Hello Khoros Marketing community, my name is Sean O’Hara and I lead our Technical Support efforts for the Khoros Marketing solution. I wanted to share Marketing specific information to let you know we hear you and we’re making improvements to the Technical Support team.
There are some upgrades coming that will help to get more of your team into Atlas, the Khoros Community, with less friction. Regarding the incident when we temporarily restricted access to the Marketing solution, we took great efforts to ensure security and stability were paramount to your experience within Marketing. Here, I’ll focus on imparting its impact to your Support Experience and how we’re recovering from this. Finally, I’ll touch upon the Status Page (bookmark it, register, it’s a great heads up!).
Atlas
Within Atlas, we’re bringing an improved and more seamless experience to you and your staff which we’ll have a blog post up next week. This will include details on the improvements that will make it easier, and smoother to get the information you’re looking for.
I strongly encourage you and your teams to take the time to register, especially once the new release comes out next week, and get familiar with Atlas and the wealth of information available within. Most importantly, this will give them access to our Case Portal, an ecosystem within Atlas that allows you to request, update, and track progress with their Technical Support cases — and for some, your entire org. It’s a great tool that’s easy to use and is the quickest channel to request or update us with your questions, concerns, or bug reports. The Case Portal gives you an easy to read and organized flow when you have one or more open cases. It also allows you to review answers provided a few weeks back to brush up on when you’re working through that area of the product again. It’s its own wealth of knowledge. Additionally, in the event that a case isn’t quite moving in the direction you’re looking for, you can use the built-in Escalation Process.
Technical Support Quality & Responsiveness
Within the last 4 months, we’ve had a growth spurt in our team which was needed to provide the level of service Khoros Marketing customers are accustomed to. This will be a noticeable improvement from where we are today! As we continue to hire, we have already grown the team by over 66% by adding new team members across the globe. These fresh faces and brilliant minds are in the middle of going through our newly revamped onboarding “Bootcamp” which delivers a hit-the-ground-running educational series that’s more detailed than ever before. This training helps our new team to become more effective within a few short weeks, rather than the 2+ months it used to. As I’m sure you’re all aware from training within your organizations, this doesn’t mean a new employee will necessarily be a complete expert on the full gamut of the Marketing product offering right out of the gate, but it does mean that they will be able to handle cases more quickly compared to previous new hires. This Bootcamp process is constantly growing and evolving as we are dedicated to continuing education and bringing high quality employees into Khoros.
On the topic of the recent Marketing incident, security and stability were two top priorities which had a direct impact on Support’s ability to respond quickly. We spent many hours ensuring that the correct information was given out along with providing responses as timely as possible in order to get everyone access to your companies. In a few short days, we received over four times the volume we normally receive in a month and this sustained for approximately 3 weeks. Our teams spent extra hours tirelessly working to address questions and concerns as quickly as possible. We are not 100% caught up, and you’ve felt our delayed responses. The feedback around this was heard loud and clear, so we continue to work overtime to catch up. While I can’t promise any timelines, I can assure you that we’re coming to the end of this challenging time and will be back to business as usual relatively soon. Along with our growing team and expertise, you will start to see marked improvements to the responses we provide both in quality and in speed, two areas of major focus per Philippe’s post. We appreciate every ounce of patience you’ve provided to us during this time and, while we’re not completely out of the woods, we’ve put in a great deal of effort to ensure that we learn and continue to drive improvements.
Status Page
One improvement around communication is a change to our Status page. We’ve recently improved the “components” within the Marketing section to allow for more customer centric focused and timely notifications that impact what you’re most interested in monitoring and being alerted to. I would love to see more of you subscribe to the Status Page to keep up to date, so please check out the new components!
Summary
So I’d like to wrap up this blog with two statements:
- Thank you for taking the time to read this, and having the interest to learn more about how we’re working hard to improve your Support experience!
- We’re not content with just improving back to a level of service you expect, we’re planning on some great things over the next few quarters to provide an even BETTER experience than you’ve come to expect. So keep your eyes and ears peeled for future updates from Technical Support!
