SAS continually strives to provide you with the best possible experience—both in the software that we produce and in the services that we provide.
As part of this mission, we launched the new SAS Customer Service Portal in August (see blog). This customer portal is a process change towards a progressive experience, and change can be uncomfortable as we all adjust.
During this transition, it’s important to focus on two things:
- We will collaborate to maximize the capabilities of this portal.
- Our goal is modernization, which promises more powerful tools and a better experience.
Partnering for excellence
Transition is hard, but it’s also an opportunity to aim higher and achieve excellence. We are in this together, and it’s vital that you share your feedback so that we can maximize the potential of the portal. We have received some customer feedback, and those suggestions have been our top priority. We have also worked internally to discuss ways in which we can unify, simplify, and streamline processes.
Development teams are working in two-week sprints to address reported issues and pushing the fixes into the production environment at regular intervals. If you encounter something with the portal that you think can be improved, please open a case with us so that we can start working on it. Be as specific as possible to help our investigation: tell us what you expected and what happened, include screenshots if you have them, and provide the steps to replicate. When we take the case, we will ask any clarification questions, add the issue to our development cycle, and then close the case.
Here are details about some issues that have been included in the portal development since launch:
Solved
- Confirmation emails are now sent to the contact when a case is created
- All email communications sent to the case by contacts appear in the SAS Customer Portal
- All case contacts are able to view their cases in the SAS Customer Portal
Under Development
- Adding your colleagues to an email case update will automatically add those users to the case watch list
- Contacts can open a case when they can’t locate their site number
- Site Reps can delete contact relationships from the SAS Customer Portal
Future Plans
- New experience for our Partners
- Increased chat capabilities
- Additional relevant knowledge base articles
Modernization is a process
Modernization is our goal because it empowers us to accomplish more with less effort, and we can then extend our reach to help more people. We also understand that the path to modernization can present challenges. In Tech Support, we’ve learned that challenges spark our creativity and can lead us to much better outcomes than if we hadn’t encountered them. So, during this process change, we are focused on discovering new possibilities in addition to investigating issues.
Here are some of the potential outcomes that we’ve already witnessed in our first month of using this new portal software:
- Data! This software provides us with tons of usage data, which we can analyze (what SAS is known for) and then use that information to improve.
- Proactivity: This software gives all customer-facing divisions at SAS a more robust understanding of our customers at all stages of their engagement with us. We can use this bigger picture to anticipate issues that customers might encounter and proactively share appropriate resources to help them be more successful.
- Continuous improvement: This software offers a wealth of out-of-the-box functionality that we can leverage to increase efficiency, automate processes, and analyze data. We are committed to taking advantage of the power in this software to improve the customer experience.
Thank you
I know that transition is challenging. We will all benefit from modernizing. Thank you for being a SAS customer, consistently giving us valuable feedback, and for partnering with us.
