174. Inside SAP’s Scaled Customer Success Strategy ft. Carsten Schütz (SAP)

There, there are customers that actually never talk to any human, so to say, but still you want to drive their adoption and you want to help them and you would need help by agents for, especially for this side.

Jenny Calvert:
Hi, I am Jenny Calvert, host of Unchurned, coming at you live from Pulse Europe in lovely Dublin, Ireland. Really excited to be joined by— here we go— Carsten Schütz today from SAP. Carsten, thanks so much for joining us.

Carsten Schütz:
Thanks for having me.

Jenny Calvert:
Tell the listeners a little bit about your role and what you do with SAP.

Carsten Schütz:
So I, I start, um, not in the past, but right now. So right now I’m VP and global head of scaled CS, um, at SAP. So basically my organization consists of two pillars. Um, so one pillar is everything around customer onboarding and the second pillar is everything around digital CS. Um, but. That is not how I started.

Jenny Calvert:
Okay. So, um, I feel a career glow up story coming.

Carsten Schütz:
Yes. So, um, I joined GreenaX, which, um, recently got acquired by SAP. So a, um, SaaS B2B software company founded in Germany. I joined them in 2019 as a CSM. I think I was employee number 100-something. Okay. Uh, when I joined, we had around 300 customers. Um, and basically in CS, um, everyone was either a CSM or in support or CSE.

Carsten Schütz:
So I started as a CSM. Actually, I had no clue about CSM or, or what it means being a CSM at all.

Jenny Calvert:
So you were brand new to the, to the industry, the space, the function, the role.

Carsten Schütz:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
All of it.

Carsten Schütz:
I have a background in IT. I have worked, um, uh, years and years ago I worked in a creative agency, so I always was used to, um, talking to customers, managing customers. And the products, um, we build at, at B9X, I’ve, it felt like, okay, you can actually combine IT with talking to customers. Um, and that is why I thought, okay, being, becoming a CSMM, that, that sounds pretty interesting. So yeah, why I did the move. Um, and then of course, if you’re successful, the company grows, you get more and more customers in. So fantastic. But then at some point you need to think of a bit more of structure, right? So not everyone can be a CSM, not everyone can be the generalist.

Carsten Schütz:
So we, we first of all introduced some teams because in the end, at some point you need some hierarchy.

Jenny Calvert:
I mean, that’s just a little bit of hierarchy.

Carsten Schütz:
Yeah. So I had the chance to take over team lead for the CSM team that took care of all the customers in, in the DACH region. So Germany, Austria, Switzerland. Switzerland, and then later on when we added another level, because we grew again, which was good, I became responsible NPP for customer success management in EMEA and Asia Pacific.

Jenny Calvert:
Okay.

Carsten Schütz:
Oh, that is what I’ve done 3 years. So basically building up the, the CSM organization. Wow. Hired a lot of CSMs. Had the pleasure of working with great team leads. And then beginning of this year, I changed roles. So when we got acquired by SAP, we figured out, okay, there’s, there’s definitely a need to invest further into scaling. So scaling CS, that’s why we created this organization, which is now called Scale CS, that I’m leading now, building it up.

Carsten Schütz:
So starting a bit, not from scratch again, because I’ve great onboarding teams. Um, but yeah, it’s just a new adventure.

Jenny Calvert:
So almost a year building out this, the scaled success discipline, if you will, the team and the, the, obviously the infrastructure and the architecture. And, uh, you mentioned something about generalists. So I’m curious, as you’re thinking about building out this scaled function, generalist? Specialist, which one wins moving forward?

Carsten Schütz:
Yeah, so as I said, I’m coming from a history where we had, so we started this with generalists, I would say, at BinaX.

Jenny Calvert:
Mm-hmm.

