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Customer Support Onboarding

Welcome to Sourcegraph, to the Customer Engineering department, and the Customer Support team! This document will guide you through customer support-specific onboarding. You’ll start the tasks listed here after you complete the company onboarding checklist, as this builds on our company onboarding and focuses on everything you need to be successful in this particular role.

Our onboarding is centered on outcomes: With X time interval, we expect Y outcome. In support of this, each time interval has a task list. If you complete the tasks and you do not feel the outcomes to be true, that likely indicates something needs to be improved about the onboarding. Make note of it, share it with the team, and we will figure out how to make sure you feel the outcomes to be true and improve the checklist for the next new team member. At this point, it’s not you. This onboarding plan is new and requires so much improvement.

As you complete the company onboarding checklist, let yourself really spend time getting to know the handbook. For each item on the checklist that takes you to the handbook, set a timer for 90 minutes and just let yourself click and read, click and read. For example, when you get to the item “Read handbook page on communication,” click into the sub links listed on that page and read those, too.

Your first week will be very reading intensive. As you read, share your thoughts, reactions, and questions in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel. It makes it a little more interactive and less tedious.

Okay, stop! Head back over to the company onboarding checklist and finish it (if you haven't done so already). Then, come back here and dig in!

✨

Welcome back! Let’s get started....

By the end of your first week, the following will be true...

  • You understand Sourcegraph’s mission, vision, values, and culture
  • You understand Sourcegraph’s purpose and how you/your role supports us achieving it
  • You understand what is expected of you in your role and what it means to be a successful Customer Support Engineer
  • You have a sense of what tools you will be using and for what

In order to ensure the above declarations are true, you will complete the following tasks:

