SAC (Customer Service)

SAC stands for Serviço de Atendimento ao Cliente — Customer Service: the channel through which a business receives questions, complaints, cancellations and information requests after the sale.

What the law requires (Brazil)

Decree 11,034/2022 replaced the old 2008 decree and applies to companies in sectors regulated by a federal agency — telecom, banks, energy, health plans, aviation, among others. The main points:

• Free phone support for at least 8 hours a day, with at least one channel available 24 hours.
• Immediate cancellation, through the same channel the service was contracted in.
• A response to the request within 7 calendar days.
• A numbered record given to the consumer, with accessible history.
• A ban on requiring the same data repeated at every transfer.

⚠️ Most businesses are not in the decree's scope — retail, local services and software are not sectors regulated by a federal agency. But consumer protection law still applies to everyone, and the rules above have become a market standard even for those not required to follow them.

SAC, ombudsman and support

• SAC — first tier: receives and resolves what is routine.
• Ombudsman — second tier: triggered when SAC did not resolve it. Usually has the authority to decide against the company's own standard.
• Technical support — resolves a product-usage problem, not a consumer relationship issue.

SAC 2.0 and 3.0

Market terms, not legal ones. SAC 2.0 describes the arrival of digital channels and social media, where a complaint is public. SAC 3.0 adds the idea of unified history across channels and using customer data — in practice, it is omnichannel under another name.

SAC moved to WhatsApp

In Brazil, most of SAC volume has moved to WhatsApp, where the expected response time is minutes. That changes the design: it requires multi-agent support with a queue, a measured SLA and history that survives an agent change — because the customer does not repeat the ticket number, they repeat the complaint.