Carsten Schütz:
But every time we figure out, okay, we are continuously growing, we need more specialists. And then we created those roles. We had customer success engineers right from the beginning, which is I think a very valuable role in CS. And then at some point we figured out, okay, we need CS Ops, right? And we were lucky enough to find a great CS Ops leader. She’s having a panel, by the way, tomorrow. Okay. Anita Beck is her name. So, great panel.

Jenny Calvert:
Fantastic. Little plug for the team.

Carsten Schütz:
Of course. And that was the point where we actually figured out, okay, those specialized roles, they are so important to also develop and mature the organization. So coming to your question, I think it’s neither nor, honestly. I mean, it’s something, so we are both coming from CS. Yeah. So it’s always this answer, it depends, right?

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah, always it depends.

Carsten Schütz:
How I see it now being part of SAP, SAP of course has tons and tons of customers. I mean, it’s amazing how many customers are SAP customers actually. The portfolio is quite complex. So the question that you ask is very important at SAP. So do you go into the direction of having CSMs who are more orchestrating all the specialists, or do you still invest into that deep knowledge, deep info, deep product knowledge, and, and CSMs who are really experts in their domain? Yeah. And for me, it’s a combination of both, honestly. Last week we had our own conference, so actually the Pulse, but for Orbit. And of course I was in, in a lot of customer meetings and there was some feedback that, I mean, every time you hear such a good feedback, you are also of course proud of your teams, but that resonated well with this discussion around specialists versus generalists.

Carsten Schütz:
And the feedback from customers were, um, they of course had to deal with so many CSMs from so many vendors. That is why I’m always interested in what is your perception of our CSMs, right? And the, the, uh, statements that I’m still thinking of is, um, I had 3 customers and I did not ask for their feedback, by the way, but they said, uh, what makes us standing out from the competition. Is that our CSMs have so much of knowledge of a path and that they are the ones that can actually help and they create value. And it’s not the situation where you talk to CSMs and they say, I don’t have the answer, but I have 3 or 5 specialists, so let’s set up another call. Yeah. And then I bring in the specialist.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah.

Carsten Schütz:
I think depending on the product complexity and the organizational complexity, you need also those who orchestrate. But for me, it’s a combination.

Jenny Calvert:
And it sounds like your customers agree. I love, I love that question actually, is understanding not just our normal, you know, how is our product doing for your business? How satisfied are you? Right? Our normal NPS, CSAT questions and going direct towards—

Carsten Schütz:
and I always, I always also advocate and, and tell our CSMs, please always try and, and change the perspective. So the customer you’re talking to, you’re not the owner’s CSM, right? So it, yeah. You wanna set up a meeting or a quarterly business review, you are not the only one asking.

Jenny Calvert:
So, so important.

Carsten Schütz:
And, and that is, I mean, that wasn’t the question, but I think, yeah. Um, every time I get asked, okay, what makes a great QBR? I always think like if a customer gets out of it and thinks, okay, that was, so I invested my time and that was valuable.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah.

Carsten Schütz:
That is when they will agree. To have another meeting, right? Yeah. Um, so I think changing this perspective is important and, but that also leads to the fact, yes, you need specialists at, at some point in the journey.

Jenny Calvert:
Sounds like it really is impacting that customer experience. And again, for a customer to not have to go circles and circles to schedule and things like that, a little more efficient in the ways that they’re able to help.

Carsten Schütz:
I was coming on that question. I, I think, so if you’re asking for, okay, what will be the path for, for your own career. So how you grow in your own career, maybe it’s this, um, maybe it’s this T-shaped model, right? So I think it’s great to be a generalist, but in, in a certain area, in a certain domain, you also have to be a specialist. Yeah. So it’s the combination of both.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. How do you think AI will transform and shift some of those roles as well?

Carsten Schütz:
Right.

Jenny Calvert:
When thinking about generalists and specialists, especially in customer success, like how do you feel AI augments or redefines enforces or enhances some of those risks?

