Customer Success-led Office Hours

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Kath Reuben
Kath Reuben Member Posts: 4 Navigator
edited February 2022 in Digital CS (Engagement Programs)
Hi folks,

I've been hearing about 'office hours' and would love to hear your experience to better understand how we could make this work for our customers.
Is it a regular open Zoom where anyone can just stop in with product/technical questions? How do you prevent it from being monopolised by one Customer? Or turning into 'Support Hour' and detracting from the self-service support options that we've spent the last year dedicated to building out?

FWIW, my team service Corporate and Enterprise Customers, primarily engaging with Csuite who are not hands-on with the tools, so I'll need to factor that into operationalising this.


Any insights on success or tips to learn from would be welcome.
Thanks
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  • Jeffrey Kushmerek
    Jeffrey Kushmerek Member Posts: 96 Expert
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    edited February 2022
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    Kath, 
    I am a huge fan of this approach. It is especially helpful when you move from high touch to low touch (or "scale"). the scenarios that I like for office hours are:

    - Onboarding- having weekly office hours that all clients can join and ask any questions. As I mentioned above, when you have customers that may be having a digital onboarding, this is especially helpful, and a good selling point
    - Post onboarding  - a place to have customers get questions answered, see how others are using it, and generally get more value from your product. 

    Its good to have a rotation of implementation resources, unless your CSMs are very hands-on and know your product functions in and out.
  • Brian Hansen
    Brian Hansen Member Posts: 75 Expert
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    edited February 2022
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    We are just starting to use Office Hours in our customer engagement plan. One of the approaches we're taking is to set a theme for the specific week. Meaning, come with a speaker who can identify a specific outcome of using one of our products. For example, "Here's how to use this tool to increase the impact of Data in your company." 

    That sets the scene for the call and allows the Hours to be more about best practices than the "support hour" you mentioned. When support-type questions come up, we can mark them and point people in the direction of support (and be able to follow up with them separately). 

    As far as avoiding one person monopolizing the conversation, I'm not sure yet, but being open to calling on attendees seems like it would help. If they're there to only listen, they can state that, but otherwise, having a conversation facilitator seems like it would work. We have yet to try this one out!
  • Tammi Canelli
    Tammi Canelli Member Posts: 5 Seeker
    edited February 2022
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    Brian we have starting doing the same with the themes.  Each month has a theme, and then the week's topic is around that theme.  This way we can make an announcement at the beginning of the month and then include the topic with each week's reminder.  So far it's working well.

    Our hour is structured this way and this week we test out polleverywhere to increase interaction.  It seemed to be hit.
    • Presentation (product updates, community outreach updates, training updates, etc) 10 min
    • Feedback 10 min
    • Q+A and support 40 min
    Our goal is to increase the number of attendees each week, especially with new people.

    Would like to hear how others conduct their Office Hours and what you've found to be successful or not.

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