Company: SAS
Company background: SAS is a Cary, N.C.-based software company with roots in American academia. Founded at N.C. State University in 1976, SAS has grown to become the leader in business analytics software and services and the largest privately held software company in the world.
Today, 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 is analytics that breaks down barriers, fuels ambition and gets results. We give our customers THE POWER TO KNOW®.
Contact: Shelley Sessoms
Title: Community Manager
Related URLs:
Virtual SAS Global Forum (event website)
Kudos Category: Bottom Line Savings Rock Star
1. Tell us how you are implementing Khoros’ digital engagement technologies (e.g. community and/or social media management) to meet your customer care business goals. Please highlight unique programs, technical upgrades and/or API usage to help reach these goals.
SAS utilizes Khoros Communities to support our global customer care and customer engagement initiatives.
- Taking advantage of both public and private areas within the SAS Communities, we enable the most strategic communication. For instance, we have approximately 12 key accounts utilizing Group Hubs as part of SAS’ account-based marketing efforts. The establishment of a closed group allows SAS customer success teams to facilitate better communications within the account, offer direct support and enablement resources and to strengthen those important relationships.
- Using APIs, we automatically publish critical announcements about software updates – replacing a more manual process that saves resources, including manhours and money (Figure 1). Additionally, APIs are also used in many of the Group Hubs mentioned above to streamline the private group membership process.
Communities also play a key role in customer advocacy.
- Working together with customer advocacy and engagement platform Influitive, SAS has built a strong advocacy program buoyed by the ability to share and store content in a Group Hub within the SAS Communities (Figure 2).
2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change?
Khoros Communities has enabled SAS to streamline communication, enhance support, improve response times, and strengthen relationships with our users.
Having an established community meant we were better equipped to pivot and support the bottom-line business and our customers when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In March, we reimagined our annual in-person global conference to a virtual event – to take place just a few weeks later. Having APIs in place, we knew which customers were already community members, which allowed us to quickly and easily support the recruitment drive for our virtual event. The conference attracted thousands of analytics professionals from 56 countries. Nearly 3,000 community members attended the virtual event, with around 200 of them contributing content to this user-led event.
3. What are your customer care and business results in quantifiable metrics? Include support savings metrics (e.g. cost savings, decreased response time, call deflection, reduced case escalations, increased agent productivity, optimizing campaigns, and efficiency with publishing and reporting).
Using the Value Analytics Survey, we know that over the past year 89% of respondents were looking for help – and 74% of them found what they needed on the SAS communities. Of those who found what they needed, 22% of them would have opened a tech support track as their next step – equaling an additional 1.4 million tracks for SAS tech support in the past 12-month period.
Applying a ridiculously conservative $5 cost per track, we estimate the SAS Communities saved the organization approximately $7,000,000 in that same 12-month period.
Additionally, SAS was also featured by the Community Roundtable in a 2019 e-book which shows an incredible ROI of 1,026%. See Figure 3 below for their complete findings.
