BACK IN BLACKboard (A Window into Blackboard Client Support)

Hello, All.  My name is Matt Painter and I’m the newest addition to the Blackboard Client Success Blog team.

I started at Blackboard in June of 2005, as a technical support manager (TSM) and worked my way up the ranks to become the director of North American Support.  Last August I decided to leave Blackboard to pursue a career in reporting and analytics.  Luckily I had kept in contact with many of the good people at Blackboard and was aware of the company-wide Client Success initiative being planned.  After discussing the position with Craig and Jan, I agreed to come back to Blackboard as the business intelligence analyst for the Client Success team.

In order for Blackboard as a company to become more proactive and foster greater client success, we’ll need to use the information we gather to find and react to problems before they are brought to our attention by users.  It is my job to work with each of our departments across the company to determine the key factors that enable our clients to be successful, and then create reports that notify Blackboard employees if a client is not succeeding in the areas affected by those factors.  This process might be easier for me to explain with an example.

One of the first tools I worked on, when returning to Blackboard, was a ticket-ranking system for TSMs.  This tool combines information like:

• The number of support tickets that are open for a client
• The age of a ticket
• The amount of time passed since a ticket was updated
• Whether or not a client requested a ticket be escalated internally

This set of information helps us evaluate the tickets and determine the order in which we should be addressing them.  More or less, the process identifies tickets that have otherwise fallen through the cracks and need to be revisited by a TSM.

The tool I worked on also enables analysts to see all tickets created by their clients, rather than just all the tickets presently assigned to them.  With this greater visibility, TSMs are able to get ahead of any potential issues that may have been escalated to someone else previously, but have since fallen from priority lists.

Thus far, I’ve truly enjoyed being back at Blackboard.  This is an exciting education company to work for, and it feels very rewarding to me to be able to see my work being used by my colleagues across multiple areas of the organization to help our clients succeed.

Although my position primarily focuses on using our data to improve, refine and expand our internal processes, posting here to the Blackboard Client Success Blog will enable me to give you glimpses into how we’re working hard every day to enhance your experience working with Blackboard.