This is a guide to help Customer Experience leaders, COOs or CEOs looking for a customer support platform or looking to switch to a new one.

Below you will see a number of criteria to assess against your needs and a Google Sheet you can reuse to calculate a score for each platform. A number of criteria are fairly subjective, while some others are very much objective.

You can find a list of customer support platforms on G2. Probably the most up-to-date list. But be careful what you’re looking at. G2 reviews are sponsored. Just because SalesForce appears on top right corner doesn’t mean it’s the best platform for you. It just means they’re running a lot of campaigns to entice users to give them good reviews.

Here is a short list of customer support platforms I think you should be evaluating if you are a fairly young product company with a B2C or B2B model.

• Intercom and Zendesk, the two industry leaders
• Pylon, up and coming YC funded
• Front (used by the Slush team)
• Tidio has an interesting promise and pricing model, ask me directly for a referral
• Gorgias is another up and coming, specialised in e-commerce
• Sierra is a AI first, like most platforms are claiming
• Tawk.to is mostly free and has raving reviews
• Kustomer highly regarded
• Helpshift is big in gaming

There are many high quality customer support platforms available on the market. Make your own short list!

Most of them are now jam-packed with AI features. But not all of them are doing it for the same reason.

Some platforms promise is to deflect as much tickets as possible from the agents. While some other try and offer the best and most consistent experience possible to the users.

Here are a few criteria you should use to select a customer support platform. Feel free to make them yours.

Core functionality and features

The non-negotiables that define how efficiently your team operates and how smooth the experience is for your customers.

First up, omnichannel support. Your customers don’t just email—they chat, tweet, send DMs, and expect real-time help on every channel. A solid platform unifies all interactions in one dashboard so agents don’t waste time switching tabs.

At Shook Digital, I enabled a support channel through Whatsapp via Intercom. This is how we were historically connecting with our creators and freelancers so it made sense to meet them where they were. Turns out, you lose a lot in the process as the users interact with a Whatsapp Business profile. Wouldn’t recommend.

Next, ticket management & automation. Smart routing ensures the right agent gets the right ticket, while automation takes care of repetitive tasks like tagging, assigning, and escalating.

This sort of feature goes without saying. But some platform make that very expensive. Look out!

Self-service & knowledge base features are key for reducing ticket volume. If customers can solve their own issues with a well-structured FAQ or AI-powered chatbot, you win twice: fewer tickets, happier users.

Most platforms have a knowledge base. Some do the bare minimum. Some have very complex permission management systems. Happy days if you can keep your KB public and standard for everyone. Having to compromise with that is going to make your life complicated, or expensive. Hello Document360

AI & chatbots go beyond basic automation. Whether it’s triaging inquiries, handling FAQs, or escalating complex issues, a well-trained AI assistant can improve efficiency and response times. There is a lot to unpack here. We’ll dive in a bit further

Collaboration tools like internal notes and ticket sharing let teams work seamlessly, while live chat & messaging keep things real-time and engaging.

These are fairly basic. Mostly a check box in the list of features.

If your platform doesn’t nail these basics, you’ll struggle with inefficiencies from day one. And inefficiencies cost time—and time is money.

Scalability & Customization: Future-Proofing Your Customer Support Platform

Your customer support needs today won’t be the same in a year. That’s why scalability and customization are critical when choosing a platform. You don’t just need a tool that works now—you need one that grows with your business. If you are small B2B startup, fear not. Your scale won’t be an issue for any of the usual tools out there. Unless your product is a complete train wreck that magically found its way in the hands of thousands of people.

Let’s start with multi-tiered user roles & permissions. A small team might get by with basic access controls, but as you scale, you’ll need granular permissions. Agents, managers, and admins should have different levels of access to avoid security risks and streamline workflows.

Then, customization—a must-have. Your support workflow isn’t identical to another company’s, so the ability to tailor fields, ticketing workflows, and automation rules ensures efficiency. If the platform forces you into a rigid structure, you’ll hit operational roadblocks fast.

Multi-brand & multi-language support is another key factor. If you manage multiple brands or serve a global audience, you need a platform that can handle separate knowledge bases, branding, and localized content without extra headaches.

Ultimately, a scalable and customizable platform doesn’t just make life easier—it saves money. The alternative? Outgrowing your system and dealing with painful migrations down the line. Choose wisely, or prepare for costly upgrades later.

Integration & Ecosystem: Connecting the Dots for a Seamless Workflow

A customer support platform isn’t an island—it needs to fit into your existing tech stack. Without solid integrations, you’ll end up with siloed data, inefficient workflows, and frustrated agents jumping between tools.

Start with CRM & sales integrations. A seamless connection with Salesforce, HubSpot, or any CRM ensures that support agents have full context on customers—past interactions, purchase history, and account details—all in one place. No more back-and-forth between support and sales.

There is sooooo much that can be done around that. Most platform have the ability to fetch context specific information about the user and display it side-by-side with the chat, making the life of the agent so much easier. It can take a bit of effort to enable and maintain that, but it’s worth looking into it.

“What was the last charge on the account of the user?”
“What’s the adoption of that new feature on this entreprise account?”

For e-commerce businesses, integrations with Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce allow agents to check order status, process refunds, and handle customer inquiries without switching platforms.

Marketing & automation tools play a role too. Whether it’s syncing with email marketing platforms (Mailchimp, Klaviyo) or workflow automation tools like Zapier, the right connections can automate repetitive tasks and improve response times.

And for teams needing custom workflows, a robust API & webhooks are game-changers. A well-documented API means you can build tailored integrations, automate processes, and pull support data into other dashboards.

Bottom line: If your support platform doesn’t integrate smoothly with your existing tools, you’re adding friction to your process. And friction leads to inefficiency, which leads to frustrated teams and slower responses.

Analytics & Reporting: Turning Data Into Actionable Insights

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. A customer support platform isn’t just about handling tickets—it should give you insights that drive better decisions, improve team performance, and enhance the customer experience.

Start with real-time dashboards. Your team needs a live view of ticket volume, resolution times, and backlog status. A good dashboard lets you spot bottlenecks instantly and take action before issues escalate.

At Smartly.io, I was obsessed with replicating the realtime dashboard McDonalds was using to track drive-in customers. There was a counter on top of each block showing the time each car had been already waiting in line. The goal was for 80% of the cars to go from enter to paying in less than 5 minutes. There was a very transparent score showing that percentage and motivating everyone to hit the goal.

Next, customer satisfaction metrics like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), NPS (Net Promoter Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score) help track how well your support team is performing. If satisfaction drops, you know it’s time to optimize processes.

For managers, agent performance analytics are crucial. Metrics like first response time, resolution time, and ticket reassignment rates show who’s excelling and who might need more training.

More advanced platforms even offer AI-driven insights, predicting trends in customer complaints, identifying common pain points, and suggesting improvements before problems snowball.

Without strong analytics, you’re flying blind. The right data-driven approach helps optimize resources, improve customer relationships, and ultimately drive revenue—because better support equals happier, more loyal customers.

User Experience & Ease of Use: Speed Matters—For Agents and Customers

A powerful support platform is useless if it’s clunky to use. User experience (UX) directly impacts efficiency, response times, and customer satisfaction. If your team wastes time navigating a slow, confusing interface, you’re losing productivity—and frustrating customers in the process.

First, agent-friendly UI is a must. A clean, intuitive dashboard with fast search, clear ticket categorization, and quick actions means agents can focus on solving issues, not wrestling with software. Cluttered, outdated interfaces? Hard pass.

On the customer side, seamless interactions are key. Whether it’s submitting a ticket, using live chat, or navigating a self-service portal, the experience should feel effortless. If customers struggle to find answers or get help, they’ll take their frustration to social media—or worse, your competitors.

A good platform also includes mobile accessibility. Whether agents are remote or on-call, a solid mobile app ensures they can respond to urgent tickets on the go.

In short, UX impacts speed, efficiency, and satisfaction for both agents and customers. The smoother the workflow, the faster the resolutions. The faster the resolutions, the better the customer experience. Simple as that. The hard part is to measure that. It’s not just about checking the box. It can be subjective and it may come down to individual preferences…

Security & Compliance: Protecting Customer Data is Non-Negotiable

Customer support platforms handle sensitive data—personal information, payment details, and confidential conversations. If security isn’t airtight, you’re exposing your company to data breaches, regulatory fines, and lost customer trust.

First, data encryption is a must. The platform should encrypt data both in transit and at rest, ensuring that customer information isn’t vulnerable to cyber threats. Weak encryption? That’s a dealbreaker.

Next, compliance with major regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA is critical. If your platform doesn’t meet industry-specific standards, you’re risking legal trouble and customer backlash.

