Customer Success as a Cross-Functional Strategy Across the Customer Value Journey

What a warm welcome and welcome to all of you. We will give you a little bit of an update how we at SAP run customer success as a current functional strategy and you will hear a little bit from us how we organize this along our journey. My name is Kristina Fischer, I'm part of Revenue Operations. I'm leading a team where we're looking at all transformational aspects regarding adoption and consumption or adopt and derive how we call it at SAP and really trying to implement everything what's related to processes, tooling, and every insights we need.

For my history I joined SAP in 2008 as a sales rep and as a sales manager after this and moved into a regional role where I looked at demand management as a practice we had implemented at SAP as a standard discipline to really drive pipeline activities. Then I was part of the IT organization where first I had an analytics team look at every step on our process journey we have and then I was running the customer engagement and service delivery team from a process and business engagement perspective and since April last year I had moved to a little bit more back to a customer facing approach of working with the business directly as part of the revenue operations organization and leading the team with adoption consumption, platform and programs we call it right now and my partner in crime. Matthias. Thanks.

I'm Matthias and I'm into running. Which means I developed a habit that if I go on business trips I always have my running equipment with me. So I had to run this morning and always thinking okay what do I do? How do I choose my route?

And last year I ran to the Las Vegas sign and this year I ran off strip. Because two reasons. I have an app which is called interval and you catch area, right? So you capture area.

And I wanted to stay in front of you saying you are in my area. Unfortunately somebody stole it already. So which means during lunch break I thought do I run just around the building to keep the stairs and now I will be sweating. But no, the important thing about that I ran off strip, right?

So just two blocks. Two blocks off the strip. All the clemence gone. You see the sewer systems, you see the garbage, you see the all transport, you see the hotel from behind and I guess that's also what I want to carry out throughout the whole presentation today.

That will be clever. But there will be also the real side, right? And I guess that is what we try to combine, Christine and me. Also, clemence and.

(laughing) Okay. No but I guess we are in the middle, right? She's running the operations team. I'm running the IT team who's doing the corporate gainsite installation.

Also a little bit of history. I did, I started SAP as an engineer. So knowing about the product engineering part and as I said, then moved over then fast forward to running the gainsite installation globally within SAP. And we have a lot of story to tell on how we moved over.

So let's go on to the agenda on what we try to tell you today. So Christine will start it off with some SAP facts and figures that you get the scene in. Then we move over with our gainsite engagement. Christine then will talk about the customer value journey and then we will tell you about our approach which is the key part of today on the cross-function collaboration when it comes to customer success.

With our lessons learned, we have two poles in between where it would be really appreciated if you can participate because then we can all bring those facts and figures together. So handing over to you. Perfect. Thanks, yeah, SAP, it's a big name.

I'm sure a lot of you have heard about it and it's always interesting to look a little bit at the numbers and what it means also for our customer engagement solutions or customer success at all. So we serve at the moment 140,000 customers. We have 36.8 billion euro of revenue. We have 21 billion euro only cloud revenue and we have at the moment over 40,000 AI customer where we launched our business AI component last year.

So when I look a little bit at the financial, I think this is maybe, especially for European colleagues, interesting because we found it in 1972. So that means we are still there as a European tech company over 50 years right now. So that's definitely what we are proud of at SAP and we also compete with the big ones here in the US. So we are still part of the game.

And also from an employee and from a nationality perspective, we have over 110,000 employees globally. We really act at the moment in over 150 nationalities and with that we really serve a lot of things regarding our shareholders and things like that. But it's what's really important when we look at how we really implement it gains and what are the complexity you see in the slides later on. We have at the moment 300 million plus cloud users for our over 100 plus cloud solutions we have in place.

So think about it. What does it mean in regarding how we need to break down everything, how we really need to make a concept available that we really be able to track on every single LPR, a lot of new product structure that we really know what's happened at a customer side and also how we really can see this internally with the right things we need to do. So just a matter of figures, what's maybe interesting as well as we had the moment, a huge move to our public cloud approach. We also have a lot of AI scenarios out there with embedded and non-embedded, what also makes our life not easy just from a tooling and from a process perspective.

