Customer support is an area aching for disruption, and the team behind HiOperator looks like they could be the ones to do it?? A startup team is stretched thin for resources and this could help offload some work, BUT does that mean the founders are risking losing out on unique insights b/c they're distancing themselves from customers? At what stage in a company's life do you think HiOperator is the best fit?
@afhill That's a good point! Concern over missing out on customer insights and learnings is something we hear a lot from companies. To address this, we drill down into what insights are important to founders and go above and beyond to make analytics and digests on content available. We also automatically flag any bits that we find interesting or different from previous interactions.
For startups, there are two stages where we've found that we fit in well. One is right after seed where they are getting a bit more volume at peak hours than they can efficiently handle. It's still important for them to be close to their customers but the team is lean and they need time to work on product too. The other is right after a later funding event or expansion where they are looking to upgrade their customer support service.
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@elizabethtsai I would like to follow up on this a bit. How do you handle frequent product changes / updates? In my previous role, we had changes rolled out every two weeks. It worked out well for our customer support representative to be part of our team meetings in order to stay up-to-date. Is this a scenario you can handle as well?
@cdmartens that sounds like it would be a good test for our process! We haven't had a customer need "major" changes every two weeks. We have discussed internally how we want to handle refresher training and skills maintenance as we scale. Perhaps this would be something to incorporate into that schedule.
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@afhill Customer support IS aching for disruption, the model really hasn't changed in 20 years... Amen to that!
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@elizabethtsai It might be unnecessary for a majority of companies, and it's totally possible that it's not even worth developing a process for immediately.
We had a SaaS platform that was used by external users and internal staff. Usually, our changes were small, but were made available to users/staff immediately. Our support representative had to be made aware of those changes on an ongoing basis.
This is probably cray-useful for rapidly scaling consumer product facing startups who don't have time or bandwidth to also master distribution support.
@blovgren We pair agents with products they are comfortable supporting and we train them. We pass on the tough cases to your internal engineers but that's typically only about 5-10% of the cases. And as we learn more about how your company and product operate, we can handle more and more. So for now, we probably can't debug an ion drive unless Liz gets on the line, but we could probably do most things associated with a hardware or software product, depending.
Awesome product guys. So how do you handle the "More questions". Eg Ecommerce store, client rings to place an order over the phone, but before he does, he asks few questions about the product. What happens then?
@smartpercent We do that for >50% of our customers currently. Customers call in with questions, we know the product and answer them. We learn about your business in anyway we can. You can send us a product FAQ, we can study the product material on your website or you can send us a product and we'll use it. If none of those work for you, we can give it our best attempt using whatever you can provide us and run any uncertainties by you. Over time we learn and should be asking for your help less and less. Think of our team as an extension of yours. If you can do it with someone at a desk next to yours, you can probably do it with HiOperator.
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@phil_salesses That sounds perfect! Thanks for your reply
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