Ask HN: Customer support outsourcing experiences?

My random thoughts come from the other side of the table -- my current gig is in a weird corner of the contact center outsourcing market, and we do some customer service for folks on a dedicated agent basis.

1) Be super clear internally with your goals for the outsourcing. Most customers end up with a split environment, as you are describing -- essentially duplicating pieces of the customer service management infrastructure between their internal team and the outsourced team. This adds complexity and cost, all things being equal, so you need to be clear on what the goals of the outsourcing are. This should include an analysis of what you are willing to pay for the outsourcing.

2) You're going to want to put quite a bit of effort into, and maintain control of, the training materials that you want the outsource vendor to use to train their employees. From your description, it sounds as though you MAY be trying to hand-wave that part of the problem away by supposing that any outsourced agents will be trained up to be subject matter experts on your product organically. Don't fall into that trap -- contact centers (even internal ones) are high turnover, and training needs to be clear, consistent, and quantifiable.

3) Have a plan in place that you can also share with your vendor as to how to perform quality-assurance on your outsourced agent based; ideally you would use the same criteria to objectively measure your internal staff as well, but I have yet to encounter a client who was willing/able to do that..

4) Have a full understanding of all the infrastructure that the outsource vendor is going to need access to, and be able to give the vendor enough control over that infrastructure to manage their agent base effectively. Don't make them ask you for a new agent account when they hire someone, or to remove an account when someone leaves or is let go.

Overall..

In my personal experience, the success or failure of these types of outsourcing endeavors come down to how objectively the client is willing to look at the entire scope of the problem, and whether they've clearly defined their goals. Clients who are just too busy to worry about customer service and are looking to just stop thinking about it and have the vendor "handle" it are usually unhappy. Clients who expect subject matter experts to be trained up on their product (and then continue to stay in the job for a long period of time) but who are looking to pay bottom dollar are typically unhappy.

YMMV. Best of luck in your search!

This is a business I've tried to start in the past.

I've usually found some cool-ish indie hacker project that was tech-oriented and doing well, just ping the owner/dev and say, "hey, i'm in between gigs, an indie hacker myself, and have thought of starting an outsource-support-type business, any interest? flexible on pay rate, etc."

if i got an answer, it was usually something like, 'thanks but we want the product/service insight/learnings from the customers (so we want/have to do it ourselves)'.

no real insights on how best to do it, just know what i would want if i ever outsourced my own support. i have outsourced social media and things like that on a limited basis, with limited success.

what would i want, in terms of customer service, for my baby?

  - should look like it's coming from me/us
  - should hit whatever SLAs we specify (one hour response, etc.)
  - should be (very) technical if necessary
  - should be geared towards self-help/service/kb-driven
  - but not in that anti-human way
  - ideally graduates to producing CSAT-like measures/surveys
  - weekly summaries of issues/root causes/etc.
  - weekly summaries of 'where the market/user base' is going/wanting
  - pro-active documentation/kb/screencasts/etc.
  - real documentation/reproducability/jira doc/screenshots/etc.
  - geared towards customer success and even up/cross-selling
  - some revenue/benefit tie-in like profit-sharing, bonuses, etc.
  - should be super-independent; i'm outsourcing for a reason.

maybe it's a pipe dream to think 'support' could be more than just support - more than just a cost-center - but i still hope that's the case, even if i don't quite believe it is actually true.

part of the outsourcing function, to me, is to have another, semi-independent partner who is invested in my success.

please ping me if you're open to exploring a new/additional provider.

I haven’t experienced outsourced cs that was effective beyond searching your support docs and relaying obvious answers.

That being said, if that’s the majority of your support burden, it may well be worth it.

It’s a competitive advantage having the same people building a product also supporting it (in the early days)

> It’s a competitive advantage

I've worked for a small company whose competitors were superior in every regard, except that all our customers could call us any time during business hours and almost immediately talk to someone who would legitimately try to help and have some idea of how the product worked internally. I suspect it was one of the few advantages keeping them in business.

We train internal support staff as a first step towards career development. Almost all of them have gone on to higher positions or left for positions we can't offer in our exact industry. What we do is have them shadow the experts and do our customer training certifications. Once their team leader deems them ready they start answering tickets, which are reviewed by a senior before sending. Along with excellent living documentation, it doesn't take long before we have high performing new team members. We also do phone support and use a pre-booking system developed internally similar to calendly, customers love it.

I have never seen outsourced support work. I've seen it maybe 5+ times varying from teams of 5 to 500. It always is bad when someone else is doing it.

I've been at two companies where I led or was part of bringing it in house. It always was 100x better, and people forget how much marketing comes from good support.

Hit me up if you want to chat, email in profile. I can probably send you toward people who can lead this charge as well.

I have a lot of experience with this question, having launched both in-house / outsourced contact centers and built products for these teams.

There are a lot of "it depends" factors here - what is the actual product; contact rate; size/scale of your biz; time horizon you're solving for; specific types of issues being supported; cost of customer churn.

Happy to chat through some thoughts on a call / via DM 1:1

Most of the recommendation I've seen have been companies based in Philippines. I've heard about Support Shepherd and some of the reviews on homepage seems to be from known names.