And when we look a little bit what was announced, four weeks ago at our customer conference in Orlando, it's called the autonomous enterprise right now where we're looking how we really can run AI systems. So a little bit similar, but already had to the stage as well. So we really looked at, we have our own agents, we have engagement layer called Jewel right now where we look a little bit how we can bring everything together, what's really the platform in between, how we really can drive our core system, the autonomous suite, our core ERP system up and running with the different areas to serve HR, supply chain, customer experience and everything as well. And then also have industry AI specific scenario and use cases to really serve the customers at their special needs, how they run their business in the future, how really they're bringing the next level as well.

And also this then can be delivered by our centralized SSP business AI platform. And then for sure this all relates if we go to market transformation, we heard it from came as well today in the morning that really everybody at IBM is at the platform and the same as as well happen on our side, you will see this later on as well. So that means we believe with the complexity we have there, we need to really find a way to translate this into our internal world and give a little bit idea what does it means. When we looked how we started, so for sure Gainsight is an SAP customer, but much more important.

Gainsight is also our partner. So we co-innovate along with our CRM solution, right? So competing a little bit with Salesforce. But as I said, that was the interesting part and we also covered that, right?

When gathering with Gainsight, where you might tick it off right on what you use in your infrastructure and your systems, it's like, no, we don't use Snowflake. And no, we don't use Slack. No, and that was all a bit of a challenge, right? Having that tight integration on Salesforce, getting the same look and feel like with Sales Cloud on our side.

And then of course we became also customer of Gainsight. That, and we want to tell you a little about that journey. So we all started off, yeah, two years back. So this is my fifth pulse overall.

So two, no, the third in US and then two in Europe. And the initial picture you've seen in my little introduction about running was exactly from Pulse in St. Louis, where we started off as a prospect with a contract signal in 2024. And then we had the implementation phase with a project start and we went live in nine months, moving off our legacy solution, hopping onto Gainsight as a one-to-one migration.

And then we went live April last year. So we're live on Gainsight for one year right now. And as I said, now it's the time. Lisa, it would be lovely if you could bring up the poll to get some facts and figures around how we run it, how you run it.

That would be interesting to see simply to get a picture. Having the opportunity of so many people in the room and getting your idea about some questions. So the first one is how many users do you have within your Gainsight instance? Is it lower than 50, lower than 100, lower than 500, lower than 1K, and then at a certain point in the center, it's bigger than five.

Okay. In the meantime, while you, so we will have the results, Lisa, we will have the results on screen then later on, right, so we can-- It's already there. It's for all the questions? It's still moving.

Maybe parallel very tighting. And to really move a little bit along. Yes, we will. So after the go live, what was really successful and you have seen it on the picture, there was also our CEO, super proud that we have done this in the timeframe and really huge thanks to everybody who has participated to make this happen.

And also the Gainsight helped us a lot in this discovery phase on that. We really had, and as you have seen earlier, a lot of people there working for us and a lot of functions there working in different areas. So we really started after the go live for the CSM community, looking at other roles. They also have a huge interest and they're part of the process in regarding what's happening after I can't get assigned and who we need to be part of this journey at all.

So we really had a first additional role, the onboarding advisor, they joined Gainsight, also in a pretty smooth phase and as well the CRE, colleagues, our customer renewal experts with a kind of personalized view and portfolio as well. And then for sure, there are a lot of other initiatives tied to the business initiatives at all. We had started a huge program around risk management where we're still in iterating what is the right approach to do this. And if you remember the numbers from earlier, so it's really hard to really get to all the CSMs out there and to really get to all the products that we really manage risk at all the levels we have implemented.

And also we have done a successful approach in regarding migrate and existing Gainsight instance to the corporate SAP instance. So Lena Exignavio acquired companies from SAP for quite a while, has run their businesses on their own instance and we really had done a great job all together to really move them over. So for those who have less disruption, we still have always validated in regarding, okay, what they're doing, what's great for corporate, what we are doing, what's great for corporate as well, so that we find a good balance between keeping the beauty of a pure cloud player and really also addressing the need from a corporate perspective where we need to serve all the legacy we had as Matthias mentioned earlier. So then right now we are in the phase of onboarding the enterprise architect.

So that's another role as part of a little more services focus to also see a little bit that they are contributing to the whole process and as well we have more services all around the corner. So the interest is pretty, pretty high and we at the moment balancing always between new user groups and also improving the content. As Matthias said, the MVP was really a migration but right now it's getting better, I would say, every day and regarding what is the content we need, how we redesign of the things, how can we reduce complexity, how we make things a little bit smarter and how we really make it a little bit more sexy, I would say. And then for sure technology innovation is around the corner, Matthias.