Carsten Schütz:
I think first, also now, so today being part of or listening to the keynote, there’s so much opportunity, so much great stuff. But I think if you’re a customer listening to the keynote, you also need to come up with a plan how you get the baseline right. So how do you clean up your data? How do you prepare every, everything around your organization, but also about your technology stack and the data to be actually prepared for AI so that you can then leverage agents and AI capabilities. I think it will, for serious organizations, it will be of so much value. So I think, thinking of our situation. Where we actually need AI is, is 80% of your customer base where you actually need to scale and where you will need support from agents because you can’t, I mean, that, that’s not news. You can’t just hire more and more people to help customers. There are customers that actually never talk to any human, so to say, but still you want to drive their adoption and you want to help them and you would needs help by agents for, especially for this side.

Jenny Calvert:
Absolutely. And then they’re able to have that same experience that some of the customers giving you feedback at your conference were given.

Carsten Schütz:
So, but to me it, it’s, um, so beginning of the year we thought around a mission statement for, for this GATE-CS and actually I stole it from Gainsight, uh, not the whole statement, but, um, I still remember it’s, I think it’s my fifth house. Still remember Nick. Being on stage, so I always brought in this human touch, right? So this human-first thinking. And that is what, what I told my organization as well. So we are scale CS. We are making up our mind about everything around digital. How can we scale our, our engagement models, all of the emotions, but please never forget there needs to be human touch too.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah.

Carsten Schütz:
And I think it will be as much as I, I’m looking forward to having all of those agents we will always need to bring in this human touch.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah, it lands here at Gainsight as well. So making sure that we are still human first and thinking about how, you know, AI agents and all of that can really only reinforce and I think redefine the value that humans are able to provide to customers. So I think you’re spot on. Speaking of AI heading into next year, let’s talk a little bit more about your strategic focus. What are you betting on or where are you investing? In AI in 2026?

Carsten Schütz:
I think again, it’s about having the, or a good baseline to start from. So we still need to invest into having the right dataset, having the right sources, and then we can implement everything around AI. My focus for next year will definitely be around adoption. So driving adoption, especially in this long tail, 80% of the customers. Because I, I think at maybe specifically at SAP, we are really good at the, at the 20%. So high touch motion. Yep. We have so many great colleagues who actually take care of customers in a one-to-one setting.

Carsten Schütz:
So that is what I’m not worried about. What I want to invest in is how can we create a great journey for this 80% by leveraging AI. So. Driving adoption, but also maybe as a, as a second pillar, understanding risks by using AI. Because I mean, I’m not speaking of hundreds of customers, I’m more speaking of thousands of customers.

Jenny Calvert:
Sure.

Carsten Schütz:
And we need to have that risk management and detection in data. So we, we can’t just jump on a call and, and, and try to figure out with a, with a sentiment, okay. How’s the customer doing? So that is where I see we need to invest using AI, risk management or, or risk, uh, detection and then adoption, driving adoption.

Jenny Calvert:
The data structure that allows you to then really bring to life that risk detection so that your teams can be more informed and drive different engagement strategies. The design goes on from there. Yeah. Incredible. What else?

Carsten Schütz:
What else? So you mean investing? Yeah. Yeah. So besides adoption and, and risk management, I think where we still need to invest is bringing in product usage data into everything that we have in the inside. Because, so it’s not, so if you wanna understand how healthy the customer is and what we’ve done in the past at LeanIX. Was not only looking at consumption, but actually trying to understand with, by data, what is the customer doing within the product and are they actually following our best practices? And I think this is far beyond just any consumption data. To give you an example, at LeadAX, we always had data points to understand which reports is the customer using or which features is, is the customer using. But especially with reports, we could actually see, are they following our best practice or not? And then we could jump on a call proactively telling the customer, hey, we’ve seen in the data, you as our customer champion, you see great adoption within your organization, but we see this pattern that we’d seen in the past. Let’s work on it.

