The state of Customer Experience at Red Hat: Product and documentation enhancements

This is the first part of a three-part series. Check out the other two posts below!

• Blog post 2: Technical support and subscription management enhancements

• Blog post 3: The State of Customer Experience at Red Hat: Where we’ve been and where we are going

In this post:

• See the enhancements we've made to products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, and more based on survey responses, virtual focus groups, events and feedback from our Red Hat Customer Portal Community.
• Get the highlights on how product documentation has also evolved in the past year.

Have you ever wondered what happens when you submit feedback to Red Hat? The Red Hat Customer and Partner Experience team collects feedback through our net promoter score (NPS) survey, focus groups and events between customers and Red Hat engineers, and through several additional surveys that we use to better understand your experience as you engage with our products and services. 

Throughout 2021, the team collected and analyzed more than 15,000 survey responses, conducted a total of 15 virtual focus groups, events, and feedback sessions between our engineering teams and customers, and collected feedback from over 1,000 active users in our Red Hat Customer Portal Community. 

The team took this feedback and worked directly with internal stakeholders to share these findings and ultimately helped to implement a host of new enhancements, investments, and resources to improve the overall customer experience.

In the first part of our three-part series, we will recap some of the enhancements made to our products and documentation resources in the past year based on feedback from users like you.

Product enhancements

We know our customers choose Red Hat’s broad portfolio of products to help improve security, performance, reliability—and for access to award-winning technical support. We also heard your feedback on just how important it is that upgrading and migrating to new major versions of our products is a painless process with minimal downtime. 

This is why teams across Red Hat have worked to create new tools that improve and simplify the migration process. Some enhancements we’ve made to our products in the past year based on customer feedback include: 

Migration + upgrade enhancements and tools

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

• Convert2RHEL is now fully supported: Convert2RHEL allows users of RHEL derivatives to convert their systems to fully supported RHEL machines. This tool was historically a self-support or consulting-supported utility, but is now fully supported. 

Red Hat Satellite

• Leapp Upgrade using Red Hat Satellite 6: Customers can now upgrade multiple systems in parallel smoothly from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 with Red Hat Satellite as a part of your infrastructure. Learn more about how to get started.

Red Hat OpenShift

• Migration Toolkit for Containers: Migration Toolkit for Containers allows you to migrate stateful and stateless applications from an older source cluster to a destination cluster running the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift. Learn more about the tool here. 

Other product enhancements based on customer feedback

RHEL

• No-cost RHEL program expanded: The Red Hat Developer Program has had no-cost RHEL programs for a long time, but it was previously limited to single-machine developers. This self-supported Individual Developer subscription has now been expanded, and RHEL can be deployed in production on up to 16 systems.

Red Hat OpenShift

• Redesigned the Red Hat OpenShift “try” experience: To ensure customers are on the right track in their trial journey with Red Hat OpenShift, we created the “Try Red Hat OpenShift” page as a one-stop shop to provide a guided getting started experience. Check it out here.

Satellite

• Red Hat Satellite registration improvements: With the release of Satellite 6.10, the process of managing hosts is now easier, more secure, customizable, and has fewer steps. Find out more in this article or watch this video. 

Product documentation enhancements

In 2021, we had millions of views to our product documentation resources on the Red Hat Customer Portal. With so many customers utilizing documentation and wanting to find answers to their questions quickly and in one place, our Customer Content Services team has changed the way we develop and present product documentation. 

Over the past year, our team has worked to increase the relevance, quality, and accuracy of the learning materials that are released. Learn more about some of these enhancements below. 

• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform documentation: To improve ease of navigation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform documentation, a drop-down version selector menu has been added. With multiple Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform versions available, customers faced issues finding and selecting the correct documentation for their version, and this makes relevant resources available with the click of a finger.

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform documentation: Our Supportability Docs team completed extensive interviews with customers and customer-facing teams this year to determine how to enhance our product documentation to improve the Red Hat OpenShift user experience. To improve findability and installation, the team implemented several enhancements, including adding prerequisites, additional resources, and next steps, adding “preparing to install” intro pages for all platforms, and  addressing and closing more than 100 bugs. 

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform documentation: Our technical writers often update our Red Hat OpenStack Platform documentation between releases, which may have caused some customers to miss procedural or configuration updates that they need to consider. To ensure customers don’t miss any critical documentation updates, the team plans to designate a single page in the release notes to a revision table that customers can monitor.

You Asked. We Acted.

Our goal is to continue to improve our products, services, and the overall customer experience based off of the feedback we receive each year. With resources like our You Asked. We Acted. page, our Customer Portal Community, and feedback from our NPS surveys, we encourage you to continue to share your opinions and to have your voice heard. We’re listening and look forward to many more improvements to come in 2022.