Yes, technology innovation, you've seen it in the keynote, right? So also at Chantique AI, it's a big thing at SAP. Integration, so what IBM did with Watson, our Watson is called JUUL. It should also be integrated into Gainsite itself within IT so we accustom a number zero in leveraging SAP solutions firsthand.

That will be the next things that will come in order to be ready for the future. So let's check on the poll. So I can see most of you, so are in the midsection, so 80% below 50, 100 customers, below 500, no users, below 500 users, 1K users, and nobody above 5K. Okay.

So then maybe on the next slide, these are the numbers, we're still on the poll, right? Perfect, okay. Two to five personas, yes, that's good. And more than five personas, 22, and one.

Fredrik, was that you? (laughing) Okay, good. Then what's on the next poll? That's customers, okay, that's great.

So the most answer is above 10K. So you do a lot of business like we do with Gainsite, that's great to see. And then the last poll. This I could have foreseen.

That's also interesting to see, but okay, CTA is on the lower, and on the other, maybe we can clarify that later on, that I would be interested in. Timeline is a big thing, but analytics, okay, cool. So now let's hop over to our next slide on our Gainsite facts and figures. You can see, so right now, we are running that users are from April, closed month of April, 8,300 users on our platform.

The biggest user group are CSMs. So whatever you can think of, specialized CSM, tech touch, everything. Managers. Managers, yes.

Onboarding advisors, Christina just mentioned, we onboarded that, and renewal executives. And it's a plan that we set, that we extend the platform to as many user groups to enable collaboration. We cover 57K cloud customers, and Christina already mentioned it, right? And the complexity comes in, multiplied, customer multiplied by solution, and then the people you have on top of it, right?

Doing that, always a little bit different. That's our biggest challenge. And you've seen CTAs a little bit low in the rating, but also we have a high number of CTAs, which we already tracked throughout that. So this gives a certain complexity on the implementation itself, which is biggest riddle on what we're trying to solve in order to improve it.

Because you can imagine, every user group wants to be first. Every user group wants to get their features in. That's the most important thing, and just add a little field here and a little thing there. But it's very important, but we come to that in the lessons learned section later on, on our findings on that.

Good, so, handing back to Christine to tell you a bit about the customer value journey. Just one additional common, also if you look at all the numbers in here, and all the different roles, at the end of the day it's one customer outside. So we need to ensure that we have one customer experience, if you have not competing priorities, but not competing content, not competing activities, it also needs to be channeled in a good way, because of the complexity we have, we really have, for sure, a lot of people that are working at a customer, and not just one by one relationship as always. So there's also a lot of people that have certain kind of portfolios, certain kind of knowledges, and also the complexity where we have a global customer acting in different countries, we also need to assign the people then, and this really creates all, yeah, things we need to balance and really find good strategies and concepts to implement this in Gainside.

So, and when we look a little bit why the customer value journey is important, why we put it in here, because this is how we really operate internally at SAP. So, when we look a little bit in our different roles, and if you have seen maybe the presser quite a while ago, so we have right now a new board area called customer value group, where everybody who is in a customer phasing role is coming together and really should act along this phasers, we start for sure we've discovered, we have then select, adopt, re-i from extend, so pretty classic, but at the end of the day, what we wanna achieve, and I don't wanna go into details, and I think the presentation will be available anyway if you download, but there's a little bit how we really look at what we need to do in regarding supporting with the right solution. So, on the adopt side, it's always deliver the promise, and really, okay, we need to look at what are the goals and the value drivers the customer has. Is this something what we can pull out of the system, something that needs to be validated, who is really working on that the business case is results into re-value realization of the solution customer has bought.

Then also in regarding how is the governance model, how we really design the touch points with the customer, what are the cadences we have set it up. All the things we have from a data perspective, but also from an engagement perspective, how we document the things. Who is part of QBR, for example. Then also looking always prepare the adoption, is the provisioning happening, is the fulfillment running, is the data center ready, is the enablement happening, is the onboarding advisor included?

