The State of Customer and Partner Experience at Red Hat 2022: How your feedback improves your experience

Each year, Red Hat works to improve our products, services and the overall customer and partner experience based on the feedback that we receive. This past year was no different, and we not only drove enhancements and improvements across the company based on that feedback, we also worked to improve the way we listened to our customers and partners.

This is the first article in a three-part series about the state of customer and partner experience at Red Hat in 2022. You can read the other articles here:

• Part 2: See your feedback in action
• Part 3: Looking to the future

In this article, we will recap how the Customer and Partner Experience (CPX) team listened to customers and partners in the past year and how we worked with teams across Red Hat to act on the feedback we received.

How Red Hat listens to our customers and partners

In 2022, the Red Hat CPX team collected over 20,000 pieces of feedback from customers and partners across various touch points. We then worked across the breadth of the company to ensure that action was taken on this feedback. While surveys and quantitative feedback give us a glimpse into how our customers and partners feel about important moments in time, conversations and qualitative feedback help us  better understand the full customer journey and other areas of opportunity. 

Here are some of the key areas we focused on in 2022.

We modified Red Hat’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey

Last year, we modified our NPS survey to include separate feedback touch points for customers and partners. We know the experience that each of these groups has with us is unique, and that we need to address each group’s needs appropriately. This year, we plan to be even more intentional about how we use the data and open text field comments collected from these surveys, and will work to better get the results to the appropriate internal teams so they can better prioritize improvements that create lasting results.

We met with more customers and partners than ever

We conducted interviews and focus groups and spoke directly with customers and partners throughout the year to better understand their priorities. Through these conversations, we increased our understanding of customer and partner challenges, use cases and integration points. With this feedback, we developed product and process improvements based on real-world usage and implementation, including improved product releases, better documentation and improved quality assurance. As a result, we are prioritizing opportunities for customers and partners to opt in to these forums to share their feedback.

We provided additional opportunities for customer and partner voices to be heard

Through feedback collection mechanisms like our annual Partner Training Portal survey, our Customer Experience 360 (CX360) lifecycle listening initiative and our research events, focus groups and interviews, we worked extensively to provide more opportunities for our customers and partners to be heard. You can learn more about how Red Hat and the CPX team work to understand and improve the customer and partner experience here. 

Another key area of focus in 2022 included assessing our cloud service offerings and how we could better listen to customers in this space.

Here are a couple of highlights.

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) feedback opportunities

Throughout 2022, we worked with ROSA customers to understand how we could improve their experience and provide better support when creating a ROSA cluster. One of the key findings from this feedback was that customers felt our technical documentation could be clearer. As a result, we are revising ROSA documentation and making updates to console.redhat.com to improve this experience. The responses from this feedback also emphasized the importance of moving forward with other initiatives, such as our ROSA chat pilot.

ROSA community chat pilot

For assistance during the ROSA onboarding process and to offer additional engagement methods with ROSA customers, we piloted a community chat channel for customers and internal subject matter experts. Red Hatters joined the channel to help users after their first cluster creation attempt and other challenges they may have experienced in their journey. These interactions have since helped customers be more successful throughout the early onboarding process, and help Red Hat continually improve this experience moving forward. 

How Red Hat acts on feedback

Once feedback is collected, the CPX team analyzes the results and works to identify the most pressing pain-points and challenges faced by our customers and partners. We then work with teams across Red Hat to act on this feedback. In 2022, we pinpointed several key areas of focus and drove enhancements, created new tools and resources, and implemented process improvements to improve the overall customer and partner experience.

In part two of our three-part annual State of Customer and Partner Experience series, we will dig deeper into areas identified through customer and partner feedback and share how we acted on them. 

Red Hat is always working to improve how we listen to, understand and act on customer and partner feedback. Have feedback you would like to share? Have feedback you would like to share? We encourage you to join the conversation in our Customer Portal Community, or you can reach out directly to the CPX team with your thoughts.