Role-based access control (RBAC) is another key feature. Not every agent should have full access to sensitive data. A good platform allows you to set granular permissions, ensuring employees only see what they need.

Then there’s audit logs—your security safety net. A proper system tracks who accessed what, when, and why, so you have a clear record if something goes wrong.

Security isn’t just an IT concern—it’s a business necessity. If your support platform doesn’t prioritize data protection, compliance, and controlled access, you’re playing with fire. And when it comes to customer trust, there’s no second chance.

Pricing & ROI: Balancing Cost with Long-Term Value

Choosing a customer support platform isn’t just about features—it’s about cost versus impact. The wrong choice can drain your budget without delivering real efficiency gains. The right one? It pays for itself by boosting productivity, improving customer satisfaction, and driving retention.

Start with pricing structure. Is it per user, per ticket, or usage-based? Some platforms lure you in with low base prices but hit you with hidden costs—add-ons for essential features, API limits, or overpriced integrations. Always read the fine print.

Then, consider scalability of pricing. Can you start with a basic plan and scale affordably as your team grows? A cheap solution today can turn into an expensive bottleneck when you need more advanced features.

Also, hint, hint… most of them are ready to negotiate when you start hitting a good scale. It’s a tough competition out there for these platforms and you should definitely be aware of sales objectives.

Look at the total cost of ownership (TCO). Beyond subscription fees, factor in training costs, setup time, integration expenses, and potential migration headaches if you outgrow the platform.

Finally, think about ROI. A platform that reduces handling time, improves agent efficiency, and enhances customer experience isn’t just a cost—it’s an investment. If it helps retain more customers, boost CSAT scores, and cut resolution times, the long-term gains far outweigh the expense.

Support & Community: Who’s Got Your Back When Things Go Wrong?

Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think…

Even the best customer support platform will break, glitch, or need troubleshooting at some point. The question is: How fast can you get help? A platform is only as good as the support behind it.

Start with vendor support quality. Do they offer 24/7 live chat, phone support, or only email tickets with a 48-hour response time? (ditch that one, no question) If your business runs around the clock, a slow or unavailable support team is a dealbreaker.

Check SLA guarantees—does the platform commit to response and resolution times? If your system goes down during a high-traffic event, knowing there’s an SLA-backed support structure can mean the difference between a quick fix and a customer service nightmare.

Then there’s the community and documentation. A strong user community, active forums, and well-maintained knowledge base can be just as valuable as official support. If the vendor provides in-depth guides, tutorials, and FAQs, your team can solve issues faster without waiting for an agent.

At the end of the day, bad support for a support tool is ironic—and unacceptable. If the company can’t support its own customers well, how can you expect it to help you support yours?

Final Thoughts: Choose Wisely—Your Support System is Your Brand’s Backbone

Your customer support platform isn’t just software—it’s the frontline of your business. A slow, clunky, or poorly integrated system doesn’t just frustrate your team; it frustrates your customers. And frustrated customers don’t stick around.

The right platform should:

Streamline workflows with automation and AI
Scale with your business without hidden costs
Integrate seamlessly with your existing tools
Provide deep analytics to optimize performance
Be easy to use for both agents and customers
Protect data and comply with security regulations
Offer reliable vendor support when things go wrong
Check all or most of the boxes because life is short

Cutting corners here means longer resolution times, higher churn, and lost revenue. Investing in the right tool isn’t an expense—it’s a strategic decision that directly impacts customer satisfaction, retention, and operational efficiency.

Before you commit, test-drive the platform, talk to existing users, and map it to your real-world needs. Because at the end of the day, your support system is more than a tool—it’s the experience your customers will remember.

Copy this Google Sheet and start comparing customer support platforms (click on the picture)

The post Choosing a customer support platform appeared first on Marc-Olivier Meunier.

I’m excited to tell you about Support from HEL, a community of customer support professionals!

In February 2020, I was knee deep in Customer Support at Smartly.io and I was wondering why we didn’t have a community of Customer Support professionals that could gather and share insights. I was interested to grow my network, my knowledge, see what others were doing, and what problems they were solving. Support Driven was attractive! An international community of Customer Support professionals founded by Scott Tran. I pushed far enough to be invited as a speaker for a leadership event organised in Portland, Oregon.

Buy local

But I really wanted something local. So I decided to build my network of trusted local customer support professionals and reached out to people from other companies. I went on Linkedin and found Jouni Hyötylä, Head of Customer Support at Supermetrics and Perttu Toikkanen, Customer Support Team Lead at Hoxhunt.

We met and found a name for the community: Support from HEL. We decided on a date for the first event. And it happened… online. That was pretty much on the same week when Covid started raging and sending everybody home. Because of that situation, we decided to put the whole project in the ice-box. Nobody was really excited about having yet another online meeting.

A couple years passed and at that point, Steve Morrell, Director of Customer Support at aPriori was in the process of moving to Finland and was excited to join our crew.

Fast forward to September 2022. Let’s have the first live meetup! Jouni accepted to host it at Supermetrics. I quickly bodged together a website for our community of customer support professionals. Supportfromhel.fi was born.

The next meetup happened at Hoxhunt in January 2023. Our first guest speaker was Pyry Åvist, CTO and co-founder of Hoxhunt.

And the following one happened at Eficode in March 2023 (where I currently work), and we welcomed Klaus and their team. Our guest speaker was Joonathan Mägi, CTO of Klaus.

The community has around 50 members so far and we are always welcoming new members. The best way to stay informed is to follow the community on Linkedin or to register to our mailing list on Supportfromhel.fi

The post Support from HEL appeared first on Marc-Olivier Meunier.

Selecting a BPO for outsourcing a customer support function usually goes through a Request for Proposal (RFP).

An RFP can have varying degrees of detail, depending on the companies. For some, the quality control or the tooling may be more important, for some others the language coverage may be the clincher.

Why using an RFP?

An RFP will help you to get definitive answers about very practical questions that are usually largely overlooked by a sales rep. The good sales rep focuses on solving your problem, they want to show you that they have the solution to your problems. Well, that’s great, but you know that already and you are shopping for a partner. You already know that they have the solution, but the devil is in the detail. And it’s what the RFP will help you to understand.

Sending out RFPs

Before receiving responses, you are going to have to provide a lot of information for the BPO to understand how to answer to you.

IMPORTANT! Signing a Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement is necessary to protect yourself. This will make it possible to share or disclose relevant topics and issues. You are searching for a partner to handle some important parts of your business, the last thing you want is to hide the details that could jeopardize the whole operation.

You will want to include information such as:

• Type of channels covered and expected to cover, calls, chats, emails, sms, social media, in-app messages, video calls, etc.
• Technologies associated with each channel, types of phone lines, social media channels and the tools to monitor them, queueing systems, chat services
• Anticipated ticket volumes with their seasonality throughout the day/week/month/year
• Hours of operations if not 24/7 or 24/5
• Escalation levels already established and planned, methods of escalation, current and expected metrics.
• Digital assets ownership. Who owns the request and its escalation, who is responsible and accountable for the KPIs associated with the tickets
• Describe the current support organization with levels.
• Describe the type of tickets covered, frontline or level 2, 3, etc.
• Ownership of automation, chat bots training, handovers, automatic triaging, custom bots, knowledge base.
• Response requirements. Tone of voice, procedures, access to customer data and how to handle privacy.
• Leadership structure in the point of contact. In-house team leads Vs vendor managers.
• Languages currently covered and the ones expected to be covered. Important to give figures to estimate the volume expectation for each language and the seasonality.
• Knowledge base management and expectations of contribution to ticket deflection, through automation or updates of procedures. Ownership of the internal and external material
• Reporting expectations, frequency, metrics, success thresholds
• Current quality metrics and standards to uphold
• Onboarding process and expectations of lead time, internal product/service trainings availability and their channels
• SLAs, SLOs, SLIs
• Project management standards, how do we get better and how do we follow the product development

Structure of a response to RFP

Main parts are:

• Executive summary
• Project timeline
• Industry Specialization, Scope and Approach to work
• Size or Capacity
• Compliance and Certifications
• Quality Management, KPIs, Success Factors
• Leadership style and Company culture
• Technology coverage
• Languages
• Hiring process
• Onboarding/Training
• Operational/Legal/Financial details, pricing and terms

Before going into the details of the RFP, it’s important to have informal chats with the BPO representative. Speaking with them may be a quick way to find out about the red flags or deal breakers. What if the company is operating in a country where payments are notoriously difficult for companies in your country. For some countries and regions, it’s a walk in the park. For some other, it’s hard to do cross-border payments with the current non-interoperable systems. There are a lot of legacy systems and there is a high cost of regulatory compliance. You’re trying to make your life easier, not harder.

