The State of Customer Experience at Red Hat: Technical support and subscription management enhancements

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

• Blog post 1: Product and documentation enhancements

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

In the first post of our three-part series, we discussed enhancements made to several Red Hat products and product documentation based on customer feedback in the past year. In this post, we’ll look at some additional areas where we have been working to improve the experience we deliver to customers and partners.

Let’s take a look at some of the enhancements we made to the areas of support delivery and subscription management. 

Support Delivery

With a Red Hat subscription, your mission-critical work is backed by our experienced, knowledgeable, and committed support engineers. Through our Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys, customers have indicated how critical quick response times and the quality of responses are when working with technical support. Here’s what we improved based on your feedback. 

• Customer business impact tooling and systemic changes: We have amended our CES survey to include an area for customers to provide more information about overall business impact. This gives our team more visibility into the impact of a support case, including insight into how many users are impacted, the ability to identify what the financial impacts are, and if the support case is a matter of legal, medical, or national emergency. With these details, our team can better understand the full scope of the business challenge and can provide the most appropriate response. 

• Non-organization administrators can now add existing users from their account as watchers to a support case: Previously, non-organization administrators had to ask their account’s organization administrator to add another user as a watcher to a support case. Now, non-organization administrators can add existing users on their account to a support case by using their email address or Red Hat Customer Portal username.

• Reference attachments inline while drafting a comment on support cases: This feature was updated to make support case interactions clearer for both customers and our technical support engineers. This allows both parties to better articulate their comments. 

• Easily close/reopen support cases while providing a reason for doing so: The previous dropdown status option within the support case tool was not clear for customers, so our team made it easier to quickly close a case if needed. Once a case is closed, customers will receive a confirmation notice confirming whether they intended to close the case or not, and asking for the overall resolution. This allows our team to better close the loop and to ensure we know how to best improve your experience. 

• Proactively accept Remote Access Rider terms once a support case is created: Users are required to sign Remote Access Rider terms before Red Hat can view and/or access a customer’s computer to troubleshoot an issue. Users can now proactively accept these terms once a case is created, saving time and an interaction between support associates and customers.

Subscription Management

We understand that trying to figure out your subscription needs is one of the last things that IT managers want to think about. This is why we’ve worked to make your subscription management experience faster, simpler, and more accurate, regardless of your role, involvement, or training level. Check out some of the enhancements we’ve made in the past year. 

• Released Simple Content Access to all Customer Portal users: Simple Content Access simplifies the subscription experience so that the operator does not have a complex workflow that needs to be completed when adding, removing, and renewing subscriptions. Announced at Red Hat Summit 2021, all Customer Portal users can now turn on Simple Content Access and opt into this new experience. Learn all about Simple Content Access here.

• Released pay-as-you-go subscription support for Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated: Our customers have asked us to offer our products and services in differing buying models, rather than just in a traditional annual subscription. With pay-as-you-go subscription support, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated users can purchase a subscription through marketplace.redhat.com as needed and view hourly usage in the Subscriptions area of console.redhat.com.  

• Introduced a simplified cloud subscription experience: Getting Red Hat Enterprise Linux up and running on the public cloud required too many steps, so we released a new simplified subscription experience.   

• Introduced a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) beta experience: As of September 15, 2021, we changed the RHEL beta subscription process so that end users are no longer required to sign up to gain access to a RHEL beta. Find out more about the new experience here. 

Improving the subscription experience based on your feedback

With a Red Hat subscription, customers benefit from the innovation of open source communities and gain the assurance that their solutions are backed by Red Hat’s ongoing investment. A key component of a Red Hat subscription is the feedback loop that helps Red Hat to continue to improve and best serve you. We take your feedback seriously and aim to continue implementing changes based on feedback we’ve received throughout 2022 and beyond.