Deliver exceptional customer service with cloud-based support portal

[ThomasHensel]

UPDATE: New version of the support site now available. Learn more Support site – easy to create, easy to consume, fun to use

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When was the last time you had an real issue with a product or service you bought – hopefully long time ago! Typically users quickly find a good-enough solution by checking the manual or calling a support hotline. But what happened, if the issue is a little bit more tricky than initially anticipated?

Exceptional customer experience as differentiator
In today’s fast-paced business world enterprises of all sizes need to quickly react on market changes and differentiate their offering from the competition by

• Bringing intuitive, valuable product innovations to the market faster
• Offering superior end-to-end customer experience and support services

Put yourself into the shoes of a service agent or customer service advisor. How can your service organization optimize customer loyalty & retention, increase efficiency and at the same time reduce support costs?

Serve increasing customer expectations
Especially the young generation who enters the business world has high expectations on customer service. Mobile technologies, social media and easy-to-use apps dramatically change the perception of how people consume products or services and want to engage with your company (see also “99 Facts on Future of Business“).

As a consequence delivering an exceptional support experience to your customers is a key for success: by anticipating needs (recommended article about the psychic pizza by kai.petzelt ) and empowering people to easily get answers to questions via their channel of choice. Studies show that 72% of customers prefer using a website or self-services to quickly find a solution for a problem*. That’s why an intuitive support site should complement your classic interaction channels such as email, phone or chat.

According to recent blog by Forrester intuitive self-services and consistent, cross-channel service experience are amongst the key trends for customer service in 2014.

Give customers a new self-service channel!
Imagine your service organizations could easily engage with customers via a support portal where people can access self-services via desktop and mobile devices at any time?

• End users gain easy, personalized access to self-services via web-based, branded support site to view and create tickets, access a knowledge base, and interact with service agents.
• Service agents manage service requests more efficiently and reduce high-tough service efforts through customer self-services.
• Site authors easily manage, customize out-of-the-box content, brand the user experience and build custom solution extensions on an open, cost-efficient platform.

With “SAP Cloud for Service – Self-Service Support Portal” you can take customer service to a whole new level – leveraging the cloud for unprecedented speed and flexibility. The solution is powered by SAP HANA Cloud portal and allows you to easily create attractive self-service support sites.

The support portal edition offers various out of the box widgets, for example: displaying open tickets, creating new service requests or accessing a knowledge base – all depending on user’s specific role and permissions in the organization. The site can be fully customized according to your company’s corporate design. You may even develop your own custom solution extensions leveraging the open SAP HANA Cloud platform. Check out these great blogs by gauravdey: "Developing a sample C4C extension application using SAP HANA Cloud Platform" part 1 and part 2 for further information.

If you are interested in further details, read the blog post by rachel.kahanasamet on the new Support site – easy to create, easy to consume, fun to use 

Note: The support site primarily focuses on integration with service-related objects of SAP Cloud for Customer. If you are interested in partner scenarios, check the Partner Portal, which allows partners to easily access self-services for managing marketing leads, customer opportunities and deals via the portal.

Looking forward to your feedback,
Thomas

* Source: “The State of Unassisted Support: 2012” TSIA Technology Insight