Try and think what are the absolute deal-breakers in your wish list and make sure these are covered right away.

About the form of the RFP

Most RFPs are structured as a big tables stretching over multiple pages. Some companies use an Excel or Google Spreadsheet. Regardless there will be open and close questions. For the close questions, you want to make it very explicit when there are only limited choices and when you accept details and precisions. If you are asking whether a technology is supported, make sure to ask the respondent to answer with the time of delivery in mind. If they are missing a necessary regulatory certification right now, but they are planning to have it by the time the service is being delivered, then you want to know that. It will inform your decision.

About the cost of answering the RFP

It goes without saying but nobody should charge you for taking the time to answer an RFP. It’s a sales exercise and it’s the decision of the BPO whether or not they want to take part in answering the RFP. Although responding to an RFP can be a tedious job, and it can often stretch over dozens of pages, it is still not your responsibility to tell a BPO if they should reply or not. It’s their job to convince you they are the best possible partner.

Executive Summary

This part of the RFP should be fairly short and to the point. It’s an excerpt that outlines the proposed business arrangement and the fees. This is typically what will look the most like a regular sales pitch with logos and partners. Geographic coverage and anything that can help you understand better the offering of the partner. It should help to understand if you are speaking with an up-and-coming BPO or with a Nasdaq traded mastodont or something in between.

Project timeline

Assuming your golive date is not yesterday, you can set forth a day when the service should start and expect the BPO to do the work of reverse-scheduling.

You should have expectations and receive proposals.

• Bid Email latest date, and where to send it
• Follow-up questions latest date
• Shortlist review date
• Reference checks date
• Site visit
• Contract signing
• Implementation, Go Live, Soft Launch
• Opening the floodgates…

Being very clear and providing all this information will make you look like a serious opportunity for the prospective BPO for your customer support.

Industry Specialization, Scope and Approach to work

One of the things a BPO does very well is hiring people. If they know a specific industry very well, they will be very effective at hiring people with the right skillset. They will be also very quick to train them. They may have in-house subject matter experts or ready-made material to comply with regulatory certifications.

Some BPOs may have multiple specialties thanks to partnership. While that’s really a great way to make your life easier, you may want to be sure that the BPO you select for your customer support is primarily a specialist of your industry. If they have to partner for 90% of the work, you are going to pay a huge fee just for them to be the middleman. Maybe you should then partner directly with another BPO.

The scope is also important. A BPO specialized in online marketing may only touch one narrow aspect of it. Maybe just social media marketing, and nothing about programmatic, or mostly video creatives, but nothing about end-to-end ad buying. It’s important to be specific and to ask these questions as it will likely inform the price you are going to pay and the level of expertise to expect.

Your BPO is going to provide a leadership structure as part of the service. There will be team leads and a program manager, probably department managers too if the size of the operation requires it. You should require these leaders to have industry expertise.

Size or Capacity

I would highly recommend to choose a partner that matches your size. If you are going to do business with a BPO for your customer support, you want to make sure that the relationship means something to them.

I’ve been sitting in multiple meetings with giant BPOs where I was trying to contract a fairly small organization. They are very proud to show that they work with Linkedin, Google, Facebook, etc. But that had the exact opposite effect on me. I thought we would be completely meaningless to them.

So instead I went for a young, up-and-coming BPO for our customer support that was human-sized. I could speak directly to the CEO and align on what was important to us.

If you represent a large organization and you need to contract at least a few hundred people, then you should not choose a small one. You want stability and efficiency, and you want the partner to be used to a certain level of professionalism. eg. Can they hire/train 20 team leads within a couple of weeks? Can they hire 200-300 people rapidly and train them. What about premises? Computers? Phone lines?

You really want to hit the sweet spot. It needs to be a great opportunity for them, but it needs to be realistic.

Compliance and Certifications

As your company grows, there are some certifications that will be required. Some are regulatory and have nothing to do with your company size. You just have to have them. Some are nice to have and demonstrate that you are a trusted market player with klouts. These certifications help to save some time and make sure you virtually sweep every corner. You may be very interested to know that your partner has a HIPAA certification, without necessarily understanding everything that pertains to that certification.

SOC2 or ISO 27001 are becoming more and more prevalent.

GDPR is now a no-brainer, but it may not be if the partner is somewhere far from Europe. Also it’s not an official certification. There are some companies providing GDPR certifications but you can be GDPR compliant without a certificate. Just ask your legal department, they know better than this blog post.

If you are handling payments, then PCI is the norm.

If you are dealing with medical records, health information, HIPAA.

For a helpful list of what’s out there, go check out the ones Amazon is holding. You will notice that some of them are country or region specific.

Quality Management, KPIs, Success Factors

Let’s face it, you are looking for a BPO for your customer support in order to reduce your costs or to reduce your risk. But on the other side of the equation you are frightened by the potentially degrading the quality of service to your customers.

So it’s time to be thoughtful and make sure that the organization you are putting together will have the perfect blend of quality control, support agent seniority, cost, and sustainability. And remember that you get what you measure. If you want speed, you will get speed. But maybe terrible quality. If you want quality, you got the idea.

Depending on the type of product or service you support, you will follow very different metrics. The baseline will most likely be:

• First response time – are the agents fast to answer / is the staffing appropriate to the support load? You want to pivot that data over some key metrics like language or geography or anything else relevant (game, product, vertical, industry)
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) – a bit of a catchall, are the agents doing a good job at turning the problematic situation into a positive experience?
• First contact resolution rate – is your frontline staffed and trained appropriately?
• Abandonment Rate – do you have some technical difficulties that make it impossible for callers to reach an agent on the phone?

Once you get into bigger organisations you may have to adopt some metrics that are more about human resources, leadership, work ethics and culture.

• Time usage – are you using your workforce efficiently?
• Transfer rate and outliers – who are the agents who need training or need offboarding?
• Average idle time – how much time does your workforce spend on the job and not handling any tickets, make sure to include breaks in the calculation, agents are humans and they can’t work 100% of the time.
• Phone/Email/Chat etiquette – how much does your workforce adhere to the tone of voice set forth?
• Adherence to procedures – are your agents respecting the rules you put together? Did they find shortcuts? Are they wasting time?
• Rate of absence – follow this trend very closely. If this is growing, you have a problem. Make sure to get data that doesn’t include turnover. If an absent agent is replaced by someone else, it’s still an absent agent.
• Rate of turnover – what’s the tenure of agents? If the turnover is growing, the training time is going to become a more and more significant cost. Is there a leadership problem? Is there a workload problem? Is there a compensation problem? Is the job too difficult?

You can also try to track some other information like the rate of career progression. How often does someone go from level 1 to level 2? Where do the team leads come from? Are they promoted from the inside? Some BPOs will tell you that you are paying for an outcome and you shouldn’t be interested in how the job is done. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

You are entitled to know if the people who are representing your company are happy and engaged in their job. And if they are happy, that usually means success.

While the RFP response will not include data from the future, you can ask for historical data about the BPO for all these metrics. It will help to compare and make a choice.

Leadership style and Company Culture

Some countries where the labor is cheap are heavens for BPOs. Their cost of living make them a great contender on the global market. That said, because one major reason for adopting a BPO for your customer support is the cost, this whole economy is pulling wages downwards.

They also offer fairly stable jobs, but the pay is not among the best ones. When you join a BPO as a worker, you do it for the money. Especially if the qualifications for working are very low.

That means the leadership style of the company need to be top notch in order to retain as many workers as possible.

Most of the big players on the market are excellent at articulating how their company culture is the best. If you read their website, their leadership principles are the best out there. But frankly, I have never seen any of these in the list of “best place to work”. It doesn’t mean they are terrible. You need to read between the lines, and check with references, current and past employees, current and past clients.

Regardless, I would strongly advise to partner with a BPO that has values you can align with. If you are Apple and you have a culture of secrecy, you may not want to work with a BPO for your customer support that has a culture of transparency and openness.

Aligning with a company culture can seem pretty subjective. There are ways to understand if there are potential HR problems without having to listen to the best sales pitch. You can ask for the employee turnover per annum. Or the average tenure.

While these numbers are hard to assess on their own, you can compare them between BPOs. And if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not true

Technology coverage

That’s a very wide topic. We could talk about the access to the product and levels of permissions, access to the CRM and customer data, permissions to change anything in the backend, or take orders for customers. These are on the side of the client, on your side, and will likely require some work if your operations are not yet ready for involving an outsourcing partner. Let’s just focus on the tools for supporting the clients and the technology on the BPO side.

