Customer Support Onboarding Mentor

As an onboarding mentor to a new member of the Customer Support team, your goal is to be the onboarding mentor you would love to have when starting a new role. Be as patient, as detailed, and as relevant as you would want someone to be with you when joining a company and learning about your day-to-day.

During the duration of your time as a mentor, you are able to pull back some availability for taking new tickets, unless you feel that a ticket that comes in may be a good learning example for yourself and your mentee to talk through.

Don’t ever feel pressured to know everything when you’re a mentor. If you are asked a question by your mentee that you are unsure of, be sure to be honest about your uncertainty and tell him or her that you will reach out to places where you can find the right answer.

Remember, being an onboarding mentee is not a chore or something that is “taking up your time.” This is something we all need to do to support each other. The more you can be there for your mentee, the stronger the CS team will continue to be. If you feel you cannot be an effective mentee for whatever reason, let management know ahead of time.

You can read more about Onboarding Mentors here

Meeting cadence and guidelines:

Meetings are to be scheduled by the mentor. Feel free to schedule more meetings as you deem necessary in between or after. The following guide demonstrates what meetings are advised at a minimum.

Week 1

1st meeting (you decide the day):

  • Fun intros! Get to know your mentee
  • How has your week been?
  • Do you have any questions?
  • How do you feel about the end of the first week expectations set here?
  • Discuss the Handbook
  • Help with planning and organizing their second week
  • Reiterate how you plan to support them
  • Congratulate them for completing their first week!

Week 2

2nd meeting (middle of the week):

  • How are you following along with Process St. and the handbook guide?
  • Do you have any questions?
  • Talk about the teams we interact with the most
  • Discuss the Handbook
  • Discuss CS day to day
  • Discuss main CS tools like Slack(main channels) and Github
  • What is your learning style?
  • How do you feel about your knowledge of Sourcegraph so far?
  • What are you really looking forward to learning about the product?
  • Give your mentee a high level overview of your favorite things about Sourcegraph, Sourcegraph in general and begin to use it together so they can start to get their hands dirty.

3rd meeting (end of the week):

  • Quick check in
  • Do you have any questions?
  • How do you feel about the end of the first week expectations set here?
  • How do you feel about going into your third week?
  • Anything new or neat you discovered about Sourcegraph since the last meeting you want to talk about?
  • Offer support

Week 3

4th meeting (early in the week):

  • Zendesk walkthrough—taking a ticket, Email vs. Slack, ticket fields for closing..etc.
  • Explain current tickets you are working on
  • Pair on tickets, calls, CE meetings etc.
  • Go through good learning examples of solved tickets in your arsenal
  • Talk through strategies for solving tickets and best practices
  • Pair together to overview the enablement section and go over some items together (enablement can be a little intimidating to go through all of these at once alone) or provide tips on a strategy for tackling these items
  • Talk about our test instances—show how they can be used
  • Talk about managed instances
  • Do you have any questions?

5th meeting (end of the week):

  • How was your week?
  • Have you been getting to meet members of our team?
  • Ticket follow up from earlier in the week.. Introduction to any new tickets, repeat process of explaining
  • How ready do you feel about taking tickets?
  • Is there anything that you feel up to this point that would make you feel better prepared? Anything else you feel we should have covered prior to this point? (Take note and share with management or make the edits you see fit on your own)
  • Comment on any nice things you’ve noticed or picked up about the way they work. (If any)
  • Congratulate them on ending their third week! It’s ticket time! Evil laugh

Week 4

6th meeting(early in the week):

  • Assist them with their first few tickets. Make it clear that you aren’t to solve their tickets but to show them how to find information they need, suggest theories, how to ask for information, troubleshooting tips, communicate with customers, SLA, talk about engaging engineering and our metrics briefly, remind them where we go to learn how to interact with teams if needed, github issue creation.. Etc.

7th meeting (middle of the week):

  • How are your tickets going?
  • Do you have any questions?
  • What do you feel is working well for you? Anything not working well?

8th meeting (end of the week):

  • How are your tickets going?
  • Have you closed any tickets?
  • Do you have any questions?
  • Is there anything you need from me?
  • Offer support
  • Congratulate them for making it to their fourth week

I would suggest doing these first meetings over video chat to get to know our teammate better. Following these meetings, once a new teammate has begun to assist our customers, continue to be there for your async as much as you can.