by Jan Day
How Are We Measuring the Client Experience?
Earlier this year my colleague Craig Chanoff posted to EducateInnovate about measuring all aspects of our clients’ experiences. This is a big challenge and many of you have asked how we’re going to do this.
One of the first steps we took was to ask a group of our clients from around the world to help us, and with these clients we formed the Client Experience Advisory Group. I asked the members of this group, representatives from K-12, Higher Education and Professional Education institutions to tell us about their experiences as clients – the good, the bad and the painfully ugly. They didn’t hold back.
To the Advisory Group feedback, I added the feedback from Client Support tickets and from Blackboard staff members to get a comprehensive list of areas in which Blackboard needs to work to improve the Client Experience. It was a long and detailed list. So, to figure out where Blackboard should start working, I asked the Advisory Group to prioritize the items in the list. It took a couple of meetings, but together we organized the list into core areas and priorities within them, and defined a baseline set of metrics that we may use to measure progress in each of the areas.
Craig and I took this list and created a set of five priority Client Success Imperatives and have given each of them owners and formed cross-departmental teams to tackle each one. The Client Success Imperatives and their owners are:
- Dramatically improve the client experience working with Client Support
Craig Chanoff, SVP Client Success - Improve Product Quality and its internal and external perceptions
Marc Nadeau, Sr. Director Product Quality - Enhance relationships through formal community and user group activities
Jan Poston Day, Sr. Director Client Engagement - Measure our success and share this data with our employees and clients
Matt Painter, Business Intelligence Analyst - Effectively communicate how to work with various company points of content
Karen Heppler, VP Sales Operations
These CSI teams have already begun their work developing project plans complete with goals and metrics, assigning resources and moving forward to improve the client experience. As work progresses we will report back to the broader client community through this blog, through direct e-mail communications, through presentations and the Blackboard staff members that our clients work with every day. So stay tuned for more information to come and drop me a line if you have any questions.