You need to make very clear from the get go what are your channels and channel expansions. That should be outlined at the beginning of your RFP. If you are currently supporting only chat and email, but are looking to adopt phone calls later, you don’t want to limit yourself with a partner that doesn’t already handle that. Setting up a call center may not be terribly difficult at a small scale, but you probably rather want to go with someone who’s already doing it. So make sure to be specific and ask precisely what tech are covered and overlap with your needs. Some companies like Zendesk offer certifications and partnership. Check this out. It could be a good idea to partner with a BPO for your customer support that has the right certifications already.

But don’t just think about the communication channel with the clients. There are many other aspects to consider:

• The Operating System, maybe you’re whole organisation works on Mac, and the partner is on Windows, will that create a problem somewhere?
• Internal comms, Slack or Teams? Something else? What about licences? Are you suddenly going to have to pay for a ton of new licences for all support agents to access that one comms channel? Or is there a solution already handled by the BPO that you could get invited to?
• You can also evaluate their readiness for outages. Do they have redundant power supply? What about internet access? Which connection do they have? What peering? Are they contracting dedicated lines? What’s the throughput? What’s the size and experience of their IT team?
• What about HR management tools. Do you have access to that? Can you see the history of employees?
• Performance management? Some BPOs, even small ones like Partnerhero offer an in-house performance management tool called Apricot. Ask about that.

Languages

This may not be as straightforward as it sounds. You will most likely need to make some choices if you need to cover languages that are not in the top 3 (English, Spanish, Mandarin).

Looking at the most spoken languages in the world is quite irrelevant, what you need is to identify the languages most spoken by your customers. You may also identify languages that need to be covered in order to address other operational problem.

At Smartly.io, I needed to find support agents that were Japanese speakers and Chinese speakers because we were burning the CSMs. There was a clear necessity to find these people because we were expecting the CSMs to help with the growth of the region, and yet they were tied up with operational work.

The other aspect to consider is whether you need to have all languages available around the clock. Probably not.

Be aware that some languages are easy to find in some time zones, and very hard in some others.

The languages to cover are an important aspect to keep in mind when thinking about costs. But it’s not the only one. In fact it compounds with the other factors that drive the fee charged by the BPO for your customer support.

The other factors would be:

• the complexity of the product/service to support. Are you supporting an advanced 3D modeling software used by cinema studios or a supporting an online t-shirt store?
• the level of service required. Are you taking frontline tickets or are you investigating the code base to find bugs?
• the service hours. Do you need some Japanese speaking agents in the middle of the night (Japan time zone)?

The cost per agent could be dramatically different if you are looking for a blessing of unicorns (TIL, that’s how you call a group of unicorns).

If you are looking for a Japanese speaking, Level 2, marketing automation support agent that works at night, it’s going to be expensive and difficult to find. So… hold your horses and be reasonable.

Hiring process

If you are early in your BPO journey, you may want to keep control over some of the hiring aspects. Especially if you come from a culture obsessed company where you rather miss out on a great talent than take on a bad apple. There are people out there who are capable of the best, and some are able to destroy a company culture. You don’t want them, so it’s only fair to be careful and you may want to choose a partner that is OK to adapt to your standard.

After growing a bit with your partner, you will look at things differently. You will likely need a bigger volume of hires. Some turnover will inevitably happen and it will become important to rely on the hiring expertise of the BPO for your customer support.

Don’t be scared! That’s what they do. They are very good at it. They have very lean costs, but they are also investing every time they need to hire someone. Your partner is just as invested as you are to keep the turnover as low as possible.

Onboarding and Training

You will then be expected to focus a lot of your attention to the onboarding process. Expect to pay for the onboarding period. That’s only fair as someone has to pay for these people. They are not getting trained on your product or service for free.

You now have a very strong incentive to work hand in hand with your BPO for your customer support and produce the best onboarding material possible. The RFP response should outline how the BPO is expecting to work with you on this. From what they understand, how long of a onboarding is required. What sort of lead time and delay to expect between an offboarding and an onboarding of a new agent?

I shoot right away for as much elearning material as possible. You want to control how the information is transferred to your agents, but you definitely need the feedback of the BPO to finetune it. Make sure this is OK with them. Some BPO may still be stuck in the past and only do classroom onboard.

Also keep in mind that onboarding is not a set-and-forget process. It’s continuous. You are going to have to provide material to help all the agents level up and improve. They all want to get better and follow the career path you’ve outlined jointly with the BPO. You have to make sure the career path is realistic and enticing, motivating and challenging. There is nothing worse than a levelling framework where it’s very easy to go from level 1 to level 2. Your agents need to feel like they are learning some valuable skills and that the upgrade is warranted. They want to feel that they deserve the raise or the new job.

What is really daunting with such a task is that there cannot be any mistake. The repercussions would be too big. You really want to double-check or triple check that your material hit the right spot and get the right message across.

If you are leading a player support team for a gaming company, you need to make sure all the game updates are very accurately documented. There can be a lot of people in the support team and this can affect of players. So you really want to make sure accuracy is on point.

I like to put a lot of emphasis on the onboarding. To me, the agents are an extension of the company and as such I want to make sure they feel like they belong. It’s important to educate them on the company culture, and the values that drive us.

When you are dealing with a large scale, you may want to take it easy with swag. No need to send a t-shirt to every agent. Probably not a great thing for the environment either, unless you find a sustainable way to do it. Why not invest in digital swag? Something that goes a long way is to contract cartoon makers on Fiverr, Upwork or Freelancer and give them pictures of the agents to be transformed to cartoons with color palette and branding of the company.

It’s all about finding the sweet spot where the employees are proud to be working for your company. But you are still keeping them an arm away in order to make sure there is no confusion with employee benefits, laws and regulations, disguised employment, taxes, etc.

Operational, Legal, Financial details, pricing and terms

There is so much that goes into that category.

Make your life easier by having clarity on the level of involvement of each party when some changes need to be made with the staff. Who gets to decide when a new team lead needs to be introduced? Why should we offboard this employee? It’s common to agree that changes made to the support team would be done only with your consent. And it should be also possible for you, the client to request or refuse changes proposed by the BPO for your customer support.

You are inevitably going to start speaking about SLAs. The favorite topic of legal teams. This is something that can make or break the whole relationship. If your expectations are unrealistic, you will have a hard time convincing a BPO to partner with you.

Be aware that the party liable for the SLA usually knows a lot of tricks to avoid having to pay penalties. For instance, if your app is unavailable, you are creating a situation that makes it impossible for the outsource support team to respect the time to first answer agreed upon at the contract signature. If a ton of customers are impacted and they all start opening tickets, it makes sense that the BPO should no be penalized for that… But hang on… isn’t that exactly why you are paying a support team? To plug the holes in your product?

One last thing to iron out will be billing and payment. Make sure this doesn’t come as a surprise. Some countries enjoy very different payment delays. It may be very common to pay with 30 or even 60 days of delay in your country, but some other places may grant only 14 days or even 7 days to pay their bills. Keep that in mind and get it in written in the RFP answer. Your CFO will thank you later.

Conclusion

If you’ve had the patience or energy to read up until now, kudos to you. I hope you learned something.

In a nutshell, here is how I see a successful outsourcing experience:

• Identify what level of customer support should be outsourced
• What does success look like? What are the KPIs you will monitor?
• On what basis will you select your BPO for customer support?
• Document the work, what do you ask the BPO to do for you
• Prepare the RFP
• Send the RFP to your prospective BPOs. More than 5, less than 10.
• Review responses and shortlist 2 or 3.
• Site visits, reference checks and due diligences
• Select the BPO
• Negotiate the contract
• Start the operation. Monitor the relationship and track the KPIs defined above
• Be in the driver seat. Identify problems. Implement changes. Trust but verify

The post Select a BPO for customer support appeared first on Marc-Olivier Meunier.

Outsourcing / offshoring? Same same. Don’t get caught up with wording. There is probably a subtle difference. But you are simply looking at paying another company to take care of the support function for you. A BPO is a Business Process of Outsourcing. It’s a company specialized in externalising a whole function. Adopting offshore for your support means you will trust an external entity to deliver to your client on your behalf. That raises a lot of questions!

Why adopting offshore for your support is a good option

Many companies would need the benefits of an offshore partner, but just don’t realise it.

I know because I was one these leaders. I was very focused on execution and couldn’t comprehend that offshore partners can provide a ton of value. I was even very defensive. I used to think offshore was evil. I couldn’t be more wrong. Feels familiar?

After looking into it properly, it became impossible to avoid the benefits of offshore:

Cost Reduction

That’s the one everyone thinks about. Often coming from a top down decision. You are being asked to reduce the cost of your team. Or you are being asked to grow your team with a smaller budget. These two scenarios will play out differently but they will both lead to adopting a BPO.

When you start going into these considerations, you need to calculate your current costs.

Here are some questions to get your started.

What’s your cost per ticket?

What’s your “margin per ticket”?

