that mat­ter through­out our customer’s jour­ney and that we make sure we meet and exceed their expec­ta­tions at every juncture.

We try to ques­tion every­thing that we’re doing and make sure it’s aligned to our customer’s needs. We also bring togeth­er both our on-premise and cloud port­fo­lios to make sure that the cus­tomer has a con­sis­tent engage­ment mod­el across those teams. SAP’s port­fo­lio is very broad and very deep. Mak­ing sure that the cus­tomer has a har­mo­nized expe­ri­ence across every touch point with SAP is one of our main goals.

Sharon: Have you iden­ti­fied some of the pain points that cur­rent SAP cus­tomers are expe­ri­enc­ing? How will you address them in your cur­rent role?

Mar­tin: We spent a lot of time inter­view­ing cus­tomers, both in pilot phas­es and now. What I hear from our cus­tomers is they want a uni­fied expe­ri­ence across the entire SAP port­fo­lio. And we’re lis­ten­ing, as that is exact­ly what my team and I are charged with doing. They also want us to accel­er­ate the pace of inte­gra­tion among our cloud prod­ucts, and that’s some­thing our devel­op­ment and engi­neer­ing teams are com­mit­ted to delivering.

Our cus­tomers also want a strate­gic rela­tion­ship with SAP. They have made a big invest­ment with SAP, and they want us to show up dif­fer­ent­ly — strate­gi­cal­ly and not just tac­ti­cal­ly. So, we cre­at­ed an engage­ment mod­el that focus­es on the type of rela­tion­ship the cus­tomer wants. We per­form an assess­ment of where we’re at with both IT as well as the lines of busi­ness, and as a result, we cre­ate an out­come suc­cess plan to guide us through the relationship.

Sharon: What are some of the ini­tia­tives you’ve set in your new role to meet those cus­tomer-first expectations?

Mar­tin: One of my first ini­tia­tives, as men­tioned above, is to har­mo­nize the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence across the entire SAP port­fo­lio. We do that by work­ing with our cus­tomer engage­ment exec­u­tives (CEEs). They are on the front line with our clients, mak­ing sure that our cus­tomers are adopt­ing and con­sum­ing our prod­ucts and they’re get­ting the busi­ness out­comes that they expect when they pur­chase these solutions.

Anoth­er ini­tia­tive comes in the way of a new­ly cre­at­ed func­tion called the cus­tomer suc­cess exec­u­tive (CSE). This per­son is respon­si­ble for orga­niz­ing and orches­trat­ing across a port­fo­lio and all the resources asso­ci­at­ed with that port­fo­lio that the cus­tomer may be imple­ment­ing, to deliv­er a har­mo­nized expe­ri­ence. It’s a cross-board ini­tia­tive and we worked close­ly with our Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Ser­vices group to make this hap­pen. It’s focused on mak­ing sure that we meet and exceed our customer’s expec­ta­tions every time.

We’re also imple­ment­ing a dig­i­tal strat­e­gy to scale and grow as an orga­ni­za­tion while reach­ing as many cus­tomers as pos­si­ble. We’re lever­ag­ing our own machine learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence capa­bil­i­ties to under­stand where our cus­tomers are at risk even before they real­ize it them­selves. We’re using our own tech­nol­o­gy and ana­lyt­ics to steer all our ini­tia­tives with a cus­tomer focus in mind.

Sharon: Have you rolled out any of these ini­tia­tives? What’s been the feed­back you’ve received so far?

Mar­tin: We intro­duced our strat­e­gy at the 2019 Field Kick­off Meet­ing in Jan­u­ary. My team led break­out ses­sions and keynote pre­sen­ta­tions to get the cus­tomer first mes­sage out to the field.

We have also spent time in every region train­ing and edu­cat­ing col­leagues in sales, pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices, sup­port teams, as well as con­sul­tants on the new engage­ment mod­el that we have with cus­tomers mov­ing for­ward. And we’ll con­tin­ue com­mu­ni­cat­ing the mes­sage across the entire organization.

Before we rolled out the cus­tomer first ini­tia­tive in Jan­u­ary, we rolled out the approach with about 400 cus­tomers last year around the world. And we learned a lot as far as what worked and what didn’t work. We will con­tin­ue to engage with cus­tomers around the world as we roll out Cus­tomer First through 2019 and 2020. I view this much more as a jour­ney than a sprint. We’re con­stant­ly learn­ing as we go.

Sharon: Why is now the right time for SAP to place a greater focus on the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence that it’s delivering?

Mar­tin: SAP has always been focused on and com­mit­ted to cus­tomer suc­cess. I remem­ber when I joined in 1998, one of the things that I loved was how SAP would always ral­ly around the customer.

The new Cus­tomer First orga­ni­za­tion with­in SAP for­mal­izes that com­pa­ny cul­ture with a ded­i­cat­ed team behind the effort.

Sharon: Let’s shift gears and talk about inno­va­tion. What do you think are the biggest tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tions that affect a cus­tomer first organization?

Mar­tin: The one I’m most excit­ed about is the abil­i­ty to bring oper­a­tional data (O data) and cus­tomer sen­ti­ment analy­sis (X data) togeth­er. SAP’s recent acqui­si­tion of Qualtrics gives us an oppor­tu­ni­ty, inter­nal­ly, to be the exem­plar for SAP and its cus­tomers on how we bring O data and X data togeth­er to dri­ve our cus­tomer first initiative.

We’re work­ing with a cross-func­tion­al team to have touch points in prod­uct and prod­uct data, in cus­tomer and cus­tomer sen­ti­ment, in the brand and brand per­cep­tion, and with our employees.

Anoth­er inno­va­tion is the abil­i­ty to have every­thing on a sin­gle plat­form. We’ve imple­ment­ed a solu­tion across all our sup­port orga­ni­za­tions so all our cus­tomer data from all the touch points goes into this plat­form. We can keep track of the sig­na­ture process, onboard­ing process, pro­vi­sion­ing process, go-live, ongo­ing enable­ment, and sup­port. All those touch points with the cus­tomer are now in one sin­gle plat­form across our cloud solu­tions, and that’s a game changer.

A third inno­va­tion direct­ly affects cus­tomers. SAP is pro­vid­ing a por­tal into its solu­tions so cus­tomers will be able to see all their ser­vice tick­ets and sys­tem oper­a­tions in real time across our entire port­fo­lio of solutions.

Last, but not least, is the inno­va­tion of advanced ana­lyt­ics with pre­dic­tive and machine learn­ing. I believe that we’re get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter at using ana­lyt­ics so we can react in real time to cus­tomer sen­ti­ment. This is going to have a major impact on our process­es and pro­grams as an orga­ni­za­tion focused on cus­tomer suc­cess, and quite frankly, across all of SAP, where we must be much more nim­ble and agile to react to this data. It’s one thing for all the data to come in. It’s anoth­er to be flex­i­ble and able to affect the process­es and out­comes for our cus­tomers. You have to be ready, will­ing, and able to do that based on what the data is telling you.

Sharon: Where can an orga­ni­za­tion that’s look­ing to start a cus­tomer first trans­for­ma­tion begin? What are the crit­i­cal SAP tools that can help with this transformation?

Mar­tin: In my for­mer role at SAP, chief inno­va­tion offi­cer of North Amer­i­ca, I met with cus­tomers on a week­ly basis around dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and trans­for­ma­tion in gen­er­al. I learned that you must start with the hearts and minds of the employ­ees. Because to start a trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney like this, you real­ly need to think about what’s the change man­age­ment that needs to occur at every lev­el of the orga­ni­za­tion, and what are the levers and the bar­ri­ers at each lev­el that you can work with and orches­trate. I think that’s a crit­i­cal piece of it. Our employ­ees are the ones who make cus­tomer first successful.

Hav­ing exec­u­tive sup­port is equal­ly impor­tant, and that is one of the things that helped SAP start its cus­tomer first jour­ney. Bring­ing all these orga­ni­za­tions togeth­er was not an easy deci­sion or task because they all had their own silos and report­ing struc­tures. It took strong exec­u­tive sup­port from SAP’s Exec­u­tive Board to begin break­ing down those silos.

And then I would say, don’t launch it as one big ini­tia­tive, but real­ly think about how you can be agile. We start­ed with a pilot pro­gram that we learned from, we con­tin­ued to build and orches­trate the mod­el, and then we rolled it out. And we’re still rolling it out. We worked close­ly with the Dig­i­tal Busi­ness Ser­vices group which was also inte­gral in ensur­ing suc­cess and scale dur­ing the pilot. My advice to cus­tomers is to think about agili­ty, think about pilot­ing, scale, and then think about the change man­age­ment aspects.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t say that com­mu­ni­ca­tion is crit­i­cal. It needs to be in demon­stra­ble exam­ples to employ­ees and to cus­tomers. It has to be ongo­ing while show­cas­ing best prac­tices and cel­e­brat­ing suc­cess­es. You have to communicate.

Sharon: We’ve heard from our mem­bers through ASUG’s research that they strug­gle with find­ing enough time to devote to inno­va­tion. What advice would you give to help them fig­ure out what’s most impor­tant for them right now?

Mar­tin: I read a sta­tis­tic that said on aver­age, a com­pa­ny in the S&P 500 is now being replaced once every two weeks and that rate is accel­er­at­ing. So, how do you con­tin­ue to inno­vate and dri­ve the busi­ness for­ward, while at the same time mak­ing sure you are focused on run­ning the busi­ness? I think the key is to make sure the ini­tia­tives that you have going on, whether they involve tech­nol­o­gy or not, are linked to the busi­ness strat­e­gy. At the same time, be sure that there’s a feed­back loop for the strat­e­gy and exec­u­tive teams, because some inno­va­tions may change that strat­e­gy and you need to be able to com­mu­ni­cate this very fast and responsibly. 

Sharon: How do you see your role evolving?

Mar­tin: I will con­tin­ue to focus on the cus­tomer and the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. That won’t change. I think the role will move from not just being the cus­tomer first leader, but an evan­ge­list across all of SAP and in front of our cus­tomers as well.

As our busi­ness mod­el shifts to the cloud, it becomes more cru­cial that we have a strong focus on all our process­es and our cus­tomer engage­ment mod­els. My role will con­tin­ue to expand and evolve as SAP con­tin­ues to expand and evolve.

Sharon: What’s the last great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence you had and what made it so great?

Mar­tin: So, I’m a big cyclist. It’s some­thing I love doing as often as I can, but I need to make sure that I am not over­train­ing, which is some­thing a type‑A per­son­al­i­ty such as myself tends to do. So, I need to be able to keep track of my rest sched­ule as well as my activ­i­ty in a way that tells me what I can and can­not do.

There is a com­pa­ny called Whoop that offers a wrist wrap and an app that keep track of every­thing and col­lects data about my sleep pat­terns, how much caf­feine or alco­hol I had before I went to bed, along with oth­er infor­ma­tion. The out­put is an analy­sis of whether I am pre­pared for a heavy day of exercise.

It’s sim­ple, but it’s a great expe­ri­ence. It real­ly helped me to be more ener­getic and atten­tive not only in cycling, but in oth­er aspects of my life as well. It’s worth not­ing, I don’t have stock in this com­pa­ny, but I am a huge fan because it meets and exceeds my expectations.

Join us at our nation­al or one of our region­al ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange events in 2019 to net­work with oth­er exec­u­tives look­ing to get more val­ue from their SAP systems.