The State of Customer and Partner Experience at Red Hat 2023: Using feedback to drive enhancements

Improving customer experience is something Red Hat focuses on every day of the year. One way we work to improve our customers' and partners' experience is through collaborating with teams across the business to share user feedback and make sure Red Hatters are keeping the customer voice top of mind in all decisions.

In the first part of our State of Customer and Partner Experience Annual Report, we covered how we engaged with customers and partners throughout 2023 to collect and listen to feedback, regardless of the channel. In this post, we will dive deeper into how that feedback has driven improvements across Red Hat’s products and services.

Analyzing your feedback to drive improvements

In 2023, Red Hat launched several tools to help Red Hatters better understand our customers' experience and how to better engage with them. One tool is called the “Experience Hub,” where Red Hatters can explore the feedback submitted by our customers through all different forums such as our websites, email, and events like Red Hat Summit.

Another internal tool we launched is called the “Customer Engagement Index,” where we assess customers' engagement activity to understand if they are getting value from Red Hat products and services. This helps Red Hatters understand which customers may need additional support and to help drive needed improvements.

By providing tools like these, Red Hatters are better able to identify opportunities to improve the experience for our customers and partners. Read on to learn more about the ways that user feedback has a direct impact on customer experience with Red Hat products and services.

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

When customers embark on a journey with ROSA, it's not just about launching a cluster – it’s about realizing value at every step, from getting started to cluster operations and beyond. We have demonstrated our commitment to customer success by implementing new ways to provide guidance and collect feedback. We have launched several initiatives to better understand user needs and to drive positive experiences throughout their journey, including:

Getting started

• Launched a feedback touchpoint where users could provide their level of experience and top use case for OpenShift. These findings help us tailor offered resources to fit their requirements throughout the getting started process
• Conducted a short survey to gauge user experience with their first cluster creation process. This feedback pinpointed areas for improvement, helping us to improve documentation and learning resources in partnership with AWS

These initiatives have provided us with deeper insights into customer needs and preferences, so we are better able to provide them with the resources they need, including chat services backed by our Customer Success team and our ROSA Slack community.

Cluster configuration and operations

• Released a ROSA cluster configuration guide that walks through Day 2 operations including cluster configuration, deploying applications, configuring CI/CD pipelines and more. We also collect feedback so we can continuously improve the guide to better fit user needs
• Launched an announcement so users were aware of the ROSA 4.10 end of life and captured their reasons for delaying the upgrade, helping us provide better support for the upgrade process

Behind the scenes, we are also using machine learning to help us make other data-driven, customer-focused improvements.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

We are committed to providing users with tools and resources that improve their experience with all Red Hat products – and Ansible Automation Platform is no exception. Acknowledging the wealth of details and materials available, we’ve received feedback about users' early challenges with Ansible Automation Platform. To address this, we’ve compiled a collection of getting started resources to help simplify and streamline the onboarding process, organized by automation role. We also developed this 5-step checklist of tips, best practices and resources to help customers make the most out of Ansible Automation Platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

RHEL 7 and CentOS Linux 7 will reach their end of maintenance support and End of Life (EOL) respectively on June 30, 2024. It is very important for customers to plan and execute their upgrade or migration activities to the latest versions of RHEL in that timeframe. This will allow customers to take full advantage of everything RHEL has to offer, including new features, security enhancements, bug fixes, technical support and more. 

Of course, transitioning to new versions of enterprise software products can be challenging, and a significant number of customers reached out to Red Hat Customer Support asking about how to upgrade their servers. Since the timeline to upgrade or migrate is narrowing as we approach the deadline, creating awareness among our worldwide customers is crucial. This gave us a chance to collaborate with Red Hat’s Global Support Services and the Global Marketing teams to develop a platform consisting of everything customers need to get started  with their upgrade or migration activities.

Learn more about all of the resources, tools, and consulting options that are available for new and current customers here: 

• For RHEL upgrades: https://red.ht/upgraderhel
• For CentOS to RHEL migrations: https://red.ht/centos

Listening to customer and partner feedback and improving their experience with Red Hat products and services is a core part of the Customer Experience team's mission. This past year, we worked to better understand what drives our customers’ positive and negative experiences, and we will spend 2024 continuing to drive meaningful changes to improve users' experience with our products, services and people.

Your insights are important and we want to hear from you. If you have feedback that you’d like to share with us, please reach out directly to our team at experience-advocacy@redhat.com. To keep up with enhancements made to our products and services based on customer feedback, check out our You Asked. We Acted. page.