Revenue – (Cost per ticket x number of tickets)

Yes, this is hardly mathematical, but you get the idea.

This is going to lead to interesting question. The revenue is not the same for a small or big customer. And the load in support is not the same either. So does it make sense to reduce your cost for high paying customers? Maybe you should just stop supporting very small customers altogether?

Get closer to your analytics guys to get the answers to these questions. You need financial data, forecasting, people cost. Maybe even factor in all costs of employment if you are trying to build a case for offshore.

With a global organisation, I was able to show that an offshore employee was about 4 to 5 times cheaper than an internal employee. No premises, hardware, pension, healthcare, etc. to pay. Everything is included in the invoice. Just because you hire people from Guatemala, doesn’t mean they are less educated. It doesn’t mean they lack drive or are not able to learn. There are some true gems out there and it would be foolish not to take advantage of these opportunities.

Seasonality and Flexibility

There are very few businesses without seasonality.

Some businesses will create the seasonality themselves. Think Amazon Prime Days… And then many e-commerce companies will have the mad rush of November. In South East Asia, it’s 10/10, 11/11 and 12/12

Travel is often very strong in January. There is a tax season. Back to school. Halloween, etc.

One important aspect to consider: seasonality is largely predictable. It’s something you’ve experienced already. Something you know will happen. There is a seasonality throughout the year, but also throughout the day, or the week.

At Smartly.io, we had 60% of support load on EMEA, 30% on Americas and 10% on APAC. It was highly predictable and somewhat (with some multipliers) connected to the business activity.

What’s not predictable are surges. These are a lot more micro than macro. They could last a few hours. Or a few days. They can happen because of a bug or because of external events.

There is a fascinating podcast about change.org on this topic. Highly recommended.

Being able to increase and decrease your capacity at will is a really appealing concept. You have 10 employees who are doing a great job. You wish you had 20 next months, and back to 10 the following months. This is what offshore can do for you.

When it comes to flexibility and answering sudden surges, you need to listen to the podcast above. Offshore can help, but it’s probably not the silver bullet you are looking for.

Languages

If you are in a variety of locations in B2C, you need to speak the language of your customers. It’s less true in B2B where you can get away with English or other major languages.

When it’s time to find some efficiency at scale, you are probably also looking to serve a very wide array of culture and languages.

Some languages are available everywhere

When adopting offshore for your support, some BPOs will try to sell fluent speakers of the rarest languages in places you wouldn’t expect.

It’s not always a scam! Most BPOs have a very comprehensive test setup to make sure their candidates meet the expectations of their clients.

If the client (you) expect that the BPO will supply people speaking Japanese in the Philippines, it’s very possible. Obviously this comes at a higher price. You can expect to pay at least two or three times more than for a regular English speaker.

And keep in mind that it will take more time to find the right people. If you are looking for people with a specific skill set on top of the regular customer support job. eg. Online Marketing + Japanese, or Graphic Design + Customer Support + Japanese.

Some languages are really hard to find though

And it’s OK. You probably want to be a bit realistic. Are you asking to find the same Japanese speaker in Latin America? With Online Marketing or Graphic Design skills for a Customer Support job, it’s going to be hard. Be realistic.

You can also decide that you will not serve Japanese customers in Japanese outside of certain working hours.

What you should really do: Ask if that BPO in the Philippines could find someone willing to work the “graveyard shift”

The graveyard shift has a very negative connotation. These are the shifts that force you to work either very early in the morning (like 2AM-8AM) or very late at night (6PM-2AM). Not sure why they are called like that, but you can imagine that you can easily turn into a zombie when you are forced to work at these hours.

That said, the gig economy has changed everything. Many people are more than happy working at odd hours. Just ask and you could get surprised.

Quality

Adopting offshore for your support also means formalizing your approach to quality. Before speaking with a BPO, I was looking at the overall quality of the customer support. I was not going into the details of what made the quality.

I was taking it for granted that our people were of best quality. I was convinced they could only have a very high quality output. And to some degrees I was right because the results were speaking for themselves.

But when a BPO comes in the picture, some aspects of the recruitment will not be in your hands anymore. They will try to replace your hiring process as much as possible. This will make them as dependable as possible. They have spent quite some time trying to refine that process and made it very lean and cost effective. That’s what they are selling you. Cost effectiveness.

You are completely entitled to question the quality of the work.

What makes up the quality of the customer support? You can find a few interesting criterions. These in turns may increase your paranoia and at least raise more questions.

Quality Assurance Questions for Customer Service (Free Checklist)

• Product Knowledge
• Tone and Empathy
• Followed internal process
• Solution
• Language and Grammar

Each of these items can become a KPI that you are following. And some of these may become areas of development.

Product Knowledge: You cannot expect that the agents you hire are specialists of your product. The quality of their product knowledge will depend highly on your input.

Tone and Empathy: You are totally entitled to expect a very empathetic crowd of agents. But it’s up to you to set the tone. You can follow the guidance of your BPO, or craft something special (think Zapier: keep customer support weird)

Following internal process: Guess what? Your processes have to make sense and be well documented if you want your external support agents to follow them

Solution: That’s the smart you are buying. Once the agent has all the information in their ends. Once they know the product, they know the bandwidth they have for fixing a problem. Once they know how much they can spend to make a customer happy. You are entitled to measure that and understand if you are getting your money worth.

Language and Grammar: This one is probably the most straightforward to assess. Except when you get into rarer languages. How do you assess that someone speaks good Japanese, very good Japanese, or near native Japanese? I have no idea. This is what you pay for and you need to trust that your partner is doing it the right way. But nothing prevents you from double-checking. Trust but Verify.

Weekend and Holiday

This one if fairly self-explanatory. It’s a clear benefit. But it’s important to be upfront with your BPO of your expectations. It’s important to communicate the load you will likely experience on a given weekend. It’s also really important to keep track of all the special days around the world. They could impact you and your business.

“Hello Sir, today is national holiday in India. I’m sorry we didn’t talk about that earlier. It means we are going to have to pay everyone a bit extra to make sure we have the appropriate coverage. Also I’ve checked and it looks like all the people who are usually the safety net of the team in Germany are on holiday today. So this could complicate things. Do you have an alternative?”

This is a conversation you don’t want to have when you’ve decide of adopting offshore for your support. It’s going to be stressful for everyone. And your clients will probably suffer from that situation.

Practical advise. Google Calendar and Outlook have native calendars to overlay the holidays of other countries. It can be interesting, but it’s fairly static and requires you to keep an eye out for these.

A better option is to setup a shared special days calendar for you and your team. Good idea to also share it with your BPO. You can set up notifications long in advance. Like 2 weeks.

That will give you enough time to find a solution when holidays are clashing.

Spend a few hours going through a whole bunch of calendars. Add recurring events and set the right notifications to make sure everyone is up to date on these events.

BTW guess what, a BPO could probably easily supply someone to do that kind of task. You don’t have to spend a whole day doing that with your expensive salary

That’s the benefit of adopting offshore for your support.

Scaling Hiring

As said earlier, you may have spent quite a bit of time refining and improving your recruitment process. But the whole job of a BPO is to be extremely efficient with hiring. That’s what they do. They hire people by the bucket and they make sure the hires are calibrated to the needs of their customers. There has got to be some really good ways of doing things in that process.

It’s hard to let go, you may even be emotionally attached to your hiring process. But it’s best to trust the BPO. You don’t want to go into the details of how they do it. You want to spend all your energy conveying the expected result.

Again, it’s hard to let go. Look at it this way. You are adopting offshore for your support because you are growing as a company. Growing comes with growing pains and it often means changing your ways of doing. If you need to change the way you hire people, maybe you could learn from your BPO. Don’t be shy to ask. You want to know all the details and that’s fair enough because you are the paying customer.

Cross-Functional Flexibility

BPOs are in the business of making your life easier. Not only taking over a whole function, or supplementing an existing in-house function.

Many BPOs will have multiple services they offer. They usually have a specialty though. But they are often able to help you on some topics that are loosely connected to your function.

Do you need a project manager? Someone to run operations? A graphic designer? A video producer? There is a good chance that you BPO can help. If not directly, many of them are part of a bigger group and they have agreements with other BPOs with different specialties.

Conclusion

Offshore is not evil. They may be sitting on the other side of the planet or not very far. You will change your perspective once you realise that you can hire at a very interesting price and great quality.

I won’t lie. It took me some time, and the change management with the rest of the team was difficult. But it also produced unexpected benefits. For instance, we went much further in the career pathing of the team. That provided even more clarity for everyone.

This article only shows the beginning. There are multiple ways of approaching outsourcing and offshoring. Some companies like freelancers as they are very scared of diluting their company culture. Some others hire a huge part of their operations offshore and put a ton of effort into documenting and managing the offshore functions.

