Lithys 2017: SAS- Social Support Champion

Lithys 2017: SAS- Social Support Champion

SAS has worked to transform the digital experience for customers, especially for practitioners who already have or have just purchased our software products.  

 

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sasteaser.pngCompany:  SAS                                                 

Entry submitted by: Chris Hemedinger (Manager, SAS Online Communities)

Community: SAS Support Communities

Lithy category:  Social Support Champion

 

 

SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, business intelligence and data management software and services, SAS helps customers at more than 83,000 sites make better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW®.

 

A new CX for Social Support at SAS

SAS has worked to transform the digital experience for customers, especially for practitioners who already have or have just purchased our software products.   We want to improve the experience for customers in the “adopt” and “use” phases of the customer journey.  Our goals are to get customers productive with the software quickly, and to get them connected to the resources that will help them along the way.

 

The path to this transformation includes:

  • A renewed focus on communities as a place to learn and get your questions answered.
  • A robust social care program, with social listening, that responds to customer questions (and complaints, and praise!) in the customer’s channel of choice (Twitter, Reddit, Quora, as well as our own branded community).
  • An active live-chat program, which can resolve an amazing number of support inquiries.  Unresolved chats are referred to our online communities or to SAS Technical Support.
  • Redesign of SAS’ marketing and support web sites to direct practitioners to communities
  • Syndication of communities content (using Lithium APIs) to the SAS product support pages as well as end-user marketing pages.
  • An onboarding campaign for new users, which includes regular e-mail outreach to nudge the customer on to the next step in their relationship with SAS and the software.

 

The SAS Support Communities, based on the Lithium communities platform since late 2015, have been central to the new digital CX strategy.

 

Customer success using communities

We have been running the Value Analytics survey on the SAS communities for over a year.  During that time, we have received over 10,000 responses to the survey.  The responses show high success and good satisfaction.

  • Most visitors arrive at the community seeking an answer (91%)
  • Of those, 73% of respondents found what they needed.
  • Of those who were successful, 21% say they would have opened a support ticket as their next step.
  • 67% of visitors say they are “Satisfied” or “Very Satisfied” with their community experience.  90% find it to be at least “OK.”

 

The following mosaic chart (built using SAS software!) shows the proportion of visitors who found their answers (“was_helpful”), crossed by their satisfaction rating (“satisfaction_index”).

  

satisfac_SAS.png

  

As you might expect, most of the people who say they were unsatisfied (less than 10% of respondents) were also unsuccessful in their quest for answers.  However, it’s gratifying to see that many people who didn’t succeed (on at least this one visit) still rated their experience with high satisfaction.

 

According to the Value Analytics formula, the SAS Support Communities has deflected over 400,000 support cases in the past 6 months.  Our friends in SAS Technical Support (who are busier than ever!) don’t completely buy into that high number, but they agree that the communities program is essential to reducing their call volume.

 

Improving the customer “landing” experience

Ninety percent of our communities site visits are driven by organic search (a.k.a. Google), and so the most viewed pages are those topics that answer a search query.  With over 10 years of legacy community topics accumulated, most of those highly viewed topics do not have accepted solutions – even while they may still be helpful to the reader.

 

In mid-2016 we began a project to study the most-viewed community topics, curate the best solutions, and mark those solutions as Accepted.  Thanks to the Lithium platform’s SEO metadata for solved topics, a topic with a solution is much more likely to be viewed again, and more often.  We also know that solved topics provide a much better landing experience, “summing up” a topic instead of requiring the deep reading of all replies.

 

We partnered with experts in SAS Technical Support, who agreed that by answering a question once on the community, they could deflect hundreds (or even thousands) of cases in the future.

 

Screen Shot 2017-05-09 at 3.55.06 PM.png

When we began the project, the Solved Views/Views ratio was hovering around 29%.  Today, with the most popular topics all marked Solved, the Solved Views/Views ratio is closer to 45%.  That might not seem impressive, but it’s made a big difference: over a half million more solution views than we might have had otherwise.  And of course, the program continues and we will take that ratio even higher.

 

A customer experience to make SAS employees proud

The success of SAS Support Communities depends largely on the thousands of SAS employees who participate.  SAS customers cherish the interactions with the SAS staff who develop and support the products they use, and that direct connection differentiates SAS as a software vendor.  We have over 4,000 SAS employees who are registered in the communities – out of a total of just over 14,000 employees worldwide.

 

On the communities, our most active SAS employees are designated as “SAS Super FREQs” (a geeky play on words – our customers get it). They are celebrities within the community (and in real life – see this thread).  As a technology company, our communities are often compared with open tech communities such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, and GitHub.  SAS participates in all of those places as part of our comprehensive social care program, but it’s the SAS Support Communities that offers the best connection with SAS staff and experts, and that keeps the practitioners coming back for more.

 

Comments

Love the way the SAS Support Community supports customers and partners and their ability to adapt with technology and community needs!!! #IloveSAS