Carsten Schütz:
Just to give you an example, we always try to keep the customer in the product. I mean, everyone does that, right? Of course we had, we had an export capability, uh, to, to actually export data. And we had customers, um, you are lucky not to have a lot of customers, but, uh, of those customers where we, we had customers where actually the, the adoption and the consumption grew, but we also saw that exporting the data, that this also heavily increased. And in the end, what, what does that mean? That means that customers, uh, that users on the customer side are using the product., but they use the data outside of the product. And that’s, of course, that’s a risk.

Jenny Calvert:
No idea what happens when it goes out product. Yeah.

Carsten Schütz:
Yeah. But if you don’t have this product usage data in Gainsight, you’re blind basically. And that is what we, what we need to continue to invest in. So having more, and I’m talking about meaningful data, can basically also tell our customers that maybe are not so successful. Hey, this is how our most successful customers are doing it, and this is our proof. So we have it in data. It’s not just us telling you, um, uh, how to, how to use our products. We have it in the data.

Carsten Schütz:
So that, that is something we, we should continue to do.

Jenny Calvert:
Exciting year ahead for you and your teams. I’m curious about maybe any shifts in your hiring strategies and things like that. Um, we’re hearing from a lot of leaders, they’re looking to interview for AI aptitude and curiosity and skill. How are you considering that as you’re expanding your teams?

Carsten Schütz:
Yeah, so also maybe a bit of history. So when we hired CSMs at LeanIX, we, we basically, we were aware of the fact that there are little to no CSMs who have experience in enterprise architecture management. That’s what the product is all about. And back then, the CS discipline, especially in Europe, but also in Germany, was quite immature. So we knew we won’t find that CSM ninja, hero, black belt, whatever you want to call it. But we need to find people that are curious, that, that want to continuously learn, that, that are good in relationship building, because I still think that that’s an important part of it. So basically the CSMs we hired were not so much specialized in the discipline or in the, in the industry. What we were looking for exactly those CSMs.

Carsten Schütz:
Did that change a bit? I would say so. I think this is, this is still a must-have when you look at the profile. What I’m specifically looking at in my organization is candidates who do not only think in this one-to-one engagement situations, but also or always come up with an idea around how can I scale that? Right. So, um, I oftentimes in interviews, I realize they actually know what to do and how to help the customer, but they are too much thinking in one-to-one situations. A little narrow. So they don’t think of, okay, this works for this one customer, but how does that scale? And so this is one aspect. And the second one is definitely. Do candidates already think in AI opportunities? Yeah.

Carsten Schütz:
So how can AI help? And it’s, it’s not, I would say it’s a, it’s a further step beyond thinking of automation and integrating systems. It’s around, do they have an understanding of what actually needs to be done by human being and what shouldn’t be done anymore?

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. It’s really interesting, the prioritization of where do you let go of some of the work that can be burdensome, let’s be honest. Uh, we know how the industry has felt around how much was on the plate as a CSM.

Carsten Schütz:
Yeah. That’s fascinating. Specifically with the, with the younger talents. Mm-hmm. Of course they have a completely different background. I mean, I, I’m pretty sure they, they, when they applied, everything they did to apply is AI powered. Why shouldn’t they?

Jenny Calvert:
Right?

Carsten Schütz:
They should. Yeah, they should. Uh, but of course they bring a, a total different set of experience than, than, uh, people who are maybe of what Jan Tjernlund said.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah, that curiosity and the ability to kind of iterate, if you will, but also think beyond this one engagement and how does this scale seems to be kind of your three-part criteria right now.

Carsten Schütz:
The only part I still have no answer to, honestly, is, I mean, we always say AI brings so much opportunity, but still there is this part where we as human beings actually check, okay, is that, is that valid? Is that of quality? And I’m wondering, in order to do that, you need some experience. You won’t understand, is that of value what the AI just created? Or is it, is it okay? Do I need to work on it, adjust it, modify it? And that is the question that I have no answer to. How do we deal with, especially with the young talents? Who are using AI already in a great way, but how do we manage to also teach them and helping them to get the experience?

