As a distributed team, we prioritize getting together via video chat once per week for a weekly support meeting. The purpose of the meeting is threefold: alignment, course-correction, and motivation. Each of these involve two-way communication.
When we meet, it’s a time to make sure all team members, regardless of team role, are on the same page as far as how the team is doing. The Head of Support briefly goes through the metrics from the previous week, with respect to how they apply to the support team. When possible, those detailed numbers reports are delivered asynchronously in slack, and anything that needs discussion is brought to this meeting.
If there are any anomalies on the reports in terms of week-over-week change, the team discusses them.
Far from being a top-down dictation of the facts and direction of the company or support team, the weekly meeting is specifically designed to surface customer issues and trends. Since the support technicians are the front-line ambassadors between customer and product team (and vice versa), the weekly meeting is an opportunity to allow support techs to voice the concerns of the customer, to discuss among the team how to deal with the issues customers are seeing, and to give the Head of Support insight into how to escalate issues to the product team.
It’s also a chance to see how the team is working together, and in what way processes can be streamlined and fixed going forward.
Working as a distributed team can be isolating. The weekly meeting is an opportunity to spend time together which also has the effect of motivating and encouraging on another. An intentional community-building thing that we do from time to time is have a brief discussion of a piece of content tangentially related to support in general or digital business.
Weekly meetings are a critical component to having a healthy support team. Barring vacation or sick time, it’s expected that support technicians block out and guard the time for weekly meetings.