From the customer’s side, this experience could affect the reliability of future purchases. It could make them think twice before shopping there again, especially if they already had concerns about the difficulties in completing transactions. From the company’s perspective, a website outage implies significant losses, such as direct revenue loss due to a main sales channel being shut down, and a loss of organizational trust, potentially driving customers to competitors.

In retail and e-commerce business, customer experience is paramount. A company whose e-commerce frequently experiences downtime could receive a negative market reaction from investors.

These experiences highlight the importance of robust support readiness programs, especially during holiday seasons when businesses strive for more sales and revenue through their digital platforms. With customer expectations at an all-time high, businesses need reliable, scalable, and innovative solutions to deliver exceptional shopping experiences. Proactive support measures can considerably reduce system failures during peak times, which not only reinforces customer satisfaction but also protects organizational trust and revenue. Â鶹ԭ´´’s holiday support readiness program is designed to address these needs. It offers a strategic, data-driven approach to help businesses thrive during peak periods.

The holiday support readiness program is a customer experience program by Â鶹ԭ´´ to help safeguard and establish strong support for digital commerce and retail customers during high shopping times. Key features of the program include:

• ​Comprehensive coverage: It can cover events ranging from Singles Day in China and El Buen Fin in Mexico to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year’s.​
• Extensive participation: Last year, 143 customers with 200 tenants used Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s holiday support readiness program to navigate the holiday rush successfully.​
• Early preparation: Preparation begins 4–6 months in advance, involving collaboration among customer support, cloud operations, and product engineering teams.​

The focus on customer experience has increased due to the expansion of interfaces through which customers interact with companies. , 70% of respondents bought products or ordered services electronically in the preceding 12 months. For corporations, this online influx depicts a figure of more than . To approach these complexities, companies have steadily turned to advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to strengthen their support systems.

In 2024, Â鶹ԭ´´ introduced a preventative care model under the transformation blueprint, aimed at delivering predictive, proactive, bi-directional support integrated with AI-driven insights and automation, allowing teams to predict potential problems and address them before they impact customers—and potentially millions of users. Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s proprietary AI tools are deployed to help streamline support processes, enhance operational insights, and enable predictive and proactive engagement.

This represents a pioneering shift in the industry, positioning Â鶹ԭ´´ as a front-runner in AI-driven, predictive, and proactive support solutions. The model provides a comprehensive, 360-degree customer support profile, helping to accelerate issue detection and anticipate potential problems, with AI-integrated features like a virtual support assistant, resource and web traffic predictions, a recommendation engine, case history analysis, issue correlation, and pattern recognition.

To operationalize this model, Â鶹ԭ´´ leverages collaboration approaches among product engineering teams, cloud operations—database administrators and technical operations managers—technical support, and mission-critical teams to convey comprehensive case analysis reports and detailed recommendations and action plans for each customer. This can allow Â鶹ԭ´´ to identify and resolve future issues before customers are affected, helping to reinforce system stability during peak sales periods. For example, the proactive support process for the 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events involved holistic health checks for over 143 customers and 200 production environments, setting a new standard in holiday readiness.

When aligned with the organizational strategy, a support program can foster a more positive customer journey, resulting in improved customer loyalty. “The holiday support readiness program isn’t just about managing the current peak; it’s about preparing for the next one. Our focus on preventative, AI-driven support means that our customers can focus on their business, not on system stability,” says Stefan Steinle, executive vice president and head of Customer Support & CLM at Â鶹ԭ´´.

For enterprises, joining the holiday support readiness program can also offer the following advantages:

• Minimize downtime: It helps ensure e-commerce platforms are ready when it matters most.​
• Optimize performance: It uses AI and automation to help maintain peak system health and customer satisfaction.​
• Stay ahead: Proactive monitoring and predictive support help keep organizations one step ahead of potential outcomes.​

Looking forward, preparing for upcoming retail peak seasons cannot be overstated. Â鶹ԭ´´ Sapphire in 2025 will hold dedicated sessions to help ensure customers are well-equipped for these challenging periods. From live demos to expert interactions, attendees will be able to witness firsthand how Â鶹ԭ´´’s tools help keep businesses running smoothly and engage directly with solution experts.

Our commitment at Â鶹ԭ´´ Sapphire in 2025 is to equip customers with the knowledge and tools needed for uninterrupted success during every peak period. The holiday support readiness program is about turning challenges into opportunities for growth. With these resources, businesses will be better prepared to face uncertainties and use favorable circumstances in demanding times, ensuring sustained development and customer satisfaction.

Don’t wait until the next holiday season to find last-minute solutions. Be a part of the holiday support readiness program now and secure your business’s performance for future peak sales periods.

The has mandated manufacturers to improve traceability, which is essential for ensuring that medicines reach patients safely. Â鶹ԭ´´ Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences is designed to help meet these demands by streamlining the tracking process. However, as the network of users has grown, support challenges have surfaced. To address these issues, Â鶹ԭ´´ introduced Built-In Support into the hub to help provide direct, seamless assistance to life sciences companies and their partners.

I had the opportunity to interview Tarun Luthra, head of Support – Industries & CX, and Andreas Krummlauf, vice president and head of Product Management Life Sciences, Health and Ecosystem, about the project’s impact. Here’s how Built-In Support is helping to enhance operational efficiency for network users in the life sciences industry.

Q: How did this project come about?

Krummlauf: , manufacturers of medicine needed to develop the ability to uniquely identify every pack of medicine they sell in those countries. This is to avoid counterfeiting in the legitimate supply chain. To support this requirement, Â鶹ԭ´´’s serialization portfolio was initiated in 2015 with the Â鶹ԭ´´ Advanced Track and Trace for Pharmaceuticals application, a corporate serialization repository.

