Somewhat tangential to what you're doing here, but I was a Technical Lead at Support.com for 5 years. We did general support and malware-specific support but we also had contracts where we would troubleshoot a specific product or brand. We, like you intend to, had a large, distributed workforce.<p>While the business development team there (along with their head of training, Mary Waltuch) are largely responsible for the constant failure of that company, I think that SPRT's experiences proves unequivocally that this business model does not work at any reasonable scale.<p>Your clients are strongly incentivized to demand your service at a significantly lower rate come contract renewal regardless of what your cost to deliver is. Your competitors, like Support.com and Sutherland, among others, will happily underbid you. Aggressively. While I worked there, I had my salary and benefits _cut_ at least once a year.<p>You'll cut costs by moving some operations to places like the Philippines while not learning the lessons of others who have done the same. One bad monsoon season and none of your workforce will show up for weeks/months. Support.com learned this one the hard way, despite my warnings.<p>Maybe you'll show some backbone in negotiations, not bend over and take shitty contract terms from "huge brands" like our bizdev did at SPRT. This is more critical to your success than you can imagine. We sure did love hiring bizdev people whose experience was at failed companies (RadioShack, Circuit City and a bunch of people from Intuit who got sacked).<p>Best of luck to you. I really hope that you succeed...there isn't really good service from anyone in this market segment right now; the training is poor and it's a race to the bottom on price. Consumers need this to be good. Don't f' it up.
Hi there! This is Liz from HiOperator. We set out earlier this year to build a scalable US-based customer service solution that we would have used as startup founders ourselves.<p>Would love your thoughts! Happy to answer any questions and tell you more.
Assuming your approach to handling the 80% is very systematic and process-oriented than I suspect you are destined for success.<p>Having spent a couple years in enterprise support, I would guess that less than 20% of the workforce carried over 80% of the weight. This was my first experience working in a support organization, and at first I assumed it was due to unusually lacking management, but after meeting people in similar roles elsewhere I think it's par for the course.<p>Support seems to suffer from the Peter Principle[1] more than the other enterprise departments. The few competent people who were around me were almost always using the support role as a steppingstone to learn a new technology, with no long term plan to stick around, nor any desire for promotion within the organization.<p>Like many new hires, I starting identifying process issues that occupied a lot of time that should have been spent more efficiently. I even documented the issues and proposed changes to improve organizational efficiency to management, who said "good stuff, thanks" but then went on fighting fires instead of preventing them in the first place. These were very basic improvements easily understood by anyone with a technical mindset who spent a week or two observing our support process. A couple <i>years</i> later and I hear nearly identical ideas are finally being phased into the process. I take no credit, because the people with whom I shared the ideas have moved on.<p>This turned into a bit of a rant, but the gist of it is I see a huge opportunity for disruption of the customer support process for any company with regular case intake. For the sake of everyone who ever needs to obtain support, which is all of us, I hope your team succeeds!<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle</a>
I like the idea, but you guys really miss the mark on costs. I don't know where you got the idea that any small business or startup would be okay paying this. Definitely out of reach for 99% of the businesses out there.<p><pre><code> --------------
From the website:
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$999/month
Starting at $3.50+/case for most everything
Starting at $1.25/minute for a voice operator
8 hours of coverage, 5 days a week
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</code></pre>
My small project handles about 30 cases per day, I spend about an hour on the phone with customers, .<p>Suddenly I'm at $6,399 MINIMUM.<p>Nice try I guess.
Reminds me of a recent negative experience with Apple Customer support. I had an issue, and they bounced me around to several different people for pretty much no reason. Then they harassed with me "Senior" Apple advisers after the issue had already been resolved. It's pretty amazing that a company as big as Apple still has no idea how to do customer service. Looking forward to someone teaching them how it's done. Then again I also feel that it might be even more complicated for a third party to support me with that...
Incredibly optimistic about the future for HiOperator. Having run a 100+ agent contact center, they are solving some complicated challenges that many growing companies will undoubtedly face.
They seems to run an interesting tech stack with Elm + Elixir + Phoenix <a href="https://github.com/HiOperator/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/HiOperator/</a><p>Disclosure: knew this since just yesterday I was searching for Elm jobs to add to my wesite <a href="https://www.jobsinnew.tech/post-49/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jobsinnew.tech/post-49/</a>
does any company provide the inverse? I would love someone to call, wait on hold, and talk to a customer service agent for me. keep calling until they fix the problem.