Feel free to reach out if you are looking for some help to evaluate a BPO or if you want to understand better how this world work. Hit me up on Linkedin

The post Adopting Offshore for your support appeared first on Marc-Olivier Meunier.

There are many aspects to consider when moving to a full blown 24/7 support setup. If you are starting from a regular 9am-5pm and you want to extend the hours to cover more time zones, that’s probably a separate exercise. Below, we are going to talk about moving from 24/5 to 24/7. When you are already covering the whole planet and you need to add the weekends.

• What does 24/7 mean
• What are you current resources, in people and tooling
• What model will be used
• And how to communicate

How we did it at Smartly.io

At Smartly.io, we’ve gone from a 24/5 support, with a follow-the-sun approach to a very hybrid and custom setup for serving customer 24/7.

It was a lot of work and a lot of planning to get this done. It was also part of a broader exercise of professionalizing and expanding the support as it was known by the customers.

The ratings were already really high at 98%. We were hoping to replicate the success of the “fanatical support” of Rackspace that Brian Marin was telling us about. Quite the objective as the size of the Rackspace organisation is immensely bigger and more complex than what we had.

What does 24/7 mean

When moving to 24/7, you may need to articulate what sort of channels and what level of service you are going to offer.

Some companies claim that their support is available 24/7. But in reality they use an email ticketing system and they always receive requests. “We’ve received your request and we will come back to you as soon as possible”. That’s a bit cheating, right?

Some other companies will take it a notch further and will enable a bot. Intercom with Resolution Bot, and Zendesk with Answer Bot make it very easy to get started. They leverage the existing support data hosted on their servers. They identify recurring questions and they prompt you to write a generic answer. It’s great for answering when nobody is available. And it’s also great for deflecting the support requests.

How Smartly.io uses customer support to win enterprise customers

But let’s face it, if you are reading this, you have higher ambitions. You are looking for answers or you are looking for the right questions to ask yourself.

So what does 24/7 mean for your channels?

Level of Service

Most likely you are going to start with a degraded level of service and you are going to have to make some choices.

At Smartly.io, we quickly realized that we should staff the weekend support with very technical agents. People who are not there to just be empathic and take the requests, but people who could actually fix issues. We realized that a high paying customer who would go out of their way to interrupt their weekend would most likely do it for a really good reason and this reason would need to be addressed as well as possible. Our weekend support staff was hired as Level 2 with the ambition to become Level 3 as soon as possible.

Depending on the type of service you are supporting, you may expect a higher or lower influx of requests or tickets over the weekend.

If your business is B2C, all bets are off. It may very well be that you would get more tickets over the weekend. You can probably already estimate that from your existing data.

If you’re in the wonderful world of B2B, there is a high chance that the number of requests over the weekend is very small compared with the rest of the week.

That should already inform the level of service you will provide and the staffing to expect.

You may still decide to have Level 1 support over weekends and only take care of simple problems. It’s a cheap way to get started and you can always iterate and improve.

Channels

You want to avoid putting too much pressure on your workforce. Imagine you have a widespread issue affecting every customer. The last thing you want is to have them handle the comms to dozen of customers. They should be handling the resolution of the problem. Hitting the code base to fix the issue, restarting process or restoring some data… There may be operations, coordination and internal communication to carry out. They need to make sure all hands (and the right ones) are on the deck to get to a resolution.

What sorts of scalable tools do you have to avoid having the support agents handle the comms with every customers? Like an in-app notification or warning, or an auto-responder. Spawning a new custom bot to answer a problem. Is the problem affecting everyone? A subset of customers? You could deal with a certain category of customers (long tail) using the bot. And reserve in-person help for high paying customer.

You need to understand the implications of allowing all customers to contact support. What if they start bombarding the inbox over the weekend?

If you operate through email with the expectations to get a response within a few hours, you can live with it.

If you choose to keep the chat enabled for everyone, the sync aspect of chats may create a bad experience for the customers. They were told that the chat was open over the weekend, they are used to a great experience with near instance response time. If they come for an urgent problem over the weekend, and get a subpar treatment and are kept in the dark, that’s going to leave a mark.

What are you current resources

It’s likely you will not be able to expand to 24/7 without investing. You are going to have to make headcount requests, and potentially invest in new tools depending where you find yourself now.

Personnel

With the introduction of weekend support, you are going to have to start hiring more people.

Before speaking with your teams, you need to have a chat with your People team and probably with your operations. You will have to choose a model at some point, and some models may need to open new fiscal entities in countries where you were not operating before.

You are will have to understand what sort of budget you can get and how much you can pay your new employees, or how much extra you need to pay your current employees if they are going to switch to weekend support.

In some countries, the work laws are very flexible and allow you to change the working hours of your employees without much overhead. But in some others, it can be a real problem.

In the US, in most states, this won’t be a problem at all. For Germany, it’s almost impossible to make someone work on Sundays unless there is a reason why the work can only be done in Germany.

Some other parts of Europe have different laws and in some cases, you will need to pay double for Sundays. This is going to inform your strategy and where you want your weekend resources to be stationed.

Once you have a good understanding of the salary constraints and the benefits they can bring to the employees, you have to poll your teams and ask them very openly if they are interested in working over the weekend. You may be surprised to see that some people would actually prefer to work over the weekend.

At Smartly.io, I’ve hired some people for weekend work for quite surprising reasons. I had this Thai guy whose parents had a Thai restaurant and they would always ask him to work at the restaurant over the weekend. You see where this is going.

Don’t make too many assumptions over working hours and weekend work. People are surprising, especially in this gig economy trend.

Once you’ve polled your teams, you should have a good understanding of the number of working hours available Vs the number of hours you require for weekend work.

Tech

Working over weekend could mean a lot needs to be arranged. If you are going global on top of extending working hours to the weekend, you may need to change some things.

• Opening hours on your chat
• Setup your chat bot (Answer bot on Zendesk or Resolution bot on Intercom) to pick up the slack when necessary
• Adapt your data collection if you are fetching stats from the API
• Can you route customers who have access to weekend support to a special inbox? How do you identify them? Did you sync with RevOps? Are they part of a special tier? Do you sync that tier from Salesforce or some other CRM to an Intercom custom parameter so you can create these routing rules?
• Setup an autoresponder to manage expectations over the weekend
• International phone numbers if you do support over the phone (that’s a big project, not just a small bullet point)

There are plenty of questions that will come along the way and most cases are different!

What model will be used

There are multiple models that can be used in order to cover 24/7 with shifts.

One great resource for this is here. There are a ton of different models that serve many different purposes. Fire departments, hospitals, hotels, etc. That’s not really what we need.

But frankly, it’s very confusing. If you are reading this, you are most likely in the SaaS business and you are running a support team. Not nurses, or firemen.

Seasonality

Most likely you have some seasonality across the day. You may be very strong in APAC region and expanding to the rest of the world, or very US-centric and expanding to Europe.

Can you articulate roughly how the next 3-6-12 months are going to look like? What percentage of support load are you going to expect from each region? That should inform your immediate needs, and potentially how you see the load growing.

In order to answer the question above, you have to get close to your Sales and leadership and understand the growth strategy.

At Smartly.io, there was a particular market where we got burned. The CSMs were exhausted and we were trying to understand how to support them and relieve the pressure they were experiencing. Because of language barriers, it was difficult to route the customers to support and they were always hitting the CSMs first. After discussing with the leadership, I understood that I should stop all investments on this market because it was seen as a test and we would likely pull out.

Three realistic models

There are probably a lot of models out there, but these are the ones I have been seriously considering

Follow-the-sun, all internal

1. You only hire internal support agents for the usual working week, with some flexibility in the contract so they can do some replacement over some critical weekends, or supplementaire special days (Black Friday weekend, 11/11, 12/12, etc.)
2. You hire dedicated weekend support agents who will have an alternative work-week. They will work Thursday-Monday, or Wednesday-Sunday, or Friday-Tuesday.
3. You hire in places where you already have tax entities and hopefully fairly compatible with the follow-the-sun

Pros: High engagement of your support agents. Everyone internal means there are opportunities for career growth. There should be little to no friction between the team members and communication should be easy. Ideally, you want an alternative work-week that contains Monday and Friday. These days can be used to do handover communication. If an agent has been in support over the weekend and was dealing with a complicated topic, he can safely hand it over during the Monday. And vise versa, if there was an ongoing issue on Friday, they can step into the weekend with no safety net but a good understanding of what the problem was.

