People Delight sells outsourced (mostly) offshore customer support, so the source is only a <i>little</i> biased.<p>Though having direct experience with this, these numbers are pretty good. Few places will need a dedicated VP/Director level for a 6 person team though, and if they did, that would apply to outsourced teams as well.
It's weird that $15-18/hour is considered pricey, when you could get 3-4 support staff per run-of-the-mill SF developer salary.<p>"All I want is someone who has the social skills to talk to clients, technical skills to be familiar with the stack, and the nous to troubleshoot issues based on the partial info that clients provide!"<p>Support sucks. You get the short end of the stick from <i>everyone</i> - clients, management, developers - and there's little in the way of benefits for doing so. No wonder there's a high turnover in the field.
I don't think that teams with only six people are that interesting. In terms of cost, it really does start to matter when your employing 100+ support teams, where the skills required may be somewhat limited.<p>One of my previous employers is a large telco, with two locations, one in Copenhagen and one in the other end of the country. When I left, the plan was to close down the entire support team in Copenhagen and move those tasks to the other office. The benefit was/is that you can pay people a little less, while still leaving them with a better work-life balance, due to lower rent and shorter commutes. As a bonus the "office" space is much cheaper.<p>There's a huge benefit to place things like support teams in more rural areas of a country. You'll have an easier time hiring and retaining and the cost goes down. Companies, especially in the English speaking countries, just take it one step to fare and move the job out of the country. Sure it's cheaper, but you'll lack the cultural understanding that your customers will expect. Also you do need developers, sales staff and so on to actually be on site with the support teams once in a while. Having to travel abroad or even more than a few hours really hinder that interaction.
Customer support for every company is going to be different; there just isn't a formula. Some companies can utilize more automation because the types of questions fielded are going to be very similar (e.g. "where's my package?" or "how come there's a flashing red light?"). A team of 8 just about anywhere can scale to fairly high volumes.<p>But since we're talking about the Bay Area, and it sounds like specifically for a technically focused company (I'm thinking startup) the good news is that the core team is likely already fielding support because talking to customers is so important to the growth and direction of the product. Yes Bay Area salaries are high, but hopefully you're hiring high quality team members that are more than just front-line support -- they should be an invaluable part of your product and customer development process. You can't really put an outsourcing price tag on that.<p>Lots of companies have a process where the developers are insulated from day-to-day support roles -- and if that's working, great. But, the best companies have developers who want to talk directly to (or at least have support access to) customers and understand their problems first hand. This is where the high salaries more than pay for themselves.
I run PartnerHero, and we only work with startups (many are name-brands, some are tiny). There is NO WAY you would need a VP or Director level person for a team of 6, or even a team of 60 (our teams start at 2 and go up 80.) Startups are not the same as "small companies", so traditional outsourcing doesn't work. I would strongly recommend hiring outside of the Bay Area (there are state nexus issues you will have to address) and put aside all the local bias. It's not just about saving money, it's about hiring people who will be excited to work with you and represent your voice to the stakeholders who matter the most: your users. Support (operations in general) is really hard and most folks don't get the love and acknowledgment they need. If you can't afford to hire full-time, experiment with interns (paid) and part-time hires. I would look at the Southeast, Mid-West and even Idaho/Oregon/Utah as great options. As for us, we have folks in Honduras, Brazil, U.S., Japan, Spain and Serbia. Great talent (for ops) can be found in many areas, with exceptional English skills and great empathy/problem solving skills too.
A lot of things cost a small fortune in Bay Area. On the other most of startups should provide exceptional support.<p>I believe it's hard to have exceptional support by outsourcing it remotely (unless the whole company is remote). Especially in young company, when every week a lot of things is changing. Also developers can apply changes based on support insights.<p>Though this might make sense for established companies, I believe initially at startup you should almost never outsource support.
Interesting read, thanks for sharing! Slightly off-topic, have you thought about making your blog more readable? There is grey text on grey background. I'm short sighted and when reading this on my computer monitor while eating lunch I had to actually print it to pdf to be able to read it conveniently. Your blog also breaks in "read mode" chrome extension that I usually use to alleviate problems with bad designs like this one.
$15k per year (or $208/person/month) for CRM/Chat/Phone seems high, unless they mean unlimited Salesforce.com license for each user and some add-one... (which for 6-person team seems an excessive choice.)
Actually (sorry late to the party) our company allows folks a great work/life balance. Not a small thing. Appreciated. Well compensated. No commute. For a person in SF that is a minimum savings of 2 hrs a day. Next enjoy team relationships. We do that through slack chat which keeps them close to engineers and other company team members, and keep those departments close to customers concerns. As for costs -- having a The entire US or global footprint to choose the most qualified talent also helps us ensure we are able to ensure the best person for our client, their customer and wage for the location of our team member - win, win, win.