Grading Ourselves

In the spirit of the back to school season now underway in parts of the world, and given my general fondness for report cards, I’ve been thinking about our marks of late in various support areas.  Too early perhaps to hand out definitive grades but worth noting levels of progress. 

How well are we maintaining the ANGEL client experience?

Since the Blackboard/ANGEL union back in May, a lot has been said, written, blogged and Tweeted about the combination and what it might mean for clients and their experience.  Now we’re at a mile post, back to school, that I’ve been looking to as a good early barometer of how we’re doing. 

So far, the news is good.  Right now, ANGEL client support, service and product quality levels have sustained the high levels we have historically delivered (and religiously measured) prior to the merger with Blackboard.  It’s still early – both in the back to school season and our integration efforts – but these are encouraging signs in areas we’ll keep tracking and reporting on (Grade: Strong Progress).

What happens when I play the client?

At BbWorld, including in my first “listening” session, I heard two major themes from clients about our support process.  First, that support has made important strides in certain areas that we can build on.  Second, there remain significant areas of frustration that need our continued attention.  To better inform my own view, I made good on a promise made at BbWorld to walk a mile in client shoes: recently I anonymously filed tickets through the normal support process for both Blackboard and ANGEL. 

How’d it go?  In general I found the experience pretty positive and responsive on both fronts.  Some color on specific elements of my experience:

• Response time: I had return calls on both tickets within an hour (for tier 2 requests) along with helpful suggestions and reasonable requests for additional information that I hadn’t already filed online.
  

• Repetitive requests for information:  While it didn’t happen during my exercise, I understand that we can sometimes irritate clients with requests for the same information they’ve already submitted as tickets are escalated from tier 1 to tier 2.
  • Homework: we’ve already undertaken some coaching with our team about this to raise awareness of the inefficiency and reduce if not entirely eliminate the practice.
    

• Clarity of messages from Behind the Blackboard: Automated emails I received were okay but could have been more user-friendly and have inspired some close follow up.
  • Homework: we’ve identified a number of small changes that could have big impact: improved subject lines, body copy and greater use of time saving click-throughs.

I’ll do more of these to get a consistent view over time but an interesting first round that I’d generally give a Progressing grade.

Your grades

While I consider myself to be pretty self-critical, ultimately it’s the grades we earn from customers that I’m most concerned with.  In this business, we get graded early and often.  Positive and negative, your feedback helps, so keep it coming. In closing, I’d like to share a recent email I received from a client – one whose experience has led her to judge us harshly in the past.  I’ll excerpt here, in part:

Hi, Ray.

I imagine that you often receive complaints and criticisms.  The client listening sessions at BbWorld must have given you an earful.   ;-)

I wanted to let you know about three outstanding Blackboard employees who together have significantly improved my opinion of Blackboard as a company. I've actually been a Blackboard System Administrator since version 3 of the product, so I have a long history of dealing with Blackboard.

The writer goes on to detail some ups and downs and to commend the great work from several members of our support and management teams that have put her institution on solid ground.  She ends with this sentiment:

As you probably know well, we universities are facing very tight budgets, and we are under pressure to consider "less expensive" open-source options, in addition to or instead of the commercial products that we license.  Outstanding employees like these help develop something that is highly valuable but hard to achieve: customer loyalty.  The three of them have made a *huge* contribution to improving my overall experiences and attitudes about Blackboard Learn as a product and about the company in general.

To be sure, we don’t always hit our mark and we’ve got lots of work ahead to get to where we want to be.  But this client’s feedback represents a solid grade – the kind we’re shooting for every day.

More to come as we get more results to grade. 

Cheers,

Ray

Comments

[Tina Henderson]

I am very excited about the angel platform this year!! Looking foward and waiting patiently for the teachers to utilize this great resource between parent and school.

[Alan Shapiro]

How are you doing so far? At first after ANGEL was bought out by BB, things seem to be ok. Now 3-4 months since the buy out things are going downhill, in my opinion, for ANGEL Learning Support. My guess is many of the ANGEL Learning employees have either been fired or left the company so the people in these support positions as well as sales really do not have a history with ANGEL Learning customers. The May Update for ANGEL 7.3 fixed many things but broke too many other important communication channels for our online courses. Some of this may happened because of the customizations that St. Petersburg College has in place that mess around with the user id but I know of one that many other institutions use that broken.

I guess I feel that things are only going to get worse and not better. I was hoping BB has learned from their experience with the WebCT buyout but now I am questioning if BB really did.

[Bruce]

I want to say a big thanks to your ANGEL support staff - We just upgraded from 7.2 to 7.4 and it was a bit of a rocky road, but the ANGEL support staff were there every step of the way to resolve every technical issue that we had. A few I probably could have fixed myself, given the time to research what was really happening, but they had the answer, usually much quicker than I could have found it. We are a one and a half person shop, supporting 60+ instructors and about 200 course sections each term, and I really appreciate the the ANGEL Support staff being there for me. ANGEL Support has always been good, but now, perhaps, even better.

Keep up the good work!

[Alan Shapiro]

You know the saying, “Someone’s perception is their reality.” Well, my own perception became my own reality when came to the my feelings about ANGEL support. However, I was wrong (I am not beyond saying I was wrong). I guess when I wrote my first post I had hoped to get the same kind of response we usually received before the buyout. I was impressed that later that morning, I got a call from Lynn Zingraf, Sr. Director, Customer Support for ANGEL Learning. We had a great conversation about the true reality of what has happened in the last 3-4 months. Lynn set me straight that very few people who were with ANGEL Learning before the buyout have left. It was really nice to hear this fact.