SAP announced that it is continuing to help businesses "run live" with its Next-Generation Support approach.

The Expert Chat service - a live chat function that connects SAP customers to technical support experts instantly - helps resolve incidents nearly twice as fast as those reported through traditional support channels.

From simple to complex problems, Expert Chat enables SAP customers to get the help they need faster. Most notably, incidents that had required more than one interaction through traditional support methods performed best. Currently, the Expert Chat service is available for all support levels and almost all solutions.

"In today's digital economy, enterprises become 'live businesses.' As a consequence, they require the same real-time availability from their essential supporting functions. Long waiting periods or reaction times between problem and solution are unaffordable for them," said Andreas Heckmann, global senior vice president, Support Delivery, SAP. "Expert Chat provides our customers with instantaneous access to our top product experts, thereby considerably reducing the amount of time to get answers to their SAP product-related questions."

Unlike traditional ticket-based models, Expert Chat directly connects customers with support experts from SAP. Instead of filing an incident, customers can establish a real-time interaction with SAP's support organization, creating a faster and more direct route to issue resolution, which improves customer satisfaction while reducing project and operational costs.

Some more benefits of Expert Chat include:

• Time savings : businesses that implement Expert Chat begin to experience significant increases in value from their maintenance and support agreements with SAP


• Reduced downtime : Expert Chat has been proven to reduce considerably the amount of time businesses spend supporting SAP products, including resolving incidents and issues


• Efficient issue resolution : through the Expert Chat service, SAP optimizes the support process by consolidating all necessary information at an early stage to solve an issue during the interaction or to deliver fast resolution if the issue requires deeper investigation

Customers can access Expert Chat through SAP ONE Support Launchpad, which provides a central place for users to access all support channels provided by SAP.