User Mr. A has several questions while using SAP system, but he temporarily holds them as
they are not very urgent. One day, an error occurred while they going live, considering the
business impact, Mr. A raised an incident to SAP with priority High and hoping SAP Product
Support engineer can answer those shelved questions along with this incident.
If you have had a similar experience with Mr. A, then I believe you may have got the
following note from the SAP support consultants: Note: 50048 – Several queries in an incident,
also, you may have been requested to create new incidents for the other questions.
Why SAP insists one question in one incident so stubbornly? I have already got in touch with
the product support consultant, why can’t they answer all of my questions within this incident?
What is the difference between reporting new incidents and dealing with all the queries within
one incident?
I know you may have many similar questions. Actually, it is not SAP not willing to provide
such services, you will be benefit from “one query one incident” mode, along with all of our
customers. Please let me introduce the details:
1. Resource.
SAP Product Support is handling customer incidents according to its priority. This needs
customers to judge the impact of the problem, then to select the most appropriate priority. When
customer raises several irrelevant questions within one incident, normally they should have
different priorities. Let’s assume a customer, who raised a “Very High” incident and kept asking
other small questions even though his most urgent issue had already been solved. This will
affect the processing efficiency for the real emergency from other customers, right?
2. Processing speed.
If you have several queries, which are on the same priority, we still suggest you splitting
them into different incidents. Because only you raised different incidents, they can be assigned
to different support consultants. We believe the speed of parallel processing will be definitely
faster than the same product support consultant deals with them one by one.
3. Cross-area.
If your queries belong to different areas, to increase processing speed and solve them in
parallel, also to avoid all kinds of information mixes together within the same incident, we
suggest you splitting the incident to different areas. Some customers may request us to
forward the original incident to other area after resolving the first issue, but this is not
recommended. For example, if you want to double check some points about the original issue,
or you have another question after implementing the solution for the original issue, this incident
will be passed back and forth among different areas. This is easy to miss information and cause
misunderstanding, too complex and lengthy processing history will be inconvenient for support
consultant, thus affecting the processing speed.
On the other hand, there will be survey to collect customer feedback on products and services
for each incident. If there are different support consultants working on the same incident, the
feedback will not be able to objectively reflect your satisfaction to each support consultant and
each part of the system functions.
Therefore, I am sure now you understand SAP Product Support has the same goal with you,
which is to solve the problem, making sure your system and data secure, thus ensuring the normal
operation of your business. "One query one incident” mode is the simplest and most basic thing
we can do to achieve this goal.