  • Week one items in the company onboarding Process St. checklist.
  • Review our FY22 OKRs (objectives and key results) to see what we believe are the most important things for us to do this year. These frame our decision making. When we are confronted with conflicting priorities, our first step is to ask ourselves … if this takes away our ability to complete an OKR, does that mean it’s more important than the OKR? It might be, but this gut check makes sure we are spending our time in the right way. If OKRs are new to you, Virginia can give you a crash course on what they are, their value, and how to work with them.
  • Read this article that summarizes the value of Sourcegraph
  • Plan to watch this product demo recording once a week for your first 3-4 weeks. It will be repetitive, but each week, more and more will start to click. Start this week!
  • Read our support overview (including the sub links). Post any questions you have in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel
  • Be sure you are invited to and start attending the weekly CSE planning/retro session and weekly CSE “cheers” huddle as outlined in our rituals
  • Schedule introductory chats with every member of the Customer Engineering org. It’s okay to schedule these over your first few weeks, however you see fit. To schedule the chat with Quinn, work with Katerina (his executive business partner and responsible for his calendar).
  • Schedule an introductory chat with Katerina, too! As Quinn's executive business partner, she is part of the CE team right now and just a lovely person to spend time with. We will likely pull her in as we work to solve problems for how our team operates, since she will be able to help us understand if we should be coordinating more broadly, etc.
  • Open and merge your first GitHub pull request in the handbook
  • Create free otter.ai and Grammarly accounts (link otter.ai to your Zoom account) and bookmark Hemingwayapp -- why we use these is explained in our team rituals doc.
  • Verify you have access to all the required tools -- and check out Support Tools for an overview of the value they bring you and how they all fit together
    • Gmail
    • Shared customer support (CS) and customer engineering (CS) Google calendars
    • GSuite (make sure you can see the Sourcegraph shared drive)
    • Github
    • Slack
    • Zoom
    • 1Password
    • Lever (for when we are hiring and you participate in the interview process)
    • Lattice (for our 360 review cycles)
    • Sourcegraph.com (admin): If you are not an admin and/or are not part of the Sourcegraph organization, post in #it-tech-ops and request the access
    • Krisp (to quiet background noise when on Zoom)
    • Calendly (if you would like to use it when you need to find a time with a customer to troubleshoot together)
    • Salesforce (our source of truth for non-ping generated customer data)
    • Looker (where we visualize customer data)
    • ProductBoard (managed by our product team and we may sometimes need access to understand feedback from customers relevant to support)
    • Jira Service Desk (our legacy tool for support cases and some good examples to look through)
    • Zendesk (our current tool for support!)
  • Verify you are in the following Slack channels (and join them if not) -- if you have any questions about the purpose or value of a particular channel (not all of them have updated descriptions or topics), ask in #customer-support-chat. It’s a lot of channels and can feel super overwhelming. Sometimes it helps to use Slack’s section functionality so you can organize all of them by those you need to pay attention to more frequently vs those you can look at whenever.
    • Team channels
      • customer-support-chat: This is where we collaborate with each other!
      • customer-support: This is our channel where we collaborate with those outside of the team
      • ce: This is where our CE teammates (and sometimes us) collaborate with folks outside of the team about things that are relevant to both CEs and CSEs or just CEs
      • ce-team-chat: This is similar to #customer-support-chat, but also includes the CEs. Most of our chatter is in #customer-support-chat, but if it’s chatter AND relevant to our CE counterparts, post here.
      • customer-updates: Where folks post updates about specific customers
      • docs: This is a channel run by product (they are accountable for our official documentation), but we will likely be in here a lot collaborating as we start to help with docs
      • feedback: Where the NPS (net promoter score) bot posts responses from customers, we post feedback manually we get from other interactions (like support cases) -- sometimes a NPS response indicates a customer is having a support issue
    • All the super important company channels to stay informed of what is happening: #general, #handbook, #hiring, #progress, #rfcs, #any-question, #thanks, #buddies, #analytics
    • Whichever of the social channels strike your fancy, for example: #books, #cooking, #kids-of-sourcegraph, #pets-of-sourcegraph, #random, #side-project, #ted-talks, #today-i-learned, #trash-tv (this is definitely not an exhaustive list)
    • All the product/engineering channels (it can be hard to stay up on all of them all the time, but that is what our daily captain’s log ritual is meant to help with): #dev-ops (probably most important since this seems to the channel where we post about 🔥 emergency issues), #dev-announce, #dev-chat, #dev-rel, #security-chat, #backend-platform, #batch-changes-chat, #code-insights-chat, #code-intel, #core-application, #design, #developer-experience, #distributioneers, #eng-pulse, #extensibility-chat, #frontend-platform-chat, #product, #web-chat
    • All the other team channels so we can see what is going on with all of our teammates across the company and pitch in when we think we might add value: #it-tech-ops, #marketing, #people-ops, #sales, #sales-chat, #sales-ops, #sales-resources
    • All the channels that could have support issues reported in them: ALL the #support- and #trial- channels … there are a lot of them, #twitter (we will have a workflow set-up for marketing to alert us if we need to engage, but it’s still good to be aware as time allows) -- these will be linked to Zendesk, so we don’t monitor these as much as be sure we have quick access when we need to engage in a thread
    • Feel free to browse all the channels and join anything else that looks relevant or interesting to you and share with the rest of the team in #customer-support-chat
  • Join the following developer communities to help make sure folks talking about Sourcegraph are getting their questions answered:
    • Gopher Slack community. Gophers Slack is a thriving, real-time messaging community. If you are looking to get immediate answers to questions or join in the conversation about Go with other Gophers, this is the place to be. Post in #customer-support-chat so a member of the team can add you. You will need to join with your personal email address so our presence feels helpful and not sales-y.
  • Read Our ABC’s Always Be Coding. It’s just cute and so why not!? It’s also a great source of inspiration when trying to simplify complex ideas.

By the end of your second week, the following will be true...

  • You have helped at least 1 customer
  • You are participating in our team rituals
  • You can wrap your head around who are our customers
  • You feel confident that you know what Sourcegraph can do functionality wise, at a high level and in detail
  • You feel confident you know the ways that Sourcegraph can be configured and why
  • You feel confident you know the ways that Sourcegraph can be deployed and why

In order to ensure the above declarations are true, you will complete the following tasks:

  • Write your first weekly planning post (one of our rituals). You can see examples in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel.

  • Start contributing to the daily captain’s log thread (another of our rituals). You can see examples in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel.

  • Learn about who our customers are by checking out the personas overview and how Sourcegraph is useful for them by reading a few case studies.

  • Explore the product overview and for each feature, explore the related documentation.

