Thursday, 21 November 2013

Bucking the pumpkin status quo

Halloween has always been a big deal at our house. Growing up, pumpkin carving was second only to trick-or-treating on the Halloween activity spectrum. With three siblings running around wielding knives, we did our best to strike a careful balance between carving pumpkin Picassos and keeping all of our fingers. The finished products weren’t much to look at, but they were always worthy of display on the front porch. But that was then.

Nowadays, the Jack-o’-Lantern game has been elevated considerably. Pumpkins we thought were awesome a few years ago look like mangled gourds today. With all the patterns, stencils, tools, and kits available, just about anyone can become a pumpkin Da Vinci.

So, how’d we get here? When was it that someone said, “Hey, can we move Jack-o’-Lanterns beyond the triangle eyes already?” Well, kudos to them. I’d dare say the world is a more creative place because of that question.

Here at Instructure, we’re never satisfied with the status quo. We like to challenge established practices as often as we can. The area I focus most on is Customer Success. Here are a few things we’re doing for our customers to “think outside the triangle eye.”

Tier One Support - a new approach
Most industry tier 1 support options are on a per-incident basis. The more bugs or problems they put into the software, the more they get paid to support it, but that just didn’t feel right to us. Our tier one support offering is one fixed price and we’ll answer every phone call, email, chat, or ticket you throw at us. We’re willing to bear the risk so you can focus on teaching and learning, something we’re passionate about.

And in case you’re wondering what the quality is like, in a recent survey our end users gave us a 94% support satisfaction rating. While we’d love to have 100%, we hope you agree that 94% is incredible and shows that we put our users first.

When the unthinkable happens
Recently a Canvas customer created hundreds of courses and had students submit assignments within those courses. When the institution determined they had the wrong content in the courses and had created and enrolled the students in all new courses, we had to find a way to quickly move all the assignment submissions over. The old model would take many weeks and involve a costly project. Instead, we concentrated our staff resources to help move assignment submissions to the new courses before students got confused about what happened.

Customer Success Managers - a new breed
That’s kind of a silly name, but the name describes exactly what they do. They’re here to make Canvas institutions more successful. Tell them your goals and they’ll help you make them a reality.

Ultimately we want everyone to have the best possible experience with Canvas. We think that means constantly upping our game and getting better. Now please excuse me while I get back to carving my pumpkin replica of the Taj Mahal.

Keep learning,
Mitch

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