The State of Customer and Partner Experience at Red Hat 2023: Collecting feedback from multiple inputs and channels

2023 was a pivotal year not only for Red Hat, but also for our customers and partners. While the past year may have presented many challenges, it also strengthened our commitment to listening to and acting on the voice of our customers and partners.

This past year our Customer Experience and Adoption team collected feedback in new ways, and also worked to modernize some of our traditional feedback collection methods. We reached a customer experience milestone by achieving our highest ever Net Promoter Score (NPS) score, as well as launched our new Customer Success Days event series that allows customers and Red Hat subject matter experts to connect and share use cases.

Through our many listening efforts, including surveys, research events and data analysis methods, we identified several areas of opportunity within our products and services throughout the year. Here's how our team collected and prioritized customer experience (CX) feedback to drive enhancements throughout 2023. 

Global “Customer Success Days” events

In 2023, we worked to infuse and collect customer feedback at events throughout the globe. Our team launched a new event series, titled Customer Success Days (CSDs), to connect customers and partners in technical discussions directly with teams like Red Hat product engineering. These interactive engagements help customers and partners adopt our technology, and equip Red Hatters with an “outside-in” perspective of customer and partner experience.

“Absolutely FANTASTIC onsite session today! I was really impressed with the quality of the presentations and live demos. I’m (re)inspired on several of those topics and look forward to continuing the conversation”  - Red Hat Partner, Senior Principal Engineer

On October 23-24, 2023, we kicked off the first Customer Success Day in EMEA at the headquarters of an enterprise customer in Saudi Arabia. The customer was excited to engage with Red Hat experts, especially around cloud architecture. Their main objective was to improve operational capacity and to create a mature and robust platform. This Customer Success Day brought new opportunities for services and subscriptions to help accelerate their DevOps journey.

“The event built trust and solid relationship between [the customer’s] Platform team and Red Hat team, offering high-quality content, such as insightful presentations, informative panels, and engaging discussions. This event provided a platform for networking and connecting with like-minded individuals, industry experts, and potential collaborators."- Red Hat Customer,  Platform Engineering Senior Consultant

Following the EMEA event, on November 14th, 2023, we hosted the first Customer Success Day in North America. We listened to the customer’s challenges to determine which solutions could be implemented to help them better realize value and achieve their business objectives. We also leveraged Red Hat subject matter experts to deepen their knowledge and proficiency to help simplify processes and improve productivity.

The “Experience Zone” at Red Hat Summit

We also expanded our presence at Red Hat Summit last year, where attendees were able to participate in hands-on journey mapping exercises, surveys, in-person roundtable discussions and conversations with Red Hat subject matter experts.

The Experience Zone booth was the fifth most visited booth at the Expo Hall. We were able to collect approximately 550 survey responses and over 200 peer reviews. On top of that we had approximately 85 activity participants help us gather in-depth feedback on a variety of topics.

All of the feedback collected at our events helps influence and improve Red Hat product roadmaps, quality testing and processes, documentation requirements and the overall customer experience.

Digital Listening via “Listening Network”

Our Customer Experience and Adoption team had a major goal in 2023;  to transform and align how Red Hat listens to our customers and partners. An outcome of this goal was the decision to build a strong "Listening Network" amongst Red Hat teams. The Listening Network is a group of Red Hat associates that are connected across teams and who work to advocate for gathering and acting upon customer feedback. From this initiative, we were able to better align how we ask our customers and partners for feedback along their journey.

Through the Listening Network, we also identified product trials as an area of focus for user research. The goal of this research was to improve the user experience along their journey by assessing the similarities and differences between the product experiences, users and use cases for product trials. We also developed a closed feedback loop where findings can be turned into actions more quickly, and with greater impact for our customers. Our strategy included executing a digital intercept and an email campaign which revealed several action items based on customer feedback, including:

• Updating our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) content to better guide the user install process.
• Updating the Product Trial Center, and soon our product trial success pages, with Interactive Lab links to provide guided modules for trial users.
• Reviewing and updating detail sections to provide comparisons between similar product trials so users are able to better distinguish between them.

Expanding beyond traditional CX listening methods

In addition to focusing on our more traditional methods of listening to improve the customer experience, our Customer Experience and Adoption team also expanded into new areas last year.

One focal point our team tackled in 2023 was expanding upon our advocacy efforts. This included broadening our presence on product peer review sites, like G2 and TrustRadius. With this focus area, we hope to continue to generate and utilize customer product reviews to not only inform areas of opportunities within our products, but to provide prospective buyers with first-hand verbatim reviews that can help to inform their buying decisions.

We are already seeing value within this area, by increasing the amount of product feedback available to us and working to apply this across the business. We received two honorable awards from our peer review vendors. First, we were thrilled to be recognized in many award categories during TrustRadius’s annual Best Of Awards. Second, we reached another impressive milestone when Red Hat was recognized as a Leader in G2’s Winter 2024 Reports.

Over the last year, we also helped  Red Hat associates gain more visibility into feedback from our customers and partners. Our team developed an internal tool called the Experience Hub, where we consolidate feedback data across Red Hat to help everyone better understand what’s working well and to identify opportunities to drive customer experience improvements. Our goal is that, with this consolidated data, we can help drive accountability internally and make sure the voice of our customers is represented across the business.

At Red Hat, we truly value the voice of our customers. As a result, we spent a large portion of last year working to improve how we listen to and collect feedback so we are better able to take effective action. Stay tuned for part 2 of our annual blog series to learn more about how we acted on the feedback we received last year.

Want to stay connected and share your feedback with our Customer Experience and Adoption team? Reach out to our team directly at experience-advocacy@redhat.com. You can also see your feedback in action on our You Asked. We Acted webpage or join the conversation in our Customer Portal Community.