Over the past couple weeks,  I’ve received multiple questions about how to start or run Office Hours. This has become a key piece to our 1:many strategy here at Gainsight. We offer a few different types of Office Hours and each has a different outcome we’re helping to achieve.

• CSA Office Hours - These are geared towards Operations teams who have questions about how to do something technical in their instance. 
• CSM Office Hours - The Digital First CS team holds these once a month and deep dive on a specific topic to drive awareness and adoption.
• PX Office hours - Each month the PX team covers a topic to drive adoption of parts of the platform.

5 steps to getting started:

1. Start with a small group of customers - This allows you to be more intimate setting as well as get rapid feedback on the program. As we rolled out our Office Hours, we started in our Pooled CS segment.
2. Be aggressive with your invite - I don’t mean to invite the same person multiple times. However, since you’re starting small, send a meeting invite where the attendees can’t see the invite list. This gives you direct access to see who RSVPs. 
   1. Bonus Tip - Send a reminder 24-48 hours in advance to sweep in those who might have forgotten.
3. You choose the topic - Set the topic for the office hours vs leaving it open ended. As you establish your cadence and format, take the lead in what to cover. Otherwise you end up with Bystander effect and few will join. Those who do join might not see the value, and then won’t attend again.
4. Giveaways - Find something you can give away. This could be swag, discounted trainings, passes for a user conference. People love freebies!
   1. Bonus tip - tie the giveaway to another company metric. If you are trying to increase attendance at a user conference, give out discounted passes.
5. Share the recording with everyone you invited - Even if you have minimal people attend your office hours, share the recording with everyone you invited. By sharing the content, non-attendees will see the value you provided through the office hours and are more likely to attend the next one.
   1. Bonus Tip - Reuse this content in adoption and lifecycle campaigns!

Once you have a few office hours under your belt, then start changing it up a bit to fit what you need. For us this looked like:

• Allowing attendees to crowd source the next topic.
• Changing from a calendar invite to Zoom registration
• Expanding from one segment to all segments through promotion on our Community

Do you run office hours at your organization? Leave a comment below about what has worked well for you.