Office Hours for Your Customers

Hey everyone!

I'm looking to host "office hours" for our customers and create more of a community and engage customers on a massive scale vs 1-on-1, especially our SMB and tech touch customers.

If you've done this before, how have you gone about doing this (successfully)?

Here's what I'm thinking so far:

Mass email to key stakeholders with Google Survey linked asking for their areas of interests (e.g. Specific best practices on X problem, feature functionality, connecting with other customers)
Once I capture their interests, then send calendar invites & Zoom info to customers of respective interested topics

What I've done before:

In-app product messaging announcing office hours one week in advance (topical office hours)
- Result: ~Medium to high registration, but low attendance

Also - how do you get new, fresh ideas for topics?

Would love to hear from you!

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Comments

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Valuable but you must be a SME in the topic. Worst thing to happen would be a webinar filled with “let me get back to you on that”

my suggestion is to host a small version first as a pilot and see just how complex some of these questions can get.

Alex Farmer

We've done something similar since lockdown started - our product is called Talisman, so we've launched Talisman Tea Time, which is a bit of an ask me anything session run by our CS and Training teams. We're still a smaller business, so its been a helpful live help session as we dont have live chat or in-product support at present. Engagement was high to start with, but dropped off, but we've kept it running as an optional live session, supported by our always-on customer community.

Andreas Knoefel

I implemented Office Hours before as a dedicated time when any customer could call in and get help. No sign-up, pre-sort or the likes. A Sr. CSM was available for Q&A. If a topic became sensitive, or screen sharing was required, we scheduled a private session.

This was promoted as part of our pre-sale engagement, in our community and when customers submitted support tickets, etc. It provided them with another way to reach out in case help was needed.

Will Pagden

I can only really echo the above, high interest, low attendance.

But like others, I have done sessions with product/feature releases and these tend to be really productive and well attended.

Alex Turkovic

Hi @Alex Tran ! My experience with regular office hours is similar to @Ronald Krisak - Doing these sessions on a regular basis usually has strong initial attendance but definitely wanes over time to where they are essentially not worth the time investment.

I LOVE his suggestion around sessions accompanying product launches though. That's a great idea.

The client engagement efforts I've held in the past (successfully) have always had these common themes in common:

Value Add: Ensure what you are doing provides real value, based on customer input. Surveys, QBRs and customer visits are fantastic ways to collect ideas for session topics to drive values.
Thoughtful Webinars: These ideas can then be turned into webinars that can be used for your existing client base as well as potential new clients. Engaging with the marketing team on these events to help drive attendance is always a best practice. The KEY here is the world 'thoughtful'. Being a thought-leader in your industry and developing a great series of free courses is a great way to provide value to new and existing clients.
Support Ticket Trends: Another item to look at is trends in the types of support tickets you're seeing. The top 5 topics or areas are a great way to start pushing valuable content out that will not only help the client, but it will help your support teams by (hopefully) reducing their ticket volume.

Matt Myszkowski

Hey @Alex Tran - reach out to one of my ex-companies, and one of your customers. Autodesk did this really well with a series of different style one-to-many events. Office hours, open-mic sessions, specific success stories, functionality demos.

Laura Lakhwara

I really like this idea @Ronald Krisak surrounding major releases. It's giving me some thoughts on how we could incorporate the milestone concept. TY!

@Alex Tran - We do this with some large customers, which has been very successful, but we haven't gone to all customers. You're getting me thinking that this would be valuable, and it could be prompted from customer inquiries to CC to CS. e,g. "Here's your answer, and by the way, we'll be talking about this and ____ at our office hours this week. Sign up here."

With enterprise customers that have gone through major rollouts, the topics are based on trends making it relevant for them to join, and this really could be applied across customers for better success/efficiency.

Ronald Krisak

@Alex Tran hi Alex, in my previous company, we used to use office hours for our customer set. We promoted it to the users, and had calendar invites that were sent out. Over time, we had less & less interest. In my current company, we haven't done office hours yet, but we do utilize Showcase/Milestone events. After every major release that is user/customer facing, we send a mass invite to all of our superusers/company sponsors, etc. We go through the latest features/functionality, and then have cross-talk between the users. So far, it is a good event!