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2021 Customer Awards: SAS - Best-in-Class: Community
Company: SAS Company background: SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative software and services, SAS empowers and inspires customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. Contact: Shelley Sessoms Title: Community Manager Related URLs: https://communities.sas.com/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it in the last year? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.) What is the purpose of your community? SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative software and services, SAS empowers and inspires customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. Our community is a support community, serving more than 380,000 registered members around the world. Since migrating platforms in late 2015, the community has generated almost 7,000 accepted solutions. Forty percent of topics get a reply within an hour, 85% within 12 hours. And approximately 90% of all topics receive a reply. We’re extremely proud that the average response time is approximately 5 ½ hours. In 2020, we saw almost 40,000 new members, more than 16,000 new topics and more than 6,000 solved topics. And so far in 2021, we have seen more than 3,000,000 visits by registered members and non-registered lurkers. We began as primarily a Q&A and TKB-based forum, but we are so much more now. Earlier this year we added the Events module, and in early 2021 we began hosting a global Hackathon in the community, bringing in-house what had been hosted by a 3rd party. Community also plays a large part in our global conference each year. Since 2015 we have hosted conversations before, during and after the event. This year, we added more than 100 presentations and their associated videos from YouTube. 2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations? Our goal as a team is to add features and functionality to the community that support the needs of our members and the goals of our company. By enhancing the community over the past 6 years, we have succeeded in making the SAS Support Communities the place for SAS customers. At their disposal, they have: Hundreds of thousands of topics, many with accepted solutions. Thousands of TKBs on popular SAS topics. More than 25 private and regional groups that allow for more concentrated conversations. Global events that are easily searchable via labels. Because we are judicious in the things we add, we find it’s easy to drive adoption. In the same way that it’s easy to drive adoption, it’s also easy to get executive buy-in because we have a mature community that has proven its value through reduced tech support calls (with an estimated $7,000,000 in cost savings), and an increase of 7% in cNPS over surveyors who are not community members. In fact, communities has had a positive impact across the board (ROI, cutting edge, ease of use, etc.). 3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible. As mentioned earlier, the global Hackathon has been our biggest ‘add’ to the community. SAS has previously supported regional hackathons. The new global hackathon gathers people from different regions, backgrounds and skill levels to collaborate and develop applications and solutions using SAS analytics, AI, cloud and open-source technology. The vision is to empower everyone to be involved in solving business and society’s most compelling challenges, such as fighting the pandemic, addressing climate change, helping a bank reduce fraud or a retailer improve its online customer experience. Through these hackathons, participants can explore entrepreneurial approaches, network with fellow innovators, and try out new and emerging SAS technologies. The Hacker’s Hub hosted 100 teams from more than 30 countries, making it by far our most popular group hub with 10 times more traffic than any other group. Since Jan. 1, 2021, the Hacker’s Hub achievements include: 68,000+ page views 11,000+ unique visitors 200 topics published The Hacker’s Hub attracted participants and spectators. The winning teams were announced at our virtual global conference in May, which is sure to bring even more attention to the Hub. The community will continue to host future Hackathons.2020 Customer Awards: SAS - Bottom Line Savings Rock Star
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: SAS Support Communities 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.
