Although connecting our team with our customers has been a top priority for us in Buffer, howthe team has communicated with our customers has evolved significantly throughout the many years.

When I began working for Buffer at the beginning of 2015 our team had a designated period during which everyone spent one hour answering customer support queries during our annual retreat. At these times our Customer Advocates would offer support to all of the Buffer team while they responded to questions from customers. It was a great bonding opportunity and an excellent opportunity to bring everyone from the company – from our People Team, to Engineers Designers, Finance, and Engineers-closer to the customers. Furthermore, with our completely remote team gathered at one location to attend our retreat we were unable to provide our normal 24/7 customer service and having additional hands to respond to customer inquiries was hugely helpful!

After some thought we realized that we shouldn’t restrict full-team connectivity to annual retreats for the company! We considered how this could appear in a remote setting and thought of the first remote version of 2019. Advocacy Day.

Iteration 1: A full day to respond to customers

The annual Advocacy Day was an entire day devoted to the team to communicate with our customers and respond to emails from customer support. Our team is remote and spread across several time zones We needed to ensure that an established structure was in place to assist every member of the team, specifically those who were brand-new or had never responded to customer emails prior to.

We were on call for the entire duration of Advocacy Day Our customer advocates was “on call” in Slack as well as on Zoom to assist our Product Managers, Engineers as well as other team members during interactions with the customers. We worked shifts in an open Zoom conference where anyone was able to come in and seek help, ask questions, to help with difficult conversations, or just enjoy conversations with us while working.

To help new team members on the first Advocacy day, we organized celebrations in Slack in the event that someone sent their first response to a customer. We also discussed valuable lessons and interactions all throughout the day.

From a customer’s perspective, Advocacy Days also resulted in numerous quick successes. If an Engineer discovered a bug or an Designer was aware of a minor user experience issue through an interaction with a customer and they decide to jump into the problem and follow-up the next following day to inform them that it was solved.

Although there were many positive advantages to bringing the whole team to clients, we also faced a few issues and drawbacks. Certain team members who were that were not as involved in the product encountered difficulties in identifying issues or figure out whether certain behavior was expected or if they were a result of bugs.

Also, we received feedback that responding to customers was a little intimidating for certain team members because they didn’t feel like they had mastered our brand’s tone and voice. In addition is the fact that some of our team members are fluent in English as an additional language.

Taken all of this into consideration taking all of this into consideration, we opted for the new model.

Iteration 2: Dedicated customer support sessions

in 2020 Customer Quality Time became our second 24/7 remote support for our customers. days.

In contrast to Advocacy Days, in this model, we eliminated the whole-team element, rather, we pair every non-support team member together with a customer advocate partner to tackle a specific subject or issue that is a concern for the customer. Every team member was involved in at the very least 1 Customer Quality Time session scheduled in the course of the year. However, in our Design, Engineering, and Product Teams included three to four sessions.

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Get started nowContrary to previous iterations that were in use, unlike previous iterations, Customer Quality Time did not require the person who is not an Advocate team member to respond directly to customers. Instead, the pair could look through customer interactions and feedback to determine the ways that customers were using our products, observe any problems or UX confusions, and determine the tasks were being praised from our clients. This eliminated the fear factor and allowed our team to concentrate on understanding the user experience. Our product-facing teams sat more often with Advocates, they could avail a concierge service, courtesy from our customer advocates every time they wanted to investigate a new aspect or feature of our product.

Although this chapter did have its positives but it also faced issues. The main focus was members of the Advocacy Team and there were difficulties in aligning schedules, particularly with respect to Product team’s current schedules and sprints, in addition to ensuring sufficient coverage to our customers. We weren’t recording any outcomes or learnings from every Customer Quality Time and it was difficult to gauge the effect the days brought to our customers, or to measure their effectiveness.

After a break for 2021 we headed back to drawing on the board.

Iteration 3: Pairing Engineers with our customers

In 2022 we began to introduce Customer Engineering Days. Based on previous feedback We wanted to be particularly deliberate in the design of these days. Instead of pairing Advocates with people from the entire team, we concentrated specifically on pairings between Engineers and made Engineers and Engineers communicate with their Advocate with whom they had been paired with to set the date that was according to their team’s work schedule. In this way, they could make use of their time to collect information about their customers based on their current work in engineering.

We’re now a year and half in to Customer Engineering Days and have been incredibly successful so far. We’ve experienced thirteen Customer Engineering Days so far across eight time zones and have the possibility of having six additional scheduled. Engineers have discovered and corrected a number of bugs, discovered a variety of UX enhancements and have gained a better knowledge of how users use our products.