How Buffer’s Happiness Team Translates Customer Emails Into Engineering Team To-dos: The April Happiness Report

Picture this: It’s your first month on the job as a Customer Happiness Hero. A core piece of your company’s app stops working. And 16 of the 20 team members of the team are on flights across the world.

That’s exactly what happened to our newest two sweet, unsuspecting Happiness Heroes when Buffer stopped shortening links for a few days in April. (Both new heroes have since completed Buffer Bootcamp and come on board despite this. :) Sorry about that, Patrik and Dave! Lesson learned about all traveling at once!)

So, with the all-hands gathering in Cape Town off to an exciting start, the common theme of April was our retreat, travel, and how we managed our emails, tweets, and team communication.

Retreat in Cape Town

Seven of the eight Happiness Team members—five Happiness Heroes, one Happiness Hacker, and I—were in one timezone. This meant that we could all hit the inboxes together and get it to zero by the end of our day. But this also meant that we didn’t have our usual benefit of being distributed around the globe, being awake whenever our customers are. The effect on our speed stats was noticeable. We completed April with 78 percent of emails answered within six hours, but the two weeks in Cape Town reminded us of the convenience of covering several continents. :)

Despite this, the benefits of meeting face-to-face can’t be overstated. We met our new teammates for the first time, brainstormed challenges and upcoming opportunities as a group, told stories, laughed at ourselves, and even went on an African safari. We find that these work weeks are incredibly beneficial for our team culture, and the gift of visiting a new and distant city gives us powerful new perspective and gratitude.

Here’s more on why we go on retreats, from Joel.

We haven’t quite figured out how to avoid this dip in response times when we’re all together. I’d love to hear from other remote teams on this!

How our Product and Happiness teams keep in touch

We’ve continually iterated on our process for tracking bugs and areas of confusion. I’d love to share our current process in case it might be helpful to you. :)

For all bug reports from customers, we use Trello. We have a “bug board,” and each new bug gets a card on the bug board. With every new instance of the bug, we comment on the card with the link to the Help Scout email or Sparkcentral conversation.

Trello has a cool feature called “card aging.” This helps us see which cards are still active, while the older ones that don’t bother customers anymore fade to the background.

The bug board is meant to be a “quick and dirty” process. We want our Happiness Heroes to have a simple and fast way to report it, without taking too much time away from the customer conversation. This can occasionally result in the same bug getting reported in a different way on two different cards.

So, we have a Bug Czar, who keeps watch over the bug board. Adam consolidates duplicate cards, keeps a close watch on trends, and reports the key bugs to our product manager each Friday. This requires extensive organization on Adam’s part, and also some judgement calls. Some bugs have affected fewer customers but are complete blockers. Others are smaller, and don’t prevent customers from doing what they need to do, but annoy a great number of people. Adam makes the call on these and prioritizes accordingly.

Brian takes this information and incorporates the high priority bugs into the developers’ schedules for the following week.

Of course, this process only works if you have an empathetic and interested product team. We are very lucky that customer happiness is baked into every role and personality on the team, so customer feedback is the top influencer for Brian and the product team.

Happiness Dashboard

Colin, Buffer’s “Happiness Engineer,” built a beautiful dashboard for the Happiness Team in April. It’s a work in progress, but we’d love for you to take a look here and share your thoughts, especially if you track different metrics. :)

View the dashboard at happiness.bufferapp.com.

Right now, this serves as an at-a-glance update on how we’re doing this week or month, as well as which areas of the app need the most attention from our product and engineering teams. Colin continues to add to it, and it’s shaping up to be a real-time “state of customer happiness” at Buffer. Of course, it’ll always be totally public, so drop by anytime! The data should be accurate from May 1 on. :)

New Community Champion

We’re so excited to have our brand new community champion kicking off Buffer Bootcamp. She’s dedicating time to our social presence on places like Pinterest, planning meetups (like our first in Chicago), and delivering happiness by mailing t-shirts to a few Buffer fans as a thank you for spreading the word, finding a bug, or otherwise helping us improve. We feel the customer happiness difference already, and we look forward to growing this team to spread the #Bufferlove even further.

Hiring

We had a huge glitch in our application form in April, causing us to lose a great number of applications. I’m so sorry to anyone who experienced this. :( We emailed everyone who applied during this time, and we’re hopeful that we’ll hear back from everyone who reached out.

In the days before and after, we received 393 applications (54 Hero, 84 Warrior, 217 Champion, and 37 Specialist). We’ve temporarily paused applications for now, but we’ll be opening these back up soon.

Two Heroes finished Bootcamp and came on board full time! Welcome, Patrik and Dave! And we made an offer to an additional Happiness Hero who has started Bootcamp.

Over to you

Thanks for reading! I’d be so interested to hear how you handle these or other challenges, or if we can answer any questions! We’d love to hear from you. :)