Cons: Hiring may be difficult or close to impossible in some markets. Also local legislation can make it plain impossible. For instance in Germany where it’s pretty much forbidden to work on Sundays (unless you’re in the restaurant or entertainment business)

At Smartly.io, it was close to impossible to hire for the weekend in Singapore. Our largest office in the APAC region was in Singapore and it was the only tax entity option of that time zone. After a few weeks of searching we found one person but they needed a working visa and never got the approval from Singapore government. We had to find another strategy.

Follow-the-sun, internal hires supplemented with offshore

1. You hire internal agents to follow the projected growth in places where you have a tax entity.
2. You setup operations with a BPO and identify how many additional agents you are going to need to cover the odd working hours where you are not able to hire.

There are many variations of that setup and it may look very different at your company.

• You could have internal employees doing level 2 support over the weekend, because it may be harder to train a BPO to do technical support at such a high level that they can operate without a safety net.
• You could chose to have only Level 3 support in-house, working closely with your engineering to solve the most complex tickets.
• You could also chose to have a BPO only for the weekend. I would probably not go this way, as I would have very little understanding of what’s happening during the weekend, unless I would start monitoring and wasting all my weekends…

Pros: You can leverage having a hybrid setup with internals and externals working in the same function. Sick leave flexibility. You can dedicate a specific support level to your BPO. For instance Level 1, the frontline, can be handled by your offshore agents. They have a high incentive to prevent handovers to Level 2 as this is showing their value, which means they are going to grow and develop as fast as possible. You can hire fast with the right BPO. The cost should be interesting.

Cons: A hybrid setup means some overhead. You are going to have to figure a leadership structure that works. It’s an opportunity for someone internal to lead the offshore team, but it’s also a hassle for the BPO and potentially a source of disagreement. Most BPO will try to sell a supervisor, and a program manager. Do you need that? That’s more questions and more trouble.

At Smartly.io we chose a hybrid setup. It was very much a work in progress and probably did not reflect the ideal setup. One BPO in Guatemala with thescalefront.com. And a collections of agents in our hubs. Some internal weekend support agents on the US west coast, and in Helsinki, and a glaring gap in Singapore. The intention was to setup a new entity in the Philippines or hire offshore agents there.

Full offshore

Going full offshore is a realistic decision, albeit a hard one. It can be very well adapted to your needs if the product is very simple. With a more complex product it’s going to take a lot of work to train your new contact agents and transition your levels of support to the offshore partner.

1. You setup operations with a BPO and identify how many agents you are going to need to cover the whole world.
2. Your job becomes a lot less operational, and much more of a planning and program management.

In the two first models, you are going to hire a lot of people. In the third one, you will need a large budget.

You will hire based on the projected load at 6 months and you will keep a buffer for the following 12 months. It means you will need to be smart with your headcount requests. Most companies do a headcount plan only once per year, so you will need to hustle in order to get what you need if the plan has already been made.

How to communicate

You are going to need to communicate heavily. Going 24/7 means a lot of changes in expectations from your customer base.

Identify all the stakeholders

• Product Marketing
• Marketing
• Product engineering
• Customer Success
• Sales
• Leadership

Product Marketing

It can be very tricky to answer simple questions such as “Why do we need to offer 24/7 support?”

Product Marketing will help answer these questions. They help you with your Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy. They will help you formalize your positioning. Help you communicate with the other stakeholders. They are your best ally in this endeavour. Also if you are going to charge extra for offering support during the weekend, they will help you figure out the pricing.

Marketing

If your marketing folks are sharp they will see an opportunity to leverage the differentiation you are trying to pull off. Too many marketoids see support as a function that shouldn’t exist, a cost center that only exist to plug the holes in the product. If you are working with the right people who understood that a superb support can be a major sales point, they will know what to do with that new setup you are putting together.

Product Engineering

With technical people available over the weekend, there is a chance that product has to adapt. Most likely some people are on-call to address critical problems. You have to establish a channel to understand what the implications of these new working hours will have. Weekend support should not start flooding engineers with requests. You will likely need to establish a baseline of criticality. What’s a P0 bug/incident? Who should be contacted? What’s the SLA? How do you make it easy for the weekend support to contact the right person (hint hint, something like Pagerduty)

On the other hand, if you hire very technical people and your product is fairly static, it’s also possible that you could remove some on-call duties from product engineering. Is it good? Politics…

Customer Success

The implication of opening weekend support for your customers can be massive depending on your industry. But you need to communicate very early with your CS leadership in order to understand what this will create. It could have a lot of positive effects on the clients, but it could also mean that some CSMs are getting pinged over the weekend to answer questions. It could mean a better understanding of the frustrations the customers are having with the product during the weekend.

At Smartly.io we’ve been debating this for a long time. One of the Unique Sales Point of Smartly is to allow for quiet weekend thanks to automation. You should not have to handle your online marketing because everything is done through triggers and algorithms. Opening weekend support means normalizing weekend work for a customer base that was promised they wouldn’t have to do that anymore. A bit contradictory!

In the end, we recognized there was a lot of demand from big customers who had operations going on all the time and across the world. Time zones were just an annoying concept that was on the way.

Sales

Product Marketing will probably put together the sales enablement material but the Sales org and RevOps will be interested to understand how to structure deals involving 24/7 support, if it’s only available to a subset of customers. Building a nice narrative and starting to internalise the benefits of support available around the clock will score high on their todo list, especially if your support is a strong USP.

Finally you may be at a stage where it’s possible to sell the roadmap. The roadmap doesn’t need to be just for the product, it’s for the whole line of services.

Leadership

Getting the buy-in from your leadership is obviously a necessity. We’re not going to talk about how to convince them to let that happen. If anything, it’s quite likely that the decision to setup a 24/7 support is top down and just a piece of the overall company strategy.

The communication with the leadership is important to make sure that the other functions are investing enough to support the roll out of your new setup. Do you need the support from engineering to develop or change something in the product? Your CTO should be in the loop and able to pull the right strings. Does marketing need to use this new feature in the marketing material? Your CMO should drive this. If legal or finance need to be involved, they should get the relevant information from their line of management to help with the GTM. Etc.

As a rule, I would strongly recommend to be friends with your CFO. There is a lot to gain in understanding the financial strategy of your company.

Summary

To setup a 24/7 support, a lot depends on where you are starting. In my humble opinion, the most important aspect is the communication. Once you start speaking to the other functions, you will receive a lot of questions that will help you understand better what needs to happen, and then you can forget about that blog post.

This is why this guide is far from being an exhaustive list of tasks. As a leader you have to use your expertise, but probably more your common sense in order to get where you need to be.

If you want help to setup a 24/7 support, I am always available to answer questions. Hit me up on Linkedin

The post Fully Setup a 24/7 support appeared first on Marc-Olivier Meunier.

I am Marc Olivier Meunier, a Customer Engagement Leader.

Going up Mont Ventoux during the Race Across France 2022

I am Marc Olivier Meunier. A customer engagement leader. My professional career spans over 20 years in both large corporations and startups. I’ve had success pouring oil on the fire of the advertisement technology company Smartly.io, before dabbling in consulting. First at Eficode, a DevOps consulting company, then as a startup advisor for companies like Mobal.io or Spritz Finance. Then I joined AILiveSim. I am now back in advertisement technology, helping Shook Digital to build a product to empower creative teams for short-form video production.

I believe in creating memorable experiences for the customers.

Track record in a nutshell:

• Closed and managed Uber, the biggest account Smartly has ever had in LTV.
• Closed and managed a collection of other big digital natives clients such as Fiverr, Walkme, Techstyle.
• Organised global summits to make customers and users meet our organisation in Helsinki
• Won the Golden Frog twice (most prized trophy of the company for exceptional cross-functional work)
• Led the Support tooling team and scale an all-hand support setup from 150 to 550 employees.
• Organised a cross-company gamified team challenge over 12 months to push for all-hand support adoption (400-550 employees).
• Converted the Support tooling team into a full blown professional support team with 35 people, tiering, Level 1, 2, 3, offshore and a premium offer.
• Expanded the support setup to 24/7, video calls, predictive outreach
• Hired more than 100 people along the way.
• Brought a structured career pathing framework to Eficode Managed Services Organisation

Marc Olivier Meunier’s leadership principles

Build trust: be consistent in decisions and actions, keep decision making transparent and explain why.

Be vulnerable: I’m a human being and I act like one, with my flaws. Sharing my ups and downs makes me relatable and creates a safe environment where it’s OK to be genuine and to show up.

Optimise for clarity: don’t optimise for making people feel better. Convey the vision of the company and how to execute it down to the teams. If I don’t get sick of hearing myself repeating the same, it means I haven’t said it enough.

Education As an Accelerator: If someone is interested in learning something, I make sure to enable that. Regardless of the alignment with the company strategy. If they said it to me, it means I succeeded at establishing a safe environment and they have a fire burning inside of them. I won’t be the one blowing it off. I’ll put oil on it and we’ll see later how we can use this new skill.

