Announcing the Okta Help Center: Putting Our Customers First

A lot has changed since I joined Okta a little less than a year ago. We’ve doubled our customer base to 2,000+ enterprises, hosted Oktane14, our second annual customer summit, and announced a series of new offerings to securely connect more people, organizations, apps and devices.

What hasn’t changed, though, is our focus on customer success. Our recent advances are just another step towards realizing our vision to make it simple for people to do their work easily, efficiently and securely. Since Todd and Frederic started Okta back in 2009, we’ve made every decision thinking about how it will enable customer productivity and, more importantly, drive business success.

Technology plays a strategic role in driving business success and since founding Okta, our team has worked closely with thousands of CIOs to realize this vision of technology-driven productivity. We’ve also watched the role of the CIO evolve tremendously – as Wilbur-Ellis CIO Dan Willey once said at an Okta event, now more than ever the CIO role is all about “understanding what technology can do and explaining how that can help your business.” So what’s next for Dan and his fellow CIOs? Forrester Research predicts that CIOs will play an important role in explaining how technology can help their customers’ businesses in 2015, adopting technologies that will make them more responsive to their customers’ needs.

Today we’re announcing that we’ve built a portal so that we can be more responsive to our customers’ needs – something we hope will serve as an example for CIOs hoping to do the same.

Introducing the Okta Help Center

In my first blog post, I wrote that my team is here to channel Okta’s internal enthusiasm for customer success and turn that enthusiasm into something concrete that our customers can benefit from. Today we’re announcing that we’ve done just that: we built the Okta Help Center, accessible from the Okta Admin page, so customers can contact support, find documentation, connect with other Okta admins and more, all from one place within Okta.

The launch of Okta Help Center comes after months of customer conversations and Customer Advisory Board meetings where we asked our customers what they loved about Okta and what we could do better. Their answers? 1) Tell them more about our roadmap, 2) make it easy to find information and share it with their teams and 3) grow with them. We feel confident that the Help Center will help us to do all of those things.

What Can Our Customers Expect?

The Help Center brings together a handful of best-of-breed apps like Salesforce, Jive and Litmus, giving our existing customers one place for all things Okta service and support. They can take live or recorded training from Okta experts, collaborate with other customers and developers in our community, open support tickets and see what’s new in our release schedule.

The portal includes everything our customers would ever need to know about Okta and gives them a direct line to our team, which becomes even more important as those organizations and the employees that need to interact with Okta grow. No more silos, no more jumping from place to place on the website or from contact to contact in real life – now customers can just head to the Help Center whenever they need to do anything Okta-related.

Our goal is to make our customers more productive, more efficient and more successful with Okta. That’s what we hope the Okta Help Center will do and why we can’t wait to get their feedback on it. It's live now, go to your Admin Page to check it out. And feel free to engage with us in the Help Center or reach out to me directly at [email protected].