Support Driven Highlights: Do you have experience setting up a Customer Advisory Board?

Hey, Support Driven Community. 👋🏻

We’re starting to highlight some questions and answers you’ve all shared via Slack on our blog. We want to showcase your unique perspectives beyond just Slack.

If you’re not familiar with our Slack community, it’s full of 8,000+ members who care about customer support. We ask for advice, share our expertise, and have fun virtually connecting.

Let's get into this week's highlights.

We have set KPI goals for all our Support Reps but we’ve never considered what the minimum KPI goals should be. Wondering if any of you have minimum KPIs that support reps need to hit in order to be performing in their roles?

"Depends a lot on:
- Internal structure
- Which KPIs
- Why those KPIs
- Do you have a 90 day onboarding plan?
- Within that 90 days onboarding plan, which KPIs you want at what stage?

I evaluate Team performance to take initiatives, rather than agents' performance. Full disclosure, I also, in my current role don't evaluate agents'directly but I manage leads that do that.
If I understand where you are coming from (maybe) this is a question that came from the agents themselves?
In that case I usually try to guide people through a bit more encompassing performance analysis based on several parameters (Good vs Bad CSAT, FRT, Tickets Solved and replied, issue types, Internal conversation review etc) and we look at a trend line and we discuss it together.
I do it using explore in Zendesk mostly but I think that could be accomplished by a simple graph through Google Spreadsheet as well."

- Simone Secci, Head of Support at Doodle

"One tip I got from Andrew at Automattic was to create a range of acceptable. Our specialists have a lower-mid-upper range and we may suggest where in that range they work depending on incoming volume (we're still working on that part).

During a quarterly review we also flag any team member whose work is always at the very minimum or very high in their range. We'll bring that up as a point of conversation. Team members also have a dashboard where they can make notes on individual days for context. Managers set the ranges based on some baseline suggestions and taking into account things like the team member's other responsibilities and their experience."

- Angela Marshall, Senior Support at YNAB

Does anyone have experience setting up a Customer Advisory Board? I'm looking at setting this up... Let me know if you have any good tips or even learnings...

"I started with a clear write-up on what is the goal, mostly to make it really clear that this is a strategic advisory council not a "let's discuss the details on where this button goes".

Then I wrote out the benefits for ourselves, and the benefits for the participants, making sure those lined up and we had a clear win-win situation.

Once I was crystal clear on what I wanted the outcome to be, I looked into what our constraints would be: max 6-7 participants as to make sure the meetings would be impactful, meeting every 6-7 weeks, how to structure communication in between etc. This already gave me a pretty good outline on what I would put into the presentation for the people I'd want to invite. Expectation management is SUPER important when getting people together to something like this.

So, once I was clear on the why and the how, I made a proposal for the entire exec team and we discussed together whom would be a good fit both from a customer perspective, but also in terms of "do they enjoy discussing the type of topics we want to discuss here".

And once we had the list, we floated the idea in meetings first, and then I sent out the invite, with our charter and a presentation (and the NDA where needed). And once you have the confirmation, then it's time to really in-depths plan the first meeting, because that meeting is the make-it-or-break-it moment of the entire idea."

- Valentina Thörner, Empress of Product at Klaus

"For us, I’m thinking members of the advisory board could be part champion and part accountability partner for specific initiatives.
Having been to board meetings in the past, I didn’t want to set up a situation where people are “helicopter parenting” in the meetings.
“Helicopter parenting” == sharing surface level thoughts and advice because they only think about the organization when the board meetings pop up on their calendar."

- Scott Tran, Founder of Support Driven

I'm looking to help my teams develop some of their skills outside of their core Support function, and one way we are doing that is giving them extra projects to work on (building some tools, creating Confluence docs, etc). The team doesn't use any project tracking/management tools at this point, and I'd love to know if anyone has found success with tools like Trello for this purpose?

"We’ve done project tracking with Asana, but it’s basically the same concept. One thing that we’ve done is have a Google form that people can fill out with all of the necessary details of a project (scope, rationale, effort, etc.) which feeds straight into the Asana board as a card in the new column. Ideas can come from anyone on the team and you can then prioritize these among leadership and decide what will/won’t be done and who to assign them over to."

- Tamir Goldberg, Support Manager at InVision

"With full disclosure that I used to work for Clubhouse and am probably biased, I’ve used both Jira and Trello for small-scale project management and still just genuinely loved using Clubhouse for it. Trello tends to be a little too simple, and Jira is just…a lot. I like Clubhouse because you can scale up and down in terms of how finely you want to organize and track work."

- Stephanie Faile Lundberg, Community Support Lead

"Another vote for Clubhouse! We still use that today (although similarly are having to move to jira since an acquisition) and used it much like that too, with the support team having their own project. We wrote up some confluence guides to help people structure their larger projects, and also used it for a backlog list of ideas that the support team wanted to work on (docs, process improvements)."

- Simon Porter, Customer Support at SkyVerge

See you next week with another roundup of Q&A highlights! If you’re not already part of the Support Driven Slack community, join here.

Subscribe to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox.