They love me, they do not love me!

While SAP's stock price is satisfactory enough and SAP CEO Bill McDermott and his CFO Luka Mucic are just preparing a second SAP Capital Markets Day for this year (watch for Nov. 12 and SAP's live webcast from the New York Stock Exchange) to drive the stock price higher, customer satisfaction, trust in SAP and the resilience of the vendor-customer relationship are in the toilet.

This year started badly for SAP: The customer net promoter score (NPS) metric is defined as the percentage of customers who would be very likely to recommend a company, reduced by the percentage of customers who would be very unlikely to make a recommendation.

The best value would be plus 100 and SAP expected a result of plus 21 to 23 for 2018. In the end, Bill McDermott had to settle for minus five - a disastrously bad value!

Customer NPS is calculated by subtracting from the percentage of customers whose recommendation score is nine or ten (advocates) the percentage of detractors who give SAP a score between zero and six.

The value scale ranges from zero to ten. This calculation does not include the "passively satisfied" with a recommendation value of seven or eight. The range of the achievable result is between minus one hundred and plus one hundred.

And SAP writes in its annual report:

"We introduced this metric in 2012 because we believe that we can only achieve our financial goals if our customers are loyal and satisfied with SAP and our solutions."

Minus five for the past year is a bitter slap in the face for McDermott. At SAP, nerves are on edge, because the SAP Executive Board knows full well that this negative result was no one-off slip, no failed survey - don't trust any statistics that you haven't falsified yourself.

On the contrary: SAP executives know exactly what their shortcomings and systemic failures are. These are not problems that can be solved overnight.

It can be read in SAP's annual report: The outlook for 2019 is reported very modestly at plus one. A pathetic target when you know that the maximum value is plus 100!

Adding to this NPS misfortune is confirmation from the DSAG user association: the summer survey revealed that 30 percent of DSAG members are convinced that SAP strategies as well as roadmaps cannot withstand any stress and are therefore not trustworthy (23 percent disagree less about the resilience and trust in SAP and seven percent disagree at all).

Only a quarter of respondents trust SAP. 45 percent of DSAG members partially agree with SAP's strategies and roadmaps.

SAP is doing nothing wrong! The Executive Board is leading SAP's existing customers and partners in the right direction - but confidence is lacking: SAP CEO McDermott's Sapphire keynotes are not resilient. They are show!

Every year McDermott drives a new "sow" through the village. The old virtue of ex-SAP board member and current supervisory board member Gerd Oswald has been forgotten: In his legendary DSAG keynotes, the first picture was always the last one from the previous year.

Only Oswald gave an account of what he promised and what was achieved a year later. This honesty and continuity would do a Bill McDermott a lot of good. SAP is hardly doing anything wrong - with the exception of marketing, communication and, to some extent, product quality.

Lack of trust, weak resilience of relationship management, and low likelihood of recommendation are the result of misguided communications work. SAP has forgotten how to communicate with its community, just like the board members Henning Kagermann, Claus Heinrich and Gerd Oswald once did.

But light at the end of the tunnel is becoming visible: In discussions with selected supervisory board members and board members, it becomes apparent that SAP has recognized the communication deficit, that it is not only about products but also about trust, that a stable Hana system is just as important as its recommendation by existing customers.

It will not be sufficient to build a digital Qualtrics complaint button into the Fiori apps to enable users to communicate praise and blame directly to SAP. Nevertheless, with the next S/4 release there will be this "red button" controlled by the Qualtrics software.

DSAG CEO Marco Lenck called for it at the annual congress, and some supervisory board members and board members know it: SAP needs a new (!), comprehensive and sustainable communication culture.

SAP needs new relationship management with the community, which those responsible for marketing and communications are obviously unable to deliver. SAP needs confidence-building measures that raise the Net Promoter Score well above 25 points and restore DSAG members' trust in SAP.