All the things that needs to be done that adoption can be started, and then for sure, enablement, the big topic, is everything up and running, and then we can also on the technical deployment, can we use the systems, and you can imagine with the age we have, it's not everywhere streamlined, we still have different systems. We also need to pull the data out of different systems, and make it available, and then also how we can really deliver the first and incremental value at all, because this is then what hopefully relates to more engagement and a happy customer. So then for sure on the next phase, it's called arrive, or sometimes also consume, depends a little bit what are really the practices we implement for post-life goal success. So we also need to look what are the services we can offer, because if we look a little bit, we have huge services organization, the consultants wanna have something to do, so we also need to ensure that we offer the right services, we really have services offerings out there, that can be initiated by a CSM, delivered by somebody, then we have a huge partner organization, they also have a lot of implementation as well.

Then we also need to look regularly how we monitor the goals, how we really check the value drivers constantly, based on a different level, what he has mentioned, a resolution, solution areas, a huge complexity, but all needs to be managed in a way, and also be transparent provided in the system, and also we really need to give more assets to the customer that they really see something is happening there. Then for sure, we need to look at the customers consuming our software, how we really, with the telemetry information we have, do we manage the usage and the consumption in a good way, do we really have all the signals in place, and sometimes require company, they have not maybe SAP corporate standard implemented, we also need to ensure that it's flying all via unified metering model into our tools that we really can provide the level we need, is it feature level, is it not, how we really, of all the commercial models, have provided the right insights, and then as well, what's happening regarding to the business review with customers, can we automate the things there, what is needed from a customer perspective, of all the challenges we have internally externally as well, here are classical things like release adoption, that then when it comes to the extents phase, everything you prepared, that then the renewal is hopefully happening. So you see there's a lot of steps and things happening, and there's a huge list of activities we expect the people that are working in these phases are supposed to do, and for all of these activities, we need to provide content or activity or support, or an access to an information, or an asset, or a dashboard, or anything happened on a SharePoint page, and yes, we for sure have AI internally, as Mathias mentioned, it's called Julien our world, and yes, we provide as much as we can, but we have still a huge number of high touch customers, so it's always in the loop to drive these things, but on the other hand, we also need to be scale, when we look at our scale business, we really do this with a small number of people, and serving a lot of customers out there, and this is a little bit why we tried on the one hand side, increase customer experience, provide a standard across all the different motions we have, but also we really need to ensure that things are, not standardized in a way, so every customer feels he's the most important customer at all, so in this balance, and this input, and everything what needs to be happened there, there's a little bit our job to help this, and when we look a little bit how we started Mathias. Yes, so how do we start, right?

So the principles for MVP, as I said, we migrated off a platform, so there were high expectations, because you're not simply migrating off something, to do it as good as it was be, it needs to be better, which means there needs to be a clear set of outcome, what do we wanna achieve, right? And also about the timelines, because if you're hopping off an existing contract, so there is a definite end date that is coming, which gives you that extra push in order to be on time, and finally jump into cold water. Of course, so the executive support, and while I speak Lisa, you could bring up the second poll, that would be awesome. And really having that end user teams engage, I guess there's nothing more serious than real end user feedback that's straight to your face on if things are crap or work.

And yes, so you see on the left hand side, right? So this is simply change management. If people are used to certain toolings, and as I said, even before the tooling, we had before, we had gains that you can imagine that SAP was not flying blind on everything Christina mentioned throughout the phases when it comes to adoption, consumption, to the telemetry itself, this was all existing. It's not like that you start greenfield on having your CRM or even managed by Excel, and then whoosh, you get the complete platform that is able to cater your needs.

It was always the managing the expectations towards what can I do quicker if I do it by myself, or what does Gainsight pay in for me, right? And that is the constant questions we are raising, or we are tackling or trying to tackle, also in our partnership with Gainsight to say, "Hey, how does the platform needs to improve, right? "How can we use AI features?" And that was also beginning 2025, right? That we said, "Okay, how can we leverage AI?

"We are a German company." They are so unsexy words like workers' counsel, ethics and compliance, right? And I still remember the broader cleat from Gainsight saying, "Ain't that over-regulation hindering "a little bit of innovation?" Yes, it does, I can tell you, but that's the world we're living in. High expectations out there, and what you can achieve with AI, and I said the glam, and then the reality on what you are able to do, what you are allowed to do, what you should be doing. But the great thing is, even in such a big company like SAP, right?

You can still move with the right people, with the right team, that's also part of the principles over here. Yeah, and you heard Christine saying in the beginning, just need to do it, right? You need to simply deliver and then check and reiterate. So coming to the surveys, I gave out a few principles, measure, learn, iterate, that's exactly right.

