Some five or six years ago, the story that started it all was first made public: the SAP support employee doesn’t understand the problem, doesn’t speak English very well, isn’t cooperative, communications fail. Instead of support, there’s nuisance and inconvenience. This story even ends in tears. But not the customer is crying, as you would expect – it’s the employee. He is crying and pleading with the customer to not let things escalate, because then his salary will be cut.
This horrific tale could never be verified. However, the source of this story was a renowned CIO of a German SAP customer and long-time member of DSAG (the German-speaking SAP user group).
When it happened, we and so many others thought nothing of it. A one-time thing, an interesting anecdote. What a lapse in judgement! These kinds of stories were told more and more often, more and more regularly. Sometimes, we can’t even go one week without hearing at least three or four of them!
SAP support never goes right apparently
This is true for all of SAP’s support offerings, by the way. Even SAP customers with access to a so-called “support advisor” aren’t that much better off. Sometimes, these “support advisors” say that the problem is caused by custom code – although the system crashed when the customer wanted to operate it for the first time. Sometimes, the support employee demands a developer license from customers for an evaluation on their systems. There are endless ways in which support calls and visits could go wrong, and SAP customers seem to have experienced all of them.
It doesn’t matter how the story goes, it always ends in misery, desperation, and chaos. SAP support is supposed to help customers – now it seems to be doing the exact opposite for many of them.
(We tried to verify or debunk some of these stories, but SAP remained uncooperative.)
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