Jenny Calvert:
That, that is a question that I currently honestly don’t have an answer for you either. It’s an important question and I think it’s gonna come pretty quickly. We’re already seeing, so, you know, again, that aptitude or, or appetite, if you will, to, to experiment, to tinker, to play, to identify those patterns, to be really curious about how and where it can augment what you do as an individual. And what’s going to drive the customer and the business forward.

Carsten Schütz:
It’s been crucial. Maybe all of us, we still need to work on changing this mindset. I love the quote from Chuck this morning in keynote. You had this great AI-created intro video, right? Yeah. With him. So the Philippe who was sitting next to me, she said last year in Amsterdam, Lick still had to create videos, right? Now, uh, Chuck is on stage and it’s everything is AI created. Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
What? One year.

Carsten Schütz:
Yeah. What, what is the quote? And he said, and I really loved that, that quote. He said, um, this is the absolute worst, right? Yeah. It will only get better.

Jenny Calvert:
It’s the worst it’s ever gonna be.

Carsten Schütz:
That’s what he said. Yeah. Wild. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought this is such a great thought when everything we are currently looking at when it comes to AI, this is basically today is the worst. So, we’ll be better tomorrow.

Jenny Calvert:
That’s really cool. That’s an amazing takeaway. All right, last question for you. It’s Q4 advice that either you’ve been given or you would give to someone else around closing the year strong and hitting those GRR numbers.

Carsten Schütz:
Yeah, funny enough, I talked to our CCO about, about Q4 and, and, um, renewals and all of that. Um, He said his first reaction was, if you ask that question in Q4, that’s if it’s late, right? You’re late party. So I really like that thought. Yeah. But I mean, I, I mentioned this human touch earlier, and I think Q4 is always this upper order where you actually bring kind of the big guns.

Jenny Calvert:
How do your scaled teams do more of that kind of human touch engagement when they’re operating in a more digital scale model?

Carsten Schütz:
That’s obviously a challenge. We are, um, we are lucky to have a lot of customers on auto-renewal. So that’s of course in a, in a scale setup, that’s way easier. Yeah. Um, but for those, I think for, for those how we call it active renewals where you actually need to engage, I still believe that in, so either you’ve worked on all of this before CubeBoard.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah.

Carsten Schütz:
Hopefully coming back to, to relate to this. Sure. Or, um, it’s so of so much value to just reengage, connect them with leadership, with the customers, because in the end, we are all human beings, right? And will I leave the conference with this memory of, okay, is invited to the dinner, sitting here? Yes, definitely I will. And of course that influences us as human beings.

Jenny Calvert:
Love it. Love it. Kirsten, it’s been a pleasure getting to sit with you and learn more about you, your evolution, and your role. Any parting thoughts for the listeners? Any words of wisdom or, um, if you haven’t joined Pulse, um, plugging Pulse, of course, we love it.

Carsten Schütz:
Well, honestly, because, um, I mean, we are doing our, our own customer conferences as, as I said earlier, and the feedback we get from customers is sessions are great. It’s always great to see customers on stage and, and your peers actually telling you, uh, what, what’s it all about, but the networking part, I mean, that’s where actually you, you create or where you get a lot of inspiration. And, um, I think at Pulse, it, it almost feels like a, I don’t know, you see so many familiar faces and it always feels a bit like, okay, we are in, in such a little industry and we are not, it’s, it’s, it’s growing still, I would say. It’s so, so many familiar faces. Uh, and I, and I think that that would be my recommendation. Yeah. Don’t just, um, learn or join everything virtually.

Jenny Calvert:
If you can at least attend one conference a year, get out in person, face to face, spend some time with the people. So build the relationships.

Carsten Schütz:
Human first.

Jenny Calvert:
We love it.

Carsten Schütz:
Without forgetting about AI.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah, bring in the human touch. Don’t forget about AI. It’s amazing. Thank you so much, Carson. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.