So that's the only thing on how you can improve, and how you can beat complexity, because honestly, features either adopted or die. And you should not be afraid of letting go of other stuff, which you do not need anymore, because otherwise you are simply creating waste over waste over waste. But that's a tough one, honestly. In my whole career, shutting down things, it's way tougher than building new things.

Writing new code, it's way easier to understand the old and to improve. So also here, outcomes and not features, that's exactly the discussion we want to drive together. What do you wanna achieve? Tell me about your problem.

Do not come opinionated with your solution already to me. That is something that is helping a lot. But yes, and the one, the data foundation, that's definitely something, right? That's also where there is a big pitch from SAP, as we see you mentioned, right?

Our data foundation is basically touching the complete world economy, the customer systems, and internally you can imagine, right, the internal data we store at SAP at that size, it's super complex. So SAP itself is a super complex customer with on-premise systems, so everything which is out there in the market, on complexity, it's internal happening. So it's not like we have a fresh cloud startup that starts from nothing and can completely run a gain-side installation from scratch with a handful of CSMs. That's not going to happen.

And that's where the world we're in. Handing over to you. Yeah, and just to add to this, and we think it's all a little bit about when we're really looking back, we made a decision to move over from our legacy system to really toggle over the MVP, and then what really, we would maybe change a little bit, so we would not do everything differently, but some of the things, and regarding also the complexity, we really faced during the implementation where really the teams worked pretty hard to make it happen, because it was the middle of our go-to-market change. So at SAP, you always have in Q1 a lot of adjustments and regarding how the go-to-market looks like, the system needs to be updated, we really need to adopt it a little bit, what can be happened, what should be happened, because some of the things are mostly decided like last minute.

And this is also where then we really need to be strong to say, okay, what we're doing right now, and I think at the beginning was a lot of steering versus engagements that we were doing from an SAP perspective for our CSM community, and what really helping them to really do their job in a better sense, and also in reguiting to, okay, how we can ensure that the cross-functionality is happening, that really we're seeing that people can collaborate and know what needs to be done with all the assignments we have, we have, you can imagine, and every country a different kind of threshold, for example, where we assign a CSM to a customer, we have different industry, we have different approaches, each solution area has a different idea, so it all needs to be implemented in a way, so when we look a little bit, how we would increase the collaboration, what is really key at all, we really used the customer value journey, as I introduced earlier, to really take this as a guiding principle for all of us, in reguiting, okay, this needs to be somewhere visible to everybody, this needs to be the leading dimension in reguarding how we move on, then as Mathias mentioned as well, outcome-oriented, I think this is also the discussion we had in the beginning, how we really can drive outcomes, how this is result to something where we see, okay, when you are really just increasing, churn is decreasing, what else we can, value realization, faster time to value, all the things looking at outcome for our customers, and as well internally for our people, do they see efficiency gains, do they see something what makes their life easier, smarter, they are fast-sensing, they get the right recommendations at the right point in time, and always put the end user in the middle of the things, because we try to, I would say, every problem with gains at the beginning, we put all the data we had in the gainsite system, but sometimes we miss a little bit, is this really how they are working when they go into the system on the morning, is this really that they look at all the different tabs and all the different dashboards and all the different data, now they really need something, they say on one page, this is what I need to do today, this customer should I call, this problem I need to solve, so this is a little bit what we're trying to achieve with this, and also content and context, we heard it earlier as well, so I always say content is key and context is king-kind, so this is super important, because sometimes without the context, you don't know what to do really, so you can see a number, but you don't have the context around, you cannot make a decision, and this is what we really wanna change in regarding, with all the people we have out there, they're helping us to drive the engagements, we really need to provide the right content and the right context, and also innovation as you've seen earlier, we always try to be, yeah, in the middle of the center regarding driving innovation, but regulation always out there, this would kill us sometimes, but sometimes we have also some good news to tell, and regarding the interaction we're having, so we are just the two, they're for sure the real business is missing, so but there are people in the rooms here, really saying so they're helping us to make our life easier, because of their push, we have really the chance to change things, and really be part of the transformation at all, and regarding innovation materials. Yes, as I said, I can copycat now the keynote from IBM so I felt okay, I will tell the same story, right? So we have our AI assistant which is called Shul, and we managed to integrate it into GainSight, so it's the first steps, baby steps, right? So you can ask simple questions, and I can already see bubbling up the questions, and I can refer to that later on, but right now, right, you don't as a CSM, if that really becomes your personal assistant, you don't want to hop between personal assistants back and forth, right?