  • Spend some time getting familiar with the Sourcegraph glossary

  • Read the last few release blog posts on our blog and decide how you want to remember where to find this to look at later and often (when a customer has an issue, it’s possible it could be caused by something in a recent release)

  • Get a Sourcegraph instance deployed using the docker-compose flow. This will be one of your test environments. If you get stuck, just post in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel to start and if we get stuck as a team, we will see if our CE counterparts can help by asking them in #ce-chat. Watch Dave’s Kubernetes Walkthrough video for an understanding of that setup process, too.

  • Set up a local environment. This will be your other test environment. If you get stuck, just post in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel to start and if we get stuck as a team, we will get help in #any-questions. You will often want to run Sourcegraph locally when you are troubleshooting.

  • Add Sourcegraph as a browser search engine. To search our private code, log in to our internal dogfood instance (k8s.sgdev.org) and add another entry: https://k8s.sgdev.org/search?q=%s.

  • Install a text editor of your choice.

  • Add your profile picture to Zendesk (update this to the avatar provided by Sourcegraph when you get it)

  • Bookmark our support plans for reference

  • Start monitoring Zendesk for new support issues and try to be accountable for at least one by the end of the week. It is okay if we miss SLA for these first few cases. Take your time trying to figure out the right initial response, following our workflow steps. This will feel painful and tedious for a bit -- this is a reflection of our team being so nascent and the opportunity we have to make this better (not of your ability). Work as a team to solve issues, run responses by each other, etc. The more activity we have in our #customer-support-chat Slack channel, the better. Virginia will also do a walk through the first day of this week and review your first 5 initial responses before you send them. We want to be sure you feel supported and set-up for success.

Big pause here. These next tasks need a ton of improvement -- as mentioned in the last bullet! They are all supposed to help you learn the product and get more comfortable doing the job. Work with what is here and take abundant notes for how this can be improved.

By the end of your first month, the following will be true...

  • You have helped several customers
  • You are starting to feel more confident troubleshooting and working with the product
  • You are finding you know where to start to help a customer more frequently
  • You have time scheduled with each engineering manager and each member of the Distribution team
  • You have signed-up for which playbook(s) you will help with and have a plan for how to approach it
  • You’ve selected your focus blocks and updated our team schedule

In order to ensure the above declarations are true, you will complete the following tasks:

  • Keep helping customers!
  • Schedule a chat with each member of the Distribution team. This is the engineering team that we cross paths with the most (they are responsible for customer deployment, monitoring, and upgrades).
  • Schedule a chat with each engineering team manager. You can find who they are by starting on the org chart page, navigating to each engineering team page, and then looking at the members listed somewhere there.
  • Sign-up for which playbook(s) you will help develop and have a plan for how to approach it. Note: more on this soon.
  • Select your focus blocks and update our team schedule.

By the end of your second month, the following will be true...

  • You have closed at least 25 cases
  • You feel super confident troubleshooting and working with the product
  • You are finding you need help less and less to get started helping a customer
  • You have had a chat with each engineering manager and each member of the Distribution team
  • You have completed the playbook(s) you committed to do
  • You have added or substantially updated at least one section to our official product documentation
  • You have started values training deep dives 1-3

In order to ensure the above declarations are true, you will complete the following tasks:

  • Keep helping customers!
  • Follow through on your plan to complete the playbook(s) you committed to do Note: more on this soon.
  • Get ready to contribute to product documentation by following these steps (though hold-off on purchasing anything to make gifs until we know we have a need for that)
  • Add or substantially update at least one section to our official product documentation
  • Purchase the book Leader's Guide to Unconscious Bias by Pamela Fuller in preparation for values training 2
  • Start attending values training 1-3 sessions (invite sent by Virginia)
  • Virginia will review some of your first 25 closed cases and offer a summary of everything she loved and any questions she has to learn more about your work style

By the end of your third month, the following will be true…

  • You have closed at least 50 cases
  • You find that you rarely need help to get started helping a customer
  • You have continued to update product documentation and the handbook as needed
  • You have identified and made progress on a project during your focus blocks
  • You have completed values training deep dives 1-3
  • You have completed a career roadmap with your manager

In order to ensure the above declarations are true, you will complete the following tasks:

  • Keep helping customers!
  • Update product documentation and/or the handbook as needed
  • Determine a project to work on, develop a plan, and start working on it during your focus blocks
  • Continue attending values training 1-3 sessions
  • Schedule time with your manager to talk about your career roadmap