Hire right: I build high performance teams with as much diversity as possible. Some key aspects I look for: a blend of superstar and rockstars. I strongly believe that A-grade employees hire A-grade employees. I don’t hire someone to tell them what to do, I hire so they tell me what we’re going to do.

Done is better than perfect: foster culture of moving fast, iterating and learning to deliver the best outcomes. It may be rough around the edges, but it works.

Lead by example: walk the talk, and keep improving. I like to show up and be intentional. If it’s technical and I know the topic, I’ll gladly get my hands dirty.

Let’s have a chat!

Some companies and organizations like to hear me speak in their events!

The post Hey, you found me! appeared first on Marc-Olivier Meunier.

Reading Time: 7 minutesEDIT: I have been now working at Smartly.io for 5 years. Going from 40 employees to more than 400 today. My mission today is to scale the way we do customer support to the next 1000 employees.

Our ways of hiring have changed a lot. The story below is not really a good reflection of how things are working nowadays. You can read it for your entertainment and some inspiration, but don’t try this at home…

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What is Smartly.io

Smartly.io is a fantastic company. We’re the leaders in Facebook and Instagram advertisements. Our growth rate is through the roof and we keep innovating in order to delight our customers.

The Facebook ad ecosystem is built around a terrific concept. Facebook is providing Power Editor and Ads Manager in order to build ads. This is the baseline. If Facebook Marketing Partners (FMP) like Smartly.io want to exist they have to provide a service that is far superior to Power Editor for marketers to even begin to start considering to pay to use their product. If an FMP is providing a service that is too close to what Power Editor is doing for free, there is no reason to invest.
At Smartly.io we proud ourselves of being the first ones to release new ad formats. Our team of engineers is working their b**** off to stay ahead of Facebook. The rhythm at which new features come out is purely insane and it’s very hard for any company to keep up with that.
This is why we like to stay very humble. Aware that one day maybe we could lose our grip like some of our competitors have done already before.

At the same time, we want to grow. And we want to grow fast. There is an attitude in this company that is truly interesting. We call ourselves humble hungry hunters.

So if you want to get hired you need to prove that you have what it takes to call yourself “humble hungry hunters”.

Let me tell you my story.

In June, my dear friend Claudio one day told me about Smartly.io. Claudio was in Lithuania, struggling to make ends meet with a startup that we co-founded and from which I was already out. Claudio was asking me what I was thinking of this company and I very quickly understood that it could be the perfect place for me as well.
After 9 years spent at Nokia, it was time to go.
So I applied for the position of Technical Account Manager. The description suited me pretty well and I thought I had a decent chance of getting hired. I was genuinely interested in online marketing, being a former instructor for top mobile operator engineers I thought I was a fast learner and from a technical point of view, I was also pretty well qualified.
In the meantime, Claudio got hired which got me really excited.
I realized from the job posting that AngularJS was a cornerstone of the product (Edit: now it’s more React.JS) so I decided I should take an introductory course in order to understand what that was. I followed the course, took all the tests, and validated all the modules, one after another.

Let’s get started

I also had to solve a small technical puzzle which led to finding the email address where to apply. It was kind of a technical position so it was only normal to have at least a basic technical test… It took me a few hours, some loops, and some curl to figure out the result of the test and then I sent my application.
I got an answer from Joonatan and I was happy to receive homework to complete.
Having two kids at home and seeing the amount of work to be done to prove my worthiness was a bit daunting at first… but luckily my wife helped to make time for me to study.
The homework was an interesting case. An excel sheet full of statistics about an advertisement campaign. The task was fairly simple: optimize that. We want to spend more and stay below a specific CPA.
So here I go studying Facebook advertisement, the blueprint, the blog posts of Smartly, one after another, what’s a bloody CPA? CTR, that I know. I have an email marketing background, very helpful! Conversion? Offsite conversion… Remarketing? Facebook Pixels? Lots of stuff to learn. I submit my homework and Joonatan finds it good!
But now I have a big task ahead. Demo Power Editor to a bunch of guys who know it inside out since Smartly.io is constantly benchmarking against Power Editor and appear as if I would know it inside out as well. The next task right after that was to demo Smartly.io as in a Sales pitch.
I have done some Facebook ads before for the French version (yaentrainement.fr) of the very famous Finnish Website nimenhuuto.com.
After spending some money to direct some traffic from Facebook to my site, I realized I was not going to put myself in the best conditions for nailing the demo. I was supposed to demo an e-commerce website and all I had was an online service. So what’s the best way to learn? Probably by doing. So here I go set up a shop on my blog.

Really want to get hired? Here is the interesting bit

The blog is running on WordPress. I install woo-commerce, set it up, play a bit with Photoshop to make some fake products, mainly Nimenhuuto t-shirts (maybe I should think about selling these t-shirts), install some pixels.
Then I thought I should take it the extra mile and go for the advanced feature rather than stay safe and only hone the basic features. If I want to get hired I need to shine and I know for a fact that most people don’t go for the advanced features because they are 1) lazy or 2) afraid. Not afraid, lazy… maybe sometimes… but I’m working on it.

So I set up a product feed using a paid plugin that has a demo version. I set up my feed on Power Editor… but then comes the problem of fixing the pixels for DPA. a bit too tricky for me. I reach out to the developer of the plugin and ask him for an extension of the trial period and for some advice about the pixel. I get an extension and a piece of code in order to do the trick.
DPA is running on Power Editor. Now let’s see what Smartly.io can do for me…
I set up an Automated Ads campaign with a carousel and with my products. It’s working well. Very easy. I couple it with Dynamic Image Template in order to enrich the pictures of my product feed with data from the feed like a price, a description, a brand, etc. I need to ask Joonatan to turn on several features for me as many of them are advanced features that are only available to very advanced users and enabled by Account Managers.
D-Day is coming. Let’s get sharp and show that I master the topic and that I can do a good demo.

Interviews

I meet Joonatan and Joonas, and I do my Power Editor demo. All good they like it and we proceed to the Smartly.io demo. Same stuff. (happy face)
I am invited to come back to meet Anssi, COO of Smartly.io. A couple of days later I am having lunch with Anssi and the interview is going pretty well. Then a quick interview with Kristo, the CEO. Culture fit detection: passed
Next step, interview with the technical guys. Otto and Arto. Otto is the VP of Engineering and the creator of the amazing tool Flowdock. I am a huge fan. Because of that I actually decided to include Flowdock in my CV. And Arto is the Product Manager of Smartly.io. Same stuff, good interview. I’m confident!
It’s Friday and there is the usual Friday demo. An open session where some externals are invited to come and discover Smartly.io a bit more.
I follow the demo as an external and I am actually just waiting for an answer… Are they going to hire me or not?
No answer yet. I get back home. Waiting for an answer. At this point, I have been visiting Smartly.io about 7 times, been to a few demos, met with plenty of people, spent days/weeks studying. The investment was consequent. But Sheryl Sandberg COO of Facebook once was told: “When you’re offered to get on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat, just get on”. That was my attitude all along. I said yes to whatever requirement. Invested all my energy into that hiring process.

The answer

Later during the evening, I receive an email from Anssi:

“We discussed internally, thought about your background and potential regarding the positions we discussed, and unfortunately decided not to move forward with you. As we have communicated, our bar is really really high. We really liked you and you presented good skills, but we’re looking for a “perfect match”. ”

I was disheartened.

But then I thought: Sorry but I don’t take no for an answer.

“I understand your decision but I don’t accept it.
You know I have a lot to give. Let me prove it to you.
Can we speak about it?”

Kristo answered me and we agreed to meet again in August after the July holiday was gone.

The comeback

I came back. I demoed again. Got some help from Claudio to help me learn the roped. Fine-tuned my demo. I was supposed to be also a bit of a video guy, so I made a kick-ass education video. I literally worked my way through the meanders of the hiring process. I went there with a knife between my teeth. Pushing, pushing, I wanted so badly to get hired that… it eventually worked. Maybe I am a hungry hunter.

Anssi made me an offer which I accepted. And I know for a fact that he really wants to make many more offers… but the bar is really really high and we are looking for a “perfect match”.

Today I am not quite doing the job of a Technical Account Manager. I do a lot of Business Development for the French Market. I do videos for marketing purposes. I do support like everybody else in the company. We are all full-stack. I saw a Rocketship, got myself invited, and jumped on board.

This may not be the only way to get hired at Smartly.io. Everybody has a different story. But the common ground of all these stories is that the individuals hired have a solid drive and a humble hungry hunter attitude.

How about you? Do you have what it takes to get hired at Smartly.io?

The post How to get hired at Smartly.io appeared first on Marc-Olivier Meunier.