During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, consumers are offered limitless choices, similar to the variety of toys available for children. At first, every toy appears to be the same – mass-produced and uniform – but as kids interact with them, each one develops according to the children’s imagination and preferences. Comparably, as we prepare for shopping scenarios of 2025, these childhood insights are reflected in how AI systems in proactive customer care evolve based on personalized inputs.
An AI-based approach encourages customized interactions, real-time adaptation, and mitigation of decision uncertainty, as it incorporates predicted answers to issues presented to them. An important element in this shopping dynamic, the coordination between AI tools and custom-made efforts aims to pinpoint a change towards more responsive customer support, especially during major shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Technologies for SAP Holiday Season Readiness Program Expansion
For 2025, the SAP Holiday Season Readiness Program is expanding to support more customers than last year. This expansion is led by a greater integration of Preventive Customer Risk Mitigation (PCRM) and intelligent automation to detect and resolve issues before customer impact. The cross-functional collaboration between Support, Cloud Ops, Engineering, and teams plans to ensure faster action and end-to-end visibility.
The improvements integrated into the program since 2024 include:
- Joule Conversational AI: Joule now allows end-users and internal teams to query case history, check system health, trigger CURE360 reports, and create proactive cases—all via natural language.
- Agentic AIs: Specialized AI agents now help with scenario planning, task dispatch, risk identification, mitigation planning, and execution monitoring.
- Smart Notification & Automation Hub: Real-time alerts and automated task execution for infrastructure and application health.
- Next-Gen CURE360: Deeper root cause analysis, pattern detection, and smart patrol capabilities.
These new technologies use data analytics to predict and prepare for potential issues during the next holiday season. What-if simulations, which forecast the impact of traffic spikes on infrastructure, and pattern recognition, which identify recurring issues and proactive solutions, are two essential factors for AI-powered predictive and preventive analytics. A real-time dashboard with these functions offers a tailored tool to help teams take proactive steps across all system layers.
Collaborative Efforts
The optimization of e-commerce workflows based on real-time data is one of the industry trends we are adopting to enhance customers’ shopping experience. Agentic AI emerges as a prime mover of these efforts compared to the last peak season. The agentic case resolution and AI framework are intended to resolve matters without human intervention and independently conduct monitoring, task orchestration, and mitigation. Moreover, with the assistance of algorithmic learning, Knowledge Base Articles are created to efficiently address similar issues in the future, for quicker and more accurate support.
In our commitment to upgrade customer support through AI, we've introduced new specialized roles and metrics intended to optimize our processes and measure their effectiveness. Key roles, such as AI-Enabled Support Engineers and Preventive Support Engineers, are projected to apply AI for quick decision-making and risk mitigation, while Knowledge Specialists provide accuracy to our knowledge base. Additionally, metrics like AI Deflection Rate and AI-Assisted Resolution Time will allow us to assess how well AI tools resolve issues independently and improve response times.
With this in mind, we are introducing to handle increased traffic and inquiries during the high shopping period the following additional customer support channels:
- Conversational AI (Joule): open for internal front office teams for queries, e.g. Mission Critical Center (MCC), Technical Operation Manager and Management team. Supports end-user interactions, triggering backend operations on demand.
- Real Time Support Channel: Promoting the use of real-time support channel
- Support community: Open dedicated Support Community to customers in scope
- Live Situation Room Access: High-impact customers can now observe and interact with the real-time resolution channel.
From Cloud Ops to MCC, different roles are shared among teams involved in the preparation for the shopping events of 2025. With a Suite-First strategy, our expert teams seek to provide technical support on integrated product solutions. CURE360-based proactive actions, as well as scenario planning for Smart Resolve and self-healing mechanisms, are some of the features assembled to heighten capacity and handle more significant volumes in the coming years. Furthermore, AI use to deliver these solutions addresses customer expectations towards an AI-first approach. Much like the metaphor of the large offer of toys for kids, increased AI automation is set to provide a personalized customer experience, one that’s familiar with users’ queries, regardless of their initial cross-industries aspect.
The future for Customer Support
Several key measures are planned to analyze the outcomes of the 2025 peak season and further enhance the capabilities of invisible support. First, incident post-mortems will be conducted to thoroughly investigate the root causes of any incidents that may have occurred during the peak season. This analysis will be crucial in identifying areas where proactive prevention could have been more effective, ultimately strengthening the "invisible" nature of support by learning how to avoid similar disruptions in the future.
Secondly, the CURE360 Accuracy Review will be employed to specifically assess the accuracy of risk detection by the CURE360 platform and the effectiveness of proactive case creation. This review will determine how well potential issues were identified before they impacted customers, a core tenet of invisible support. It will also evaluate whether the proactive measures taken successfully prevented customer-facing issues.
Finally, for any issues that were not resolved proactively, a gap analysis will be performed to pinpoint any detection or action gaps. This is vital for enhancing invisible support, as it will highlight where the preventative systems or processes fell short, allowing for targeted improvements to ensure a more seamless and uninterrupted experience for customers in subsequent peak seasons. The insights gained from these analyses will directly inform refinements to the intelligent automation and proactive frameworks like CURE360 and agentic AIs, further embedding the principles of invisible support into SAP's operational readiness. The goal is to learn from the 2025 experience to make future support even more preemptive and less noticeable to the customer.
With Joule, agentic AIs, PCRM, and deep AI integration across the stack, our 2025 Black Friday and Cyber Monday support readiness is envisioned to be smarter, faster, more predictive, and scalable than ever before. At Sapphire 2025, just as children discover new possibilities with their toys, we’ll showcase how SAP is preparing customers for a world of personalized purchase experience in retail events.
A sincere appreciation to Tarun Luthra, Global Head of Technical Support, Industries & Customer Experience, Winston Zhou, Director of Technical Support, Keith Ho, Customer Support Engagement Director, and Bharath Ramamurthy, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, Customer Support, SAP experts who have contributed to this article.
