From Customer Success Summit 2017 - Fernando Pizarro, CEO at PeopleDelight, Inc., discusses "Knowing When to Outsource Support for Better Customer Success". Learn more about Customer Success Summit: http://customersuccesssummit.com Totango is the leading enterprise- grade customer success platform that helps recurring revenue businesses proactively impact business outcomes with customer success. With solutions to empower Customer Success Teams or entire companies, Totango enables everyone to participate in customer success. Learn more at www.totango.com.

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When to Outsource Customer
Support for Customer Success

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About Me
• CEO of PeopleDelight, a company
focused on providing friendly,
intelligent, delightful customer
support for startups.
• Co-Author of Farm Don’t Hunt, and
of Blueprints for Saas Sales
• Failed the audition for Guy’s band…
so it’s probably better you can’t hear
me singing…

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So why are we here?
• I say SaaS companies should outsource their customer support. Heresy!!
• Most companies don’t everything well! You lot are focused on customer
success.
• Doing customer support well is hard.
• The belief is that outsourcing is the evil empire – but the dirty secret is that
when you succeed, you outsource…for good reasons.
• You shouldn’t outsource success…but you should outsource support.

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But great customer support is still crucial because
it’s your first point of contact

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Getting support right: obvious, maybe…but HARD!
Hiring
Training Communication

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“But wait, we’re doing all that.”
• Responding within minutes
• Instant access via phone, email, and chat
• 24/7 or nights and weekends
• Lots of opportunities for the success team
• Constantly improving against your baseline stats
• Not getting any pressure about costs

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Let’s talk about HIRING
• Are you able to get the quality of support person you want
in your market – SF, LA, NYC?
• Is what you pay in this market commensurate with the
work your support people are doing?
• Is your support team reliable, trustworthy, and happy to
work extended hours, nights, and weekends?

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Some TRAINING questions to ask yourself
• Do you train with “side by sides”
• Do you have an up to date written training
program?
• Does your support team understand your full
customer onboarding process?
• Is your initial training good enough to make
your agents feel good and prepared?

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Example – when training falls short
customers suffer

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Some COMMUNICATION questions to ask
yourself…
• Does support, product, and engineering and
success teams work in Slack together?
• Strong VOC program?
• Consistent “hot topics?”
• This all this needs to be trained and
maintained consistently.

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Example: Good process – flustered CTO

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If you are already doing all these things, and you are
finding hiring easy and cheap…
I got nothing for ya…

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But, to take it to the next level:
• You should consider working with a partner!
• Most startups don’t have the time or bandwidth for real training.
• Most startups are based in high cost markets where it’s hard to get
good support people at a reasonable budget.
• Few companies can spare the resources to implement process-
driven quality programs.
• AND…you should be focusing on customer success!

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Let’s say you really ARE doing support right. Are
you doing it THIS right?
$-
$100
$200
$300
$400
$500
$600
SF Internal Onshore Vendor Offshore Vendor
Yearly Cost Of Running
7 Support People 8am-8pm M-F

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Don’t believe me? Guess who outsources their
customer support…
Even if you think doing it internally is beEer… at some point, when
you scale doing it internally gets expensive fast.

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You might say “well SaaS is different”
• SaaS is different…because of customer success, not because of customer
support.
• But the same variables that drive vendoring at scale in other tech companies
apply in SaaS…for customer support.

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You also might say “We really think we can do it
better internally”
Myth: if we’re in house, then
• Customer success will know what is
happening
• We will respond more quickly
• Everyone will learn from each other
Reality: In-house or remote
• Only training information transfer lets
you know what is happening
• We will still respond slowly unless we
have great information resources
• We’ll only learn from each other if
support has a formal seat at the table
As soon as you scale what makes you go remote
is only one thing: COST.

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That’s where a vendor fits in
• Hire globally at lower rates and higher quality
• Focus on training and systems to ensure scale and repeatability
• Virtual workforces attrit less and have better performance
• Just like you don’t generally change your electric or do your own
plumbing, you call in people who do it all day long, have the right
tools, and can do better than you can because it’s what they do.

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Ok, ok you got me. But WHEN do I outsource?
Some good milestones
• When you decide to offer
24/7 support
• When your support costs are
running $200k+ a year
• When your support team is
costing you space
• When you decide to expand
internationally
It’s not binary!
• You can do a trial period
• You can start by offering a
channel you don’t offer, like
chat, or lower complexity
responses, like email
• You can work with a vendor to
cover extended hours and
weekends

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THANK YOU