Thank you very much to all of you who took the time to answer our satisfaction survey in April. And congratulations to the winner of Photoshop CS5 at the University of Maine ! (For legal reason, I can not disclose the full name of the winner).
Let me now share with you some of the results and surprises from the survey and what we are doing about it.
Let’s start with some logistical items. We initially planned to run this survey on a quarterly basis. But due to the overwhelming amount of responses we got and the feed-back that the survey might be too long, we decided to do a couple of things: shorten the survey and run it twice a year instead of four times a year as planned.
What did we learn with this first edition of the survey:
About your usage of Adobe Connect:
General Collaboration, Seminar/Webcast and Training are the main use cases for Adobe Connect in your organizations. All of you have deployed Connect Meeting and over 50% of you have deployed Adobe Presenter as key modules of the Adobe Connect solution. Finally, 60% of you use Adobe Connect hosted by Adobe, where 30% chose to deploy on-premise, behind their firewall, and 10% using managed services. Over 50% of you have been using Connect for at least 2 years. In terms of feature usage, we were surprised by 2 things: first the ability to upload powerpoint in a room was ranked higher than screen sharing; second, we were surprised by the number of people using our Collaboration Builder SDK or XML API.
About your product satisfaction:
We were pleased to get an overall high satisfaction score with the product and its various aspects. Some areas scored higher than the average: the Connect Meeting and Seminar modules; the Connect hosted service or the on-prem installer; the ease of use of the product. Other scored lower than the average: support, Adobe Presenter module, VoIP. These results did not surprise us and the survey helped us ensure we execute more quickly on actions plan already in progress to improve each area.
Actions plans:
On Adobe Connect Support: our Technical Response Team (Tier 3) helped by the Connect engineering and product management teams launched earlier this year a program to improve the Connect and Presenter knowledge of the Tier 1 support teams to ensure we could answer your issues faster. The support group also re-designed call workflows to make sure you can talk to a Connect technician much faster. We are running on-going satisfaction survey with every support call and since may june we have observed much higher satisfaction scores for people calling into our support team a clear sign that all the work we put to improve support is yielding good results.
On Adobe Presenter: Adobe Presenter is a great rapid e-learning tool that enables any subject matter expert to turn a Powerpoint presentation into Flash content with video, voice over and quizz. Adobe Presenter is a plug-in to Microsoft Powerpoint, but it traditionally shipped with each new version of Adobe Connect (instead of shipping with every new version of Powerpoint). That created issues like what is happening currently where Microsoft shipped Office 2010 in June 2010 but Connect 8 will not ship until later this year. What we have done is decouple the Presenter team from the Connect team to ensure they can release independently of the Connect releases. The team did their first release Presenter 7.0.6 recently which provides important bug fixes and Microsoft Office 2010 compatibility.
On VoIP: With Connect 7 and the increase usage of VoIP in Connect meeting (driven by the fact that users are more and more comfortable using Skype like technologies), some customers reported issues with VoIP quality in constrained bandwidth environment. With Connect 7.5 first last december and 7.5 SP1 in april, we made significant improvement on VoIP quality by improving compression and echo cancellation on both MAC and PC. Since the roll-out of 7.5 SP1, we have seen notable improvement and as the results our volume of call to support re: VoIP have dropped significantly. You can expect us to continuously drive improvement on Voice and Video in the coming release as we leverage innovations built in the Flash Player.
What’s next?
We are not done. To ensure your satisfaction, it is important that you tell us what we can do better on a regular basis. Since the last survey, we released 2 service packs, worked hard to improve support: did we successfully solve some of the issues you reported us in the last survey? Please take 10 minutes of your time to let us know when the new survey becomes available later this month. As with the previous survey, you will be able to win a copy of Photoshop Cs5 by doing so.