The State of Customer and Partner Experience at Red Hat 2022: See your feedback in action

This is the second 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 1: How your feedback improves your experience
• Part 3: Looking to the future

In this article, we will highlight some of the key ways that we acted on this feedback in several areas of the business. 

Technical support and Customer Portal enhancements

The Customer and Partner Experience (CPX) team partnered closely with the Customer Experience and Engagement (CEE) team throughout 2022 to improve customer experience in several ways. One area we worked on extensively was improving the user experience of the many tools within the Red Hat Customer Portal. The Customer Portal helps customers plan, deploy, maintain and manage their Red Hat solutions, and provides product documentation, troubleshooting tools, security updates and technical support as well as expert Red Hat and community-powered knowledge. 

Some key changes we made to the Customer Portal include: 

• Improved the technical documentation user experience: In an effort to make complex information easier to digest and to improve the digital experience, we launched updates that improved the accessibility, responsiveness and readability of our product documentation. You can read more about these customer-driven updates in this blog post. 
• Redesigned the Red Hat Customer Portal homepage: From our data, we know that most Customer Portal visitors often navigate to support, subscriptions or product content. The improved homepage experience puts helpful content front and center, allowing customers to access personalized data specific to their Red Hat subscriptions faster and easier. Read this blog post for full details. 
• Made improvements to better understand the business impact of support cases: To better understand and prioritize support cases, customers can now indicate business impact when creating a support case, requesting an escalation or updating the severity of a case. A question has also been added to the Customer Effort Score (CES) survey to get feedback on whether the technical engineer assigned to their support case understood the business impact of their case.
• Developed a closed-loop program from customer escalations: A closed-loop program has been established to help identify and address improvement opportunities based on findings from escalated cases. At the closure of each major escalation, internal retrospectives are performed to evaluate the reasons behind the escalation and to identify issues encountered during the escalation handling. The improvement opportunities are then shared with the relevant Red Hat teams who can then address them. 

Product enhancements 

To its core, Red Hat believes in the open source model. By collaborating closely with open source communities and our customers, we’re working to develop innovative software with security and stability in mind. In 2022, our Products and Global Engineering team continued its work  to support and enhance our entire portfolio of products. 

We heard from customers about the importance of smooth upgrades and migrations, uncomplicated subscription management and straightforward processes for logging and resolving bugs. Here is an overview of how some of our latest improvements help to address these key items:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 general availability: RHEL 9 was released in 2022 and includes several new features and enhancements that are based on customer feedback. RHEL 9 offers greater flexibility, stability and reliability to support hybrid cloud innovation. For more information, check out this blog post. 
• Simple Content Access is now the default experience for new connected customers: Managing your Red Hat subscriptions should not require an expert. With the latest release of Simple Content Access, new administrators and developers can use RHEL with minimal configuration, by simply registering a system—no attaching of subscriptions is required. Previously, all Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) users needed to explicitly opt-in to this experience.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 now available: Customers have been asking for more flexibility and scalability, and the latest release of Ansible Automation Platform delivers on this. The latest release delivers on our promise to help customers create, manage and scale their automation more effectively. Find out what’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2.3. 
• Red Hat OpenShift EUS life cycle extension:  Beginning with Red Hat OpenShift 4.12, we’re providing an additional six months of support with extended update support (EUS), giving customers with appropriate entitlements a total of 24 months of software maintenance and support for each EUS OpenShift release. Combined with the functionality previously introduced to allow for EUS-to-EUS upgrades, customers have greater flexibility to plan and execute their cluster upgrade strategies, often driven by the need to limit the number of moving parts on a cluster for use in more stringent, regulated environments.

You asked. We acted. 

Beyond technical support and product enhancements, teams throughout Red Hat are always working to improve our processes, services and offerings based on your feedback. You can send us your feedback and stay updated on how we’re improving your experience on our You Asked. We Acted.page. 

We also encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and suggestions through our Customer Portal community, with your account manager or by emailing our Customer and Partner Experience team. Stay tuned for the final part of our three-part State of Customer and Partner Experience summary for 2022, where we'll highlight our plans for 2023.