[00:00:25] Maxime Manseau: I basically invited Sophie today because I believe she has a very personal story with outsourcing support. The kind of story you don't see every day and I think you learn a lot very quickly regarding outsourcing. Yeah, just wanted to invite you. I have a bunch of questions, so you can just share your insights and answer a few questions.

[00:00:50] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, Sophie if you can maybe introduce yourself in just a few words the and tell us a bit about the story of Outskool, it would be amazing.

[00:01:00] Sophie Heller: Sure, so I joined Outschool in the spring of 2018 as its second employee. I was the whole support inbox. I processed all of our class and teacher applications, among other things, because we were such an early stage startup.

[00:01:13] Sophie Heller: And the story that Max is referring to, I was at the company for two years. We'd grown to about 20 people, raised a series A. And then in March of 2020, experienced the kind of growth that I don't think I'll ever experience again in my career. As a bit of background, OutSchool is a live online class program for kids.

[00:01:33] Sophie Heller: And prior to the pandemic, we had a pretty small user base, mostly homeschool kids, very niche product. And we happened to be in exactly the right place at the right time, Peloton or Zoom. So in March of 2020, U. S. public schools around the country, they all just started to close their doors about March 13th.

[00:01:50] Sophie Heller: And OutSchool did a really smart thing. We released a free class program for public school kids affected by closures. And it's the best time to release something for your support team on a Friday afternoon. So we put that out. And then I woke up the next morning and we had 20X'd overnight. And we continued to grow for the next six months or so as more and more kids, including those at brick and mortar public schools, Started to use our program.

[00:02:16] Sophie Heller: I had a pretty wild waking up on a Saturday. I had texts from the entire company, including the CEO, asking me where I was.

[00:02:23] Maxime Manseau: Sophie, just a question before like a COVID hit. How many were you in support? Was it just you or you were like a few of you?

[00:02:31] Sophie Heller: Yeah. I was the first person and then we hired four additional people in that kind of hybrid support class and teacher role.

[00:02:39] Sophie Heller: So we were a really small five person generalist team handling everything at the company.

[00:02:45] Maxime Manseau: And you grew, you tell me if you're right, to over 100 support rate. So from five to 100 plus, right? In Yeah.

[00:02:53] Sophie Heller: Yeah. That's correct. And just.

[00:02:55] Maxime Manseau: In a few days or like a few weeks or like overnight.

[00:02:59] Sophie Heller: Yeah, more like in the space of a month or two.

[00:03:01] Sophie Heller: So we, we did a few different things. We hired a lot internally, and then we also engaged two PPOs. And I'm really excited to see Fumi here from our Hugo tech team. That's the main company that we used for our support and class and teacher processing. So in that first space of a few weeks, we immediately had to go from this world where nothing was written down.

[00:03:22] Sophie Heller: We had no processes, very few policies. Everything was on a case by case, use your best judgment basis. And we really had to switch worlds immediately to be able to bring on outsourcers. That meant that I had to create our first documentation systems, set up a ton of macros in Intercom, because we were free handing most of our responses.

[00:03:42] Sophie Heller: Create training, create quality and eventually scale those programs as the company grew.

[00:03:49] Maxime Manseau: Okay. We're going to come back to that. So first I want to say to all the people who are watching us, if you have any question, don't hesitate to write them in the comments. We probably won't do a Q and A at the end, but we just going to take the question as they come.

[00:04:05] Maxime Manseau: I just prefer to do it this way. So just don't hesitate. Basically like Sophie the main idea I have is I have a first a few questions about I, I know like for you, it was obvious that you had to to outsource, but I want to focus on the first part about I would say the pros and cons.

[00:04:23] Maxime Manseau: How do you know if I should outsource or not? This, like on the first part, I have a few questions and on the second part, then we're gonna take a deeper look about okay. So now if I need to outsource my support team or part of my support team what should I do, basically, if that's fine with you?

[00:04:39] Maxime Manseau: Sure. Yeah so my first question basically for you is, what would be the key factors I should look like if I had to make the decision to outsource support or not? What would you recommend?

[00:04:53] Sophie Heller: So as you mentioned, Outskool, we really had no choice. So I think further down the line, I can talk about, I have some opinions on going more in house versus using a highly outsourced team, but Outskool's position, when we grew that weekend, we had a 15, 000 ticket backlog within three weeks.

[00:05:11] Sophie Heller: And so we really had no choice. We had to catch up on the backlog and then also confront the fact that this wasn't just like like a retail company experiencing a very brief spike in tickets and then going back to normal. This was our new reality, so I think that some things outside our situation that could have led us to outsource would have been wanting to have more 24 7 coverage.

[00:05:34] Sophie Heller: We were a San Francisco office team, so even servicing the rest of the U. S. would have been a little difficult for us if we were working 9 to 5 Pacific hours. So Having more coverage, especially in these times, I think a lot of companies don't have the financials to hire fully in house teams. So that also plays a large role.

[00:05:55] Maxime Manseau: Sorry I'm like, the main point I have in mind is obviously I'm, And they could buy it in a sense like it's cheaper, right? We'll talk a bit about that, but sorry I thought you'd go ahead. But this is like on my side, why I buy it just like first, like it's cheaper.

[00:06:09] Sophie Heller: And then I think the other thing somewhat related to having a spike is if you have a regularly seasonal business.

[00:06:15] Sophie Heller: OutSchool was always a seasonal business, aligns with the academic school year. So homeschool kids, they were using our product during the school year. And then the summer, that was a great time, if you wanted to take a vacation or things were a little bit more dead. Yeah. So I think that even had we not hit that crazy spike, it would've been useful for us to outsource during our busier times.

[00:06:35] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. Depending on the product you're working for. But if you are, for example, have I know mark, like I don't like e-commerce marketplace, something like this. Christmas is hitting. Would make sense to hire extra people for the shipping chain.

[00:06:52] Sophie Heller: Yep, exactly.

[00:06:53] Maxime Manseau: Okay. And I don't know if you mentioned, but I've seen also people like looking to outsourcing like the company because they wanted to offer 24 seven coverage, right? And I know this is like also one of the men, like sometimes even just for like legal matters, like they don't have like entities, like for example, I don't know in Asia and they're starting to have a lot of customer in Asia.

[00:07:17] Maxime Manseau: So they're just like outsourcing support for their, right? Yeah. And so that

[00:07:21] