What's SAS like to do business with? Share your favorite story!

[BeverlyBrown]

Forbes magazine years ago did its best to convey how loyal SAS customers are.

An article compared SAS veterans at our annual user conference to the Grateful Dead’s legendary loyalists. An industry analyst described the event now known as SAS Global Forum as a “love-in.”  He quipped to Forbes: “I was afraid that if I said anything negative, they [the users] would lynch me.”

We appreciate your loyalty and will never take it for granted. We hope you agree that we’re providing you with the best analytics on earth and following up with outstanding support. That’s why, as part of marking Customer Experience Day, we’re collecting personal stories about your experience doing business with us. 

Seriously! We want to know. We’re even offering you a chance to win a little swag for your trouble. Here’s how it works:

In the comments to this post, share a story that illustrates what SAS is like to do business with. Or how your experience using SAS has benefitted you – personally or professionally. Write it like a mini-skirt…long enough to cover the topic, but short enough to be interesting.

Share your story by close of business Friday!

Everyone who shares a story before 5:00 p.m. ET on Friday, Oct. 7 will be entered in a drawing to win a nice messenger bag made of old SAS advertising canvas.

The plan is to award just one, but we reserve the right to bestow more if we get a big response. Limit one entry per person.  (*NOTE: If you work for an organization that frowns on winning stuff like this outright, but you really love that bag, you may pay fair market value and receive a receipt for the item at www.sas.com/paysas.)

Two hours with SAS Tech Support left favorable impression

We asked our Super Users, your ever-present, helpful peers in these forums, for anecdotes. One of my favorites came from @ballardw, who described a perplexing situation in which code as simple as…

data _null_;
   x=3;
   put x;
run;

…failed. Every time.

“Back in the days of SAS 6.04 / 6.06, I had just applied an update to an install on an OS/2 PC,” he said, “and then funny things happened. I could run procedures against any of my existing data sets and create output from procedures. But any code involving a data step failed.”

After two hours on the phone with Technical Support, our future Super User discovered the culprit: A bad copy of an original installation disk. SAS sent a completely new set of installation media.

“This is much better tech support than I have received from any other company in over 30 years of working with PCs,” said @ballardw.

What’s your story? Share it in the comments!

* ELIGIBILITY TO RECEIVE PROMOTIONAL ITEM:  Individuals, such as, but not limited to, certain government employees, may be prohibited by the terms of their employment or applicable law from participating in this promotion and are ineligible to receive this promotional item. If you take this item and subsequently learn that you are not eligible, pursuant to your organization’s gift rules, you may pay fair market value and receive a receipt for the item at www.sas.com/paysas.

[ballardw]

I may have missed a word or spelling in the original response:

But any code involving a data set failed

should read

But any code involving a data step failed

[BeverlyBrown]

Fixed it, @ballardw! We deeply appreciate all your activity in here.

[fbass]

When I was fairly new to SAS and was preparing for the 2000 Census, I called the support line five times -- over a five-day period -- with five variations on basically the same question. It was absolutely mortifying for me (especially after talking to the same person three times), but I got the idea that it was just business as usual for the support people.

[BeverlyBrown]

Thanks for sharing that,  @fbass. There's proof you got the hang of it!

 

[DarthPathos]

I've had numerous encounters with SAS Support, Pre-Sales, and multiple other roles at SAS and SAS Canada.  My personal favourite was from this past SAS Global Forum, where I ended up eating lunch with a group of students from California.  We started talking about non-English characters, particularly Spanish, and how they would be handled in SAS University Edition.  I admitted I didn't know (even though Canada is bilingual, all the data I work with is English) so I poked around, asking SAS Employees I had met during the conference.  I ended up meeting a woman who works in the multi-lingual support for SAS, and asked how characters like ñ and ł would be handled.  She wrote down a function that can be used to ensure SAS knows there are non-English characters, and i ended up sharing it with the students and the SAS Employees I had asked.  (I unfortunately don't remember the function, but in testing it did what the students want) - so both brand new users and highly skilled SAS Employees learned something 🙂

[BeverlyBrown]

@DarthPathos, thank you for sharing this! I remember that sequence of events and thinking, "Wow, this fellow's spreading SAS knowledge everywhere he goes!" We appreciate that. 

[DarthPathos]

oh you know me, just spreading the joy of SAS 🙂