How We Stay Nimble as a Customer Operations Team
At Animoto, we’re always working towards the next improvement to our product. With multiple product teams all working on releases and tests for our web and mobile app, there is a lot that can change on Animoto.com from day to day. Our Customer Operations team is on the front-lines with our customers, so making sure we are equipped to help our customers and prepared for anything is a must.
In this article, I’ll dive into what Customer Operations means at Animoto. Plus, I’ll share some of the ways our team works with the rest of the teams at Animoto to stay nimble and help our customers find success with our product.
What is Customer Operations?
Customer facing teams can take all forms and shapes within a company. At Animoto, the heart of Customer Operations is rooted in supporting people. While other teams at Animoto use communications with customers to align with the company’s needs (e.g. user research for better product decisions) the Customer Operations team is aligned with the customer’s needs and acts as the human representation of the company at operational moments when the customer interacts with us.
Rather than three separate teams with individual goals, we’ve joined the forces of sales, support, and success together to create a super-powered operations team whose goals align around the entire customer journey. While other teams in the company are zoomed in on improving a specific piece of the product or a customer experience, the Customer Operations team has a holistic view of our customers and understands what success looks like for them.
A healthy mixture of knowledge-sharing and flexibility are the secret sauce to keeping the team prepared and providing stellar support.
Knowledge Sharing
To make sure that we’re getting information to and from the Customer Operations team at the right times, we prioritize in-person and virtual touchpoints to connect and collaborate.
Go where the knowledge is
To maximize the use of our in-person interactions and to make sure we’re never creating unnecessary calendar clutter, we look for established meetings where information is already flowing and then add in a representative from the Customer Operations team. This approach has been especially fruitful with our product teams that already have multiple review meetings to discuss learnings and roadmaps.
By adding a member of the Customer Operations team to sprint review meetings and product stakeholder meetings, we’ve created longer lead times for the team to prepare for upcoming changes and cleaner opportunities for questions and feedback.
Write it down
The Customer Operations team has a healthy mix of preferred learning styles, but one thing we all agree on is that having documentation can save us valuable time when we are addressing customer concerns or troubleshooting something. Luckily, the whole Animoto team loves documentation as much as we do!
What makes this knowledge sharing option so appealing for us is that our preferred documentation platforms all have collaboration tools built right in. When sharing documents, we set time limits for open comments, but allow conversation to build naturally during that time. This transparency not only gives us a document to come back to for questions in the future, but also lets us understand what important conversations were happening when the document was created, long after the team has moved on to something new.
Organize it
The one downfall to all those collaborative documents is that they can be difficult to wade through when we are looking for a very specific piece of information. To combat that, our Customer Operations team has built an online documentation hub that groups key documents based on our own areas of expertise together for easy finding. Once a quarter we review all of those documents to make sure we aren’t hanging onto incorrect documentation that could cause confusion later. We also call out knowledge gaps in our hub so that team members can be assigned to track down or create the missing documentation.
Flexibility
Thanks to all the knowledge sharing we do across the company and within the team, we are able to anticipate what we think will happen when something goes live or how we think our customers will respond to something. Even so, we often have to wait and see what our customers will actually do or say, so we focus on preparing for what we can predict and leave room for flexibility for the things we can’t.
The art of staying unattached
When we know a significant change is coming we start by gathering any documentation that currently exists. If there isn’t any documentation, we create it! The majority of our preparation documents include tidbits of knowledge and content from various team members. In most situations, compilation documents can cause headaches, but for the Customer Operations team the more information we can gather the better. The closer we get to a launch the more organized our documentation gets, but we never consider our documentation totally complete.
We also gather the team and write starter responses to questions we predict we will receive when we know a release will drive customer inquiries. Most of the time we pour energy into crafting just the right responses to our customers, but when we are writing up starter responses we push ourselves to not get attached.
Having a draft to work off makes sure we aren’t starting from scratch for every new customer response, but also gives us the breathing room to send a response that matches the customers needs in the future.
Pause when needed
As they say, preparation is only half of the battle. No matter how much information we’ve gathered or how much knowledge has been shared there is always a possibility something unexpected will be waiting for us when we start working with customers after a release. If we discover that we do not have the proper tools or knowledge to support our customers at any point in time, we aren’t afraid to call a timeout.
When customer inquiries are pouring in, taking the time to talk face to face might feel like losing valuable time, but what we’ve discovered is that taking the time to meet and get on the same page as a team ensures we are all delivering consistent support for our customers.
During these timeouts, we focus on what we can change, not what we can’t. That often leaves us with a short, impactful to-do list that allows us to divide any work or research that is necessary for our success and gets us back to focusing on our customers quickly.
Must love adventure
Our hiring process also plays a huge role in ensuring the Customer Operations team is set up for success in moments when things are changing quickly. We’ve hired to make sure we have a room full of folks that not only know how to define success, identify the challenges, and troubleshoot for solutions but also feel a little thrill when a new challenge pops up.
We define that as a love of adventure and we’ve got a special set of interview questions that help us suss out just how adventurous a candidate is. The goal is to find a new hire that is excited about coming to work each day, at least in part because they don’t know what might be waiting in their inbox.
In Conclusion
While the rest of our team has their eyes on the future, we rely on our Customer Operations team to know about and guide our customers through the things they are experiencing right now. To ensure that our team can deliver on the success we all want our customers to have, we all put in the work to make sure we are sharing knowledge with the Customer Operations team early and then giving them the space to stay nimble when it matters most.
Sound good to you? Join our team, we’re hiring!
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