Bridging the gap between engineering and customer success teams

Investing in your customer success team is high leverage. The more knowledgeable your team is, the more effective it can be at investigating, diagnosing and triaging customer issues. The stronger your customer success team is, the less of that diagnostic work falls to engineers and the more time the engineers have for fixing bugs. The more time they have, the more bugs they can fix, and the more bugs they can fix the happier customers will be.

Nothing that I’ve said is ground breaking — you are probably aware of the ripple effect that stems from the performance of the customer success team. And while you might know you should be actively developing your customer success team, that raises the question of how? How can you use your existing resources to invest in your customer success team?

I’ll share a light-weight process called Bug Dives that our company has adopted in order to increase the sharing of knowledge and debugging strategies between engineering and customer success teams. I’ll describe what we have learned after a year of Bug Dives about how to make this process interesting, effective and self-sustaining. This process is sure to get the bug crushing engineer excited to share, and the customer success team eager to learn.