Author Details:
- Name: Chris Hemdinger
- Title: Director of SAS User Engagement
- Company: SAS Institute
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
About me: I'm a technology enthusiast who believes in the power of community to drive technology success, learning, and connections. As Director of SAS User Engagement, I lead a talented 12-member team that looks after the SAS Support Community and many other programs that benefit users of SAS® software and SAS.
About SAS: SAS, based in Cary, N.C., is a software company with roots in academia. Founded at N.C. State University in 1976, SAS has grown to become the leader in business analytics software and services and the world’s largest privately held software company. Co-founder Jim Goodnight remains at the helm as CEO and more than 80,000 business, government, and university sites in more than 140 countries rely on SAS® software. We make it easier for more people to use powerful analytics every day, to shorten the path from data to insight – and to inspire bold new discoveries that drive progress. The result: analytics that breaks down barriers, fuels ambition, and gets results. We give our customers THE POWER TO KNOW®.
About my team: The SAS User Engagement team manages key programs of outreach to SAS users, including our online support communities, expert webinars, user group events, blogs, a technical newsletter, a developer engagement program and more. All of these programs have a home in our hosted Khoros community platform.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
By providing a forum for discussion and support, we increase our customers’ ability to self-serve in finding answers to their technical questions and challenges. This improves customer satisfaction and saves on support costs, two metrics that are supported by data we collect. We also use the community platform to support other strategic programs at SAS, such as our annual SAS Hackathon, our SAS Customer Recognition Awards, our Ask the Expert webinar series and more. The community also provides operational support for support initiatives such as hotfix notices and syndicated content directly into the user experience for our product offerings.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Our best-in-class community plays a vital role in expressing SAS’ customer-centric ethos built over five decades. Key turning points in our story:
- Long before SAS spun out of NCSU in 1976, as our three co-founders wrote the first lines of SAS code, they welcomed input from an enthusiastic nascent community of SAS users.
- Our first users conference, which drew 300+ attendees, further baked customer-centricity into our culture and products.
- Online user collaboration sprouted in 1986 when SAS users connected via the SAS-L email listserve.
- In the late 2000s, we launched a SAS community on Jive, followed in 2015 with the migration to Khoros.
The latter move was in line with our customer-centric ethos and users' growing preference for peer-to-peer and self-service support. It marked a significant uptick in investment. We tripled community-management staff to grow engagement, curate content and enlist employee and customer experts to improve the quality and number of solved topics.
The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted business as usual. In-person events, the prevalent way of connecting with our customers for many years, were off the table. This presented an opportunity to reimagine how to serve and engage our customers online at higher levels. Collaborating with our counterparts in global marketing, research and development, sales, and technical support, we leveled up our digital capabilities to that end. Our Khoros-hosted SAS Support Community became – and remains – an indispensable hub for many programs that engage, equip, and encourage SAS software users. Social-distancing protocols receded, and in-person events resumed, but the digital pivot equipped us with a strong, agile platform that continues to grow and evolve.
Today, communities.sas.com is the largest digital gathering of SAS users with more than 330,000 members. In the past year, nearly 10,000 topics were published (nearly 2,800 questions solved) and there were 8.4 million visits, with 15 million page views. 80+ special-interest groups give members additional ways to connect. SAS employees share their expertise through more than 7,000 knowledge base articles. User-engagement programs, such as SAS Analytics Explorers, SAS Inner Circle and the SAS Developer portal serve and delight our most ardent SAS fans. Recently we began syndicating community content within popular new products, SAS® Intelligent Decisioning and SAS® Model Manager.
Varied programs, two goals: 1) Shrink the distance between customers and the answers they need to win with SAS (community health); 2) Increase customer satisfaction and lower support costs (community success).
What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved.
Our Khoros community platform is at the heart of the overall success of our user-engagement program. It’s more than just a website, having grown far beyond its beginnings as a home for technical discussions. This makes it difficult to pinpoint just one win. In the past year, innovative use of Khoros’ bulk data APIs has enabled us to gain insights to shape strategic decisions for how we engage with community members—particularly new community members and new SAS users.
The challenge: faster, deeper engagement with SAS users, especially new community members.
The opportunity: greater customer loyalty evidenced by higher net promoter scores among community members and more engagement by new members. This includes a space for new users to receive enhanced moderation. Overall, our community boasts an average “first reply” time of just about 400 minutes. In our special “New Users” board, a designated “safe space” for new-user questions, 72% of first replies come within 2 hours, and over 92% come within 12 hours.
Teams involved: our counterparts in marketing, product management, R&D, and technical support.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
The SAS Support Community delivers significant value throughout the customer experience. Having grown beyond is customer-support roots, today it also drives customer satisfaction (according to net-promoter scores), brand awareness (for example, as the digital home of the popular SAS Hackathon), and increasingly is a leading source of information on new solutions and innovation (exemplified by community content syndicated in SAS solutions.) It has become the hub of SAS expertise online and complements other channels such as GitHub and YouTube.
Overall community health and success metrics:
- 1,000% SAS Community ROI based on deflected technical support tracks (calculated with Value Analytics data and standard ROI formula.)
- New members: 14K+ YTD
- Page views: 12 million YTD (on pace to surpass last year's 15+ million)
- Visits: 7 million YTD (on pace to surpass last year's 8 million)
- New topics: 5K+ YTD
- Solved topics often garner more than half of total topic views.
- 84% of topics receive a reply within 24 hours
- 74% rate of successful searches, proof that SAS users are finding the help they need
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Efforts to engage new members in particular have paid off. We started with a stretch goal of 20% engagement (defined by “liking” posts, publishing topics and replies, etc., within 90 days of registering.) Our email onboarding campaign sends a “welcome” email to new members soon after they register. The email acquaints them with best practices and invites them to connect with fellow members, share their expertise and level up by earning ranks and badges. Two weeks later, emails are sent to those who have asked a question encouraging them to mark a reply as a solution and to those who have yet to post a topic.
Additional campaigns invite members to attend webinars, play SAS Bowl Trivia, participate in the SAS Hackathon, and engage with SAS in myriad other ways. In the past year, our Khoros platform has delivered more than 1.5 million emails, garnering a 17.5% open rate and a 14% click-to-open rate. This consistent, proactive outreach, enabled by our Khoros platform, has driven these and other key metrics:
- SAS User Community Net Promoter Score rose 11% in 2024 over 2023
- 30% of new members engaged within three months of joining
What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved?
As a global leader in data and AI, SAS is all about transforming a world of data into trusted decisions. That’s reflected in the way we run our community program. The abundance of data, analyzed with SAS® software, enables us to send targeted emails to boost engagement, gain invaluable insight into prevalent topics, content worthy of promoting in other channels, opportunities to delight customers, and much more.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Our Khoros platform enables us to make high-impact data-driven campaigns and decisions. The admin console makes it easy for community managers to manage content, the site’s structure and look and feel, and set permissions for members. There are easy-to-use mechanisms to include code in posts and upload animations, images, and video. There are APIs for everything and abundant data to analyze with SAS software. We make full use of our platform’s discussion styles—blogs, events, forums, contests, events, group hubs, ideas, and TKBs. Looking ahead, by being able to syndicate community content directly into our own software solutions, we anticipate further expanding use of communities.sas.com as an operational hub and a way to showcase GenAI capabilities.