Is anyone holding cross-functional meetings to triage key customer issues?

Jay Nathan

Following on from today's CS Leadership Office Hours discussion on separating and clarifying the roles of customer success and customer support, is anyone using a cross-department forum to regularly triage and highlight key customer issues? If so, curious about the format (e.g. daily stand-up vs. longer meeting), agenda, participants, frequency. 

I have seen a great example used by the team at Code42 where they do a daily standup including support, success, engineering and product, led by the support leader. Top 2-3 issues are prioritized / discussed, detailed notes are taken and distributed to the entire team each morning. Perhaps most importantly, the CEO reads the notes every day and follows up with questions. They call it CCR - Critical Customer Response. 

Curious what others are doing and have seen work to ensure tight alignment across the org and visibility into key issues affecting the customer base?

Anastasia Magnitskaia

Jay- Great discussion today. 

I have always found that cross functional meetings are rather important. Key people from each department can discuss various points weekly, but also having quarterly meetings with larger group was helpful. Always have an agenda at least for your function and encourage others to bring some agenda points as well. These meetings also sometimes have ability to streamline resolutions to key issues and talk about them in a cohesive discussion while everyone is the same room.

Russell Bourne

@Jay Nathan, absolutely!  I have a success story on this exact thing.  I started hosting a weekly meeting that we called "Hot Accounts" where I invited leaders from Support, Product, Professional Services, Finance, and a few other groups.  Our agenda was sourced from issues the CSMs communicated during pipeline reviews, especially where they saw risk of major churn.  The issues were generally reactive things like unresolved tickets, finance holds, feature requests, etc.

Once we shared the issues, we were able to agree on actions to take and ownership of each action.  Sometimes we fixed the problem; sometimes it was a single call, sometimes an issue stayed on the agenda for weeks. 

Sometimes we couldn't fix the issue, but the customer was satisfied because they felt heard (like the ones who got a call from our Product leader and a sneak peak at our roadmap).

Eventually Support leadership was inspired to host the Support section of the call, where they brought critical support cases to the attention of CS that CS may not have otherwise seen.  It was gratifying and doubly productive for the communication to flow into the CS group.

Generally, I don't love having a wall of meetings on the calendar, but in our case, these communications wouldn't have happened otherwise.  And, I think the structure of the meeting helped keep our mentality away from finger-pointing and toward "let's fix these things together".

Brian Hartley

We have a weekly stand-up both within the CS team to prioritize and then a separate one with the product team to share our priorities.  We also have the luxury of a production support engineer who can focus solely on break/fix.

Kelly Hook

We hold a weekly meeting with CS, Support, Product leads, and CTO. Customer Success and support keep a combined google sheet of our top 5 priority needs from customers and we ask for updates on where those are in the development cycle. If things are being worked on already we move that to an "in-progress" tab that product also updates. "Top 5 customer needs" enables us to have our own prioritization framework to share what we think is important and compare that with the product roadmap. If there's misalignment we discuss what needs to happen to meet our company's long term vision while keeping current customers happy.  Discussing over a call helps a lot with Product and Engineering empathy vs when we just share customer requests in slack. 

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Kelly Hook
Head of Customer Success | Orderful
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-13-2020 12:35
From: Jay Nathan
Subject: Is anyone holding cross-functional meetings to triage key customer issues?

Following on from today's CS Leadership Office Hours discussion on separating and clarifying the roles of customer success and customer support, is anyone using a cross-department forum to regularly triage and highlight key customer issues? If so, curious about the format (e.g. daily stand-up vs. longer meeting), agenda, participants, frequency. 

I have seen a great example used by the team at Code42 where they do a daily standup including support, success, engineering and product, led by the support leader. Top 2-3 issues are prioritized / discussed, detailed notes are taken and distributed to the entire team each morning. Perhaps most importantly, the CEO reads the notes every day and follows up with questions. They call it CCR - Critical Customer Response. 

Curious what others are doing and have seen work to ensure tight alignment across the org and visibility into key issues affecting the customer base?


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Jay Nathan
Chief Customer Officer, Higher Logic
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