Because with Shul, you can of course create everything you need from HR with whatever you do in your reimbursements, and of course you can also ask then, hey, what are my open CTAs, right? And that's the sweetness of it, you think user-centric and problem-centric, and you hide the complexity which we try to hide behind your eyes or your eye blendings and whatever, and who have ever seen from you a real SAP graphical user interface, Gui, please hands up. And not the ones in the front row, nobody. If somebody's interested, I can show you that.

And when I started SAP 2005, I said, gosh, how can they make money? It's incredibly ugly, I can tell you, and I'm with this company now for over 20 years, but it's not the UI, it's the complete processes underneath, it's the complete integration of your supply chain into financials, everything, and that is rock solid, right? So there is no flaw in that. It calculates, you can do your financial reports, that was also part of our customer conference, 80% correct, not working, needs to be 100% correct.

And that's also where this then will be the proof in the pudding, right, if we integrate also with Gainsight into that, you want reliability. It's not like that you get different results asking the systems, you get different risk assessments and so on, this needs to be rock solid, because that's the expectations. So, concluding with our lessons learned from our journey so far with Gainsight two years back. Yeah, we tried to really group them a little bit, and I wanna go all to the details, but really pick some of the things.

And I have seen this in the poll answers as well. So learning and change management is definitely a huge topic in regarding to, okay, how we really change behavior, how we really helping that they really need to come from, I just do my job in how I can really ensure my customer is receiving value with everything we're doing. And also in regarding talking to each other, because we are big companies, so not everybody is sitting in the same office, so we don't have everybody in the same country, for example. So we really need to start exchanging and driving communication, transparency on what was discussed and not really store things on your personal folder, not in a personal outlook, because at the end of the day, we're serving the customer out there.

And if you have a tons of folks just as a big account, they can be there, they have 100 consultants out there. So if you don't know what they are doing, you will not be able to really doing the right things for the customers at all. And really also define the right goals and the business benefits upfront that it really can measure what we wanna achieve and how we get there. And regarding provider roadmap, looking really how things are changing, process efficiency, how changing maybe KPIs, we providing to the market and things like that.

And also provide some kind of innovation and give the people a vision where they're heading to, they understand why we have done this, why we have implemented a new solution, why we have really moved from a running system to something new of all the challenges you have in the beginning to roll out a new software and also how you really didn't drive the adoption overall. So this was, I would say some of the things and if we would summarize this a little bit, we call it a full seize. So communication is really key. Be open, be regular in all the meetings, send out newsletter, whatever's out there, that people are aware of what's happening.

And also they can ask other questions and provide feedback to the teams as well. Collaboration internally between the teams, really from an operations perspective, from an IT perspective, from a business perspective and also the culture. I think that's super important because I have seen one question how we handle big CSM community like we have. Culture is definitely something what we need to look into.

So we organize by regions and then also by LOB. So we also have different kind of standards maybe, different kind of maturity level from the people, from the engagement, from the customer, from the market and also have the right success metrics and criterias in place to really see how things are progressing over time. And hopefully more to come. So next year Georgia promise to be main stage, perfect.

And with this we can open up for questions. (audience applauding) Thank you, you stay in the center. I know, no, no. And I have to firstly saying I've been with SAP part of the journey from the beginning as their CSM.

And I'm very proud of what they achieved. There's a big part of the team here in the front and many others that we need to thank. So I'm really, really proud of what you're doing and what you're going to do next. Which is going to answer some questions for now.

So the first one is SAP has the biggest CSM company on the planet, how to handle so many CSMs? Yeah, I think it's a good question. And at the end of the day, we try to be better every day. So we organized it centrally on a regional level.

So we have regional leaders out there and providing based on the customer value journey and more details regarding what is the role of a CSM, what is the vision for CSM, how the right profile is looking like and how we really can provide with the right mechanics, the right support for them and also steer them in the same way. So for sure it's not that easy, but I think we're getting there to really have this CSM of the future as a peer as well. And I would say we're doing good. So a lot of folks have worked in customer facing roles as well, but also we have people they join us over time.

So we'll drive the engagement at all. And yeah, a big fan of the CSM community at all because they really have the right intention and help us although from a revenue operations perspective to really do the right things. So more we can have later on at the bar to really look into the details where the challenges are. But in general, I think we're doing a great job.

Nice, Matias, this is probably for you the next one. How's SAP enabling the new personas, so all the user groups that we're adding and existing CS teams on the platform without over-training? What's the secret? Well, like there is no secret, right?

Honestly, whatever you push out and that said we're not even responsible for the training, that's one piece of the success, right? So we did split up on the actions, on technical enablement, rollouts and so on. But I guess the real proof when really user logs on, we were sitting together with Gainsight today sitting checking on the user statistics, right? How many happy users do we have that regular log onto?

It's that multi-channel, right? So you offer trainings, right? But actually, does it fit to your world? Do people really adopt because they see a value in ease of, and you've seen the customer 360, right?

So do they get the data where they need it? Do they ask, do they trust the data? That's a big thing, right? And that is nothing you can train for.

You can of course say, hey, this is how you should be using the system, but our lessons learned is that people will work around anything which provides no value with a lot of creativity. And I guess that is what you need to capture, right? And that you cannot capture with a training. The training is just the entry door, right?

But then let's say if people really work with it and if they come down your desk with improvement potential, that is where it shows that it's really working. Yeah, maybe an edge of this, we always build a kind of three in a box approach. So we have always a business representative, an IT representative, an operations representative to really work on how we really get things done and rolled out. If we have a new persona and joining the party, then we are all sitting together and say, okay, what we need, whom we need, and how we make it happen.

So that really the business is leading the enablement and driving the change internally, that we really have people there living and breathing this day by day. And not just somebody from a training department is offering a standard training, that we really have people, they know what to do, they're coming from that area, they can tell the story in their words, they're using a little bit their methodology to make this happen. With this approach, we are quite successful. We just have onboarded LOBs that went on the platform in the last four weeks.

And with this approach, we really had also the beauty little bit to also use their feedback, how we can improve it all. So it's always a win-win for all directions. So we touch again on the cross-collaboration. It's like really having that ownership of who's in, who do you need in mix?

Training is important, but like really understanding what's in it for me, creating the clarity, and then trust in the data, trust in the workflows that we built on and so on. Right, couple more questions. The adopt phase of your customer value journey is clearly the most critical focus area. How are you measuring whether customers truly are realizing value and not just completing activities?

And what does a successful value realization look like in your engagement model? Let me start and then you take over, right? So the adoption phase is clearly critical, right? And as I said, adoption measurement at SAP is not only a gainside play.

So there is a lot of tooling around and you can imagine this multiplies given the solution areas around. So I would even lie if I say that adoption measures are at least five. There's a standard for it, which the data is running into gainside for risk measurement and risk assessment, but that's definitely something which we're currently working on to harmonize that even more and bring it to the AI and the Chantique world because it involves a lot of manual activities right now. It's in the trust of a CSM to say, hey, this customer is live and monitored along with the onboarding advisors.

But the problem is if there is human, there is failure. If there is no human at all, you've heard the long tail story from Chuck this morning. You need to rely on system information. And we have a dedicated adoption model to that running and giving that signals.

But that value discussion, right, I guess that is something that we all need to work on. How can we use AI, use machine learning way more to predict what is going on and to give that signals? But Gainside is our platform where we want to measure that, right? So, and even their process KPIs, how can we speed up time to value until go live?

How can we bring up early risks and so on? That's key. But I guess what's also, and that's not in the question, but then the derive phase, how do we ensure the solutions are properly measured and monitored in order to avoid churn? Yeah, and in addition to that, I think everybody knows this in the room.

The head over phase from the sales colleagues to the post sales colleagues is absolutely critical because in our advisory organization, we really drive the business cases. We really look how we can realize value and how we ensure that the information, the identified area and really discuss of customer is coming to a post sales world. And sometimes it's just stuck because the document was not handed over. It was not on a central platform.

So it is all the things we really, we need to have to then measure the value of the solution at all. But really try to automate a lot of things and make it applicable that we really then can have this in the system as well. And for sure we are not there, but at the moment several pilots running how we really can ensure this, we call it internally a sales to success handover phase and regarding what we need to do to have documents shared, we can read the information, put it into the system, how can it validate ongoing and all the step of how we're planning adoption and consumption at all, how we're really looking at usage triggers and patterns we have out there to really make this a little bit more transparent and also can give this to customer as an indicator how successful they are. Well, we're out of time.

So thanks everybody for your questions. Let's give another applause for Christina Matias. (audience applauding)