Â鶹ԭ´´ Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences started in 2016 with a focused goal: to manage traceability and serialization data exchange for our customers and a couple of hundred of their business partners. In 2021, the hub won the Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award.

As the network expanded to tens of thousands of partners, a key limitation emerged: we did not have a simple way for business partners, acting as network end users, to directly interact with Â鶹ԭ´´ support in case of critical issues, even without having a support contract with Â鶹ԭ´´ in place.

Q: What support challenges were network end users facing?

Luthra: The challenge arose from supporting an increasing number of network end users that were not direct Â鶹ԭ´´ customers. Without access to Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s support system, the network end users had to rely on their customers to resolve issues, adding unnecessary steps and risked communication gaps. This presented an opportunity to implement Built-In Support to support our customers’ business partners as network end users when they use Â鶹ԭ´´ Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences.

Q: How does Built-In Support make a difference for network end users?

Luthra: We are now providing network end users with a direct entry point from within Â鶹ԭ´´ Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences, enabling them to easily contact the support team. Built-In Support is seamlessly integrated into the hub. The network end user can find help by searching Â鶹ԭ´´ Knowledge Base Articles or submitting a case.

Krummlauf: This streamlined process can enhance the support experience and helps ensure users can quickly find the help they need. Network end users can now resolve issues independently or submit a case without involving customers in the resolution process. This improvement leads to faster response times. Users can efficiently search for relevant product information and potentially resolve issues on their own. This autonomy helps enhance the overall support experience and empowers users to find solutions quickly and effectively.

Built-In Support Enhances User Experience and Support Efficiency

In conclusion, marks a significant advancement in enhancing user experience and support efficiency. When network end users are empowered to directly access support resources and resolve issues independently, we not only help to streamline the support process but also reinforce Â鶹ԭ´´’s commitment to improving lives through better life sciences solutions. As regulatory demands evolve, our innovative approaches will continue to drive progress and collaboration in the life sciences sector. For more insights, stay connected with Â鶹ԭ´´’s ongoing developments.

ASP is an international membership organization for customer support managers and professionals and has held this title for over 20 years. Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management team and Corporate Processes & Information Technology (CPIT) teams are proud to get this honor for the second time, building on the 2018 ASP award win for the Â鶹ԭ´´ Support Portal.

This year’s evaluation criteria covered site user experience, content offering, content engagement and interaction, site improvement process, and site measurement process. Created to become a unified meeting point for information about administrative, commercial, and technical Â鶹ԭ´´ solutions, Â鶹ԭ´´ for Me implemented new features that focus on self-service and AI-enhanced search. The ASP award demonstrates the team effort to deliver these improvements for functional dashboards, user-friendly navigation, and an integrated portal for post-sale customer communication.

Four Questions to the Experts

Dr. Benjamin Blau, chief process & information officer and head of Corporate Processes & Information Technology, and Stefan Steinle, EVP and head of Customer Support, answered some questions related to the ASP award.

Q: What role did Corporate Processes & Information Technology play in achieving this award?

Blau: Let me start by giving a shout-out to our Corporate Processes & Information Technology teams for all their hard work in developing the amazing platform, Â鶹ԭ´´ for Me. By leveraging Â鶹ԭ´´’s own technology stack, we were able to enable seamless integration, high performance, and scalability. Through the fantastic collaborative effort between our IT and process teams and support functions, we were able to create a personalized and user-friendly experience that the judges recognized as industry leading. I am proud of what we were able to achieve together.

Q: The award is a great proof point in delighting customers. What do customers find most useful when seeking support from Â鶹ԭ´´ and what role does AI play in it?

Steinle: This award reconfirms the direction Â鶹ԭ´´ support is heading and our customers’ needs are the driving force behind. Customers value how predictive support, efficient self-service, and real-time channels can reduce the effort of resolving software issues. AI plays an important role in this. With the Â鶹ԭ´´ for Me site’s AI-powered self-service capabilities and search tools, we can provide efficient and personalized support. Customers can get targeted and relevant results that consider the user and product context. Moreover, AI also helps categorize issues, identify and recommend the best suited solutions through , and find the most appropriate interaction channel.

Q: How do you see the future of Â鶹ԭ´´ for Me evolving, and what role will Â鶹ԭ´´’s technology play in its continued success?

Blau: The future of Â鶹ԭ´´ for Me is incredibly bright! We’re thrilled about our plans to enhance key areas like contracts and billing, system management, reporting, and support. We’re also going to dive into emerging Â鶹ԭ´´ technologies such as AI-driven insights, machine learning, and predictive analytics to personalize and optimize the customer experience. Our goal is to help customers anticipate their needs, automate routine tasks, and gain greater insight into their Â鶹ԭ´´ landscape. By staying ahead in technology, we’re not just maintaining our leadership in customer support but also setting new industry benchmarks. We’re excited to continue improving and evolving to better serve our customers.

Q: The customer support experience is constantly being innovated. What can customers look forward to from Â鶹ԭ´´ support?

Steinle: To start, it would be evolving and growing personalization. We’re dedicated to strengthening predictive and preventative support, proactively identifying and anticipating potential issues. Customers can also expect our continued focus on bi-directional support, including real-time assistance. We’ll continue to optimize our real-time support channels to help further reduce our customers’ effort to resolve software issues. We’ll significantly increase the use of AI, particularly generative AI, to analyze and classify reported issues, enhance search results, and improve recommendations. We actively listen to customer feedback and continuously improve usability, supportability, and product quality. This helps ensure a smooth and effortless experience.

More Information

The constant innovations and leveraging AI for a further improved customer support experience and this recognition reconfirm Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s continued focus to bring out the best in every business. is one of the three key access points for customers, together with and . Read more about and .

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