SAP Admits to Customer Satisfaction Issues, Touts New Quality Framework

A new SAP Quality Framework seeks to help ensure more consistent and successful partner and customer experiences.

Christian Klein, now SAP’s sole CEO following co-CEO Jennifer Morgan’s recent departure, says customer success is a key priority.

Klein vowed SAP will deliver higher quality solutions by the end of the year. Speaking at this week’s SAP Global Partner Summit, Klein acknowledged integration issues that have affected quality.

SAP’s Christian Klein

“We are not fully satisfied with the customer satisfaction scores we are getting,” Klein admitted.

“To improve the integration of our products SAP cannot be offering – as we did sometimes in the past – a bunch of products with different logos, with different UIs and different data models. By the end of this year, we will significantly [improve] the integration qualities of our products based on our SAP cloud platform.”

Klein hopes the SAP Quality Framework with new partner enablement tools will play a key role in those improvements.

“Customer success is not about the point of sale,” Klein said. “We have to continue across the customer life cycle. And across the life cycle, the ecosystem, our partners are playing a vital role in that. And we have to double down on that.”

To achieve that goal, SAP launched several partner services at the summit, which the company held online because of COVID-19.

The partner delivery component of the SAP Quality Framework promises to be more consistent. It includes standardized processes, tools and reporting capabilities for partner training and quality monitoring across different projects.

“We’re going to have dedicated resources focusing on project delivery quality, partner services, as well as a post sales partner management role,” said Nanette Lazina, SAP’s VP of midmarket channels.

SAP Partner Demo Environment

The company also rolled out its new SAP Partner Demo Environment. The new offering gives partners free access to demonstration solutions that SAP’s internal sales force uses, said chief partner officer Karl Fahrbach.

SAP’s Karl Fahrbach

The services are various implementations of what SAP calls its “intelligent enterprise” solutions. These may include any number of SAP offerings such as SuccessFactors and Ariba running in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud,

“It actually contains end-to-end integrated scenarios of the intelligent enterprise,” Fahrbach told Channel Futures. “It’s an integrated set of scenarios with processes that are run end to end so partners can show how an SAP system works in an intelligent enterprise. It’s a much more professional way to present the intelligent enterprise.”

Lazina added that partners had requested the SAP Partner Demo Environment, particularly those who lack access to a testing environment. Even those using the free custom service SAP rolled out last year might not have resources to build or prepopulate solutions with content, she noted.

The service, a shared environment for SAP, has 50 preconfigured scenarios.

SAP’s Nanette Lazina

“This allows partners to have predefined content supplied by SAP that is constantly updated,” Lazina explained. “They no longer have to maintain their own environment if they choose. And they’ll always have the latest and greatest, in addition to just the environment itself. They’re also going to receive concierge service for guidance and coaching along the way.”

SAP is also extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud free to partners to create test and demo systems for another year. The company introduced the 12-month service at last year’s partner summit and now is adding another year of use.

The company also is extending it to SAP Business ByDesign.