In December, Kathy Council gave us the scoop on the consolidation of several divisions at SAS into a single organization focused on customer support. At this morning’s 2014 Technology Connection, Fritz Lehman, Vice President of SAS Customer Engagement and Support, shared his vision by responding to some of your requests and questions about support.

“Over last year to eighteen months, SAS has been gathering information about your experience with SAS”, said Lehman. “In response, SAS has been reorganizing to try address some of what we’ve learned. In particular, we’ve brought the divisions that have a lot of customer contact together into one larger Customer Engagement and Support Division. By merging and sharing information, we hope to get to know each one of you better and can be more proactive in the services we offer.”

Lehman used this opportunity to address some of the questions or requests SAS hears most often:

Can you provide more expert guidance? Lehman pointed out that SAS is taking steps to make information more widely available and to provide it more quickly. Here are three ways:

• Free SAS Tutorials are available today. These are dozens of brief, easily accessed, how-to training videos around SAS programming and analytics.
• SAS is also exploring ways to share its best-practices content, including more SAS administrator content and implementation tips and techniques.
• Look for more emphasis on online support communities where you can ask questions and get the information you need from SAS users and SAS practitioners in the field.

How can we find analytic talent? Lehman emphasized that there are a number of universities in the US and around the world that have programs built around SAS Analytics. There are a number of universities represented here at SAS Global Forum 2014. SAS has always strongly supported education and analytics. The new SAS Analytics U initiative is one more way SAS is able to increase its investment in both.

How can I give feedback? The SASware Ballot has historically been the means for users to share input on our products, with the results of each year’s voting announced at the annual global users’ conference. Now the ballot is available year-round on support.sas.com. There are a number of other ways, SAS gathers your feedback:

• trends in your SAS Technical Support calls help define areas of future development and enhancements
• field consultants, training instructors, and partners provide a wealth of useful information about how you’re using our products
• social media such as online discussion forums provide a lot of unfiltered feedback about products and services

Please stay tuned as we share more from SAS Global Forum 2014.