It’s no secret that SAS enjoys a high degree of customer loyalty and it’s also well known that part of what drives that loyalty is driven by how much we pay attention to our customers.
This devotion to our customers is helping to ensure that we deliver on our promise of rock-solid solutions to business problems by giving customers the power to know more about their business issues, as well as how to address them. As per my previous post about branding being as much about operational alignment as it is about clear communications ("Are You All Paying Attention?"), I see a story here about the power of the SAS brand.
The many ways SAS pays attention to its customers begins with the fact that SAS customers receive a full suite of support services at no additional charge, including skilled telephone technical support and unlimited around-the-clock online technical support. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg:
- The SAS Customer Support Site has more than 250,000 searchable resource pages on documentation, samples and SAS® notes that provide problem solutions as well as usage and installation information.
- The SAS Technical Support service includes an average hold time of less than 30 seconds.
- The SAS Technical Support staff has an average of 12 years of experience as statisticians, technical architects, programmers, database administrators and operating system engineers.
- The SAS Education Division aims to provide customers with information before they need it through nearly 5,000 courses in any given year to over 60,000 students worldwide through a variety of media to accommodate multiple learning styles.
- So far this year, the SAS Customer Loyalty Team contacted over 6.500 SAS representatives at SAS Customers in the U.S. alone.
- More than 5,400 emails have been sent about the new SAS® Customer Resource Center, which has a wealth of information organized by the person’s role, including administrators, analysts, decision makers, programmers and statisticians.
- SAS offers a library of videos to provide an overview of resources that customers have available to them, and a different link if reading about it is preferred.
- The SAS Publications Division enables SAS customers to help other SAS customers by highlighting their own real-world ways to solve their business problems using SAS software.
All these resources begin and end with the customer in mind, which points to the degree to which SAS culture centers on the customer. [As I write that, I hear my marketing professor in my head voicing his approval.] To me, what’s even more notable is how many SAS User’s Groups there are around the world, and every single one of them is run entirely by our customers. Now that is loyalty!
[Special thanks to Kat Hardy for the original internal article on this topic and to Melissa Perez for helping me keep the details in this post accurate.]
2 Comments
I think support is the biggest issue with customer retention. Your article states that you have over 250,000 searchable resource pages. What an astounding number. If you cannot find the help you need in that kind of database then I don't know what else to say.
Very interesting article