How We Connect Our Engineers Directly To Buffer Customers with Customer Engineering Days
By Kelly Vass
While connecting the team to our customers has always been a priority for us at Buffer, how the team has connected with customers has changed quite a bit over the years.
When I first joined Buffer in 2015, the team would have a dedicated time when everyone would spend an hour answering customer support emails at our annual company retreat. During these sessions, our Customer Advocates would provide support for the entire Buffer team as they answered customer emails. It was an awesome bonding experience and a great way to bring everyone across the company–from the People Team, to Engineers, Designers, and Finance–closer to customers. Plus, with our fully-remote team having gathered in one location for the retreat, we weren’t able to provide our usual around-the-clock customer support, so having extra hands to reply to customers was a huge help!
After some reflection, it dawned on us that we shouldn’t limit full-team connection to annual company retreats! We thought through how it might look in a remote setting, and we came up with our first remote iteration in 2019: Advocacy Day.
Iteration #1: A full day for replying to customers
Our annual Advocacy Day was an entire day blocked out for the team to engage with our customers by replying to customer support emails. With our team being fully remote and spread across multiple time zones, we wanted to make sure a solid structure was in place to support all team members, especially those who were new or had never replied to a customer email before.
For the duration of Advocacy Day, our Customer Advocates were “on call” in Slack and on Zoom to support our Engineers, Product Managers, and other team members as they navigated conversations with our customers. We took shifts in an open Zoom call where anyone could pop in to ask questions, get support for tricky conversations, or just have company as they worked.
To support new team members during their first Advocacy Day, we also held celebrations in Slack when someone shipped their first reply to a customer and shared meaningful learnings and interactions throughout the day.
From the customer perspective, Advocacy Days also resulted in many quick wins. If an Engineer learned about a bug or a Designer learned of a small user experience issue from a customer conversation, they might jump right in to address the issue and follow up the same day with the customer to let them know it was resolved.
While there were many great benefits to connecting the entire team with our customers, there were some challenges and drawbacks. Some team members in roles further from the product experience found it challenging to troubleshoot an issue or know if certain behaviors were expected or were bugs.
We also received feedback that replying to customers was a bit intimidating for some team members, because they didn’t feel as though they were experts at …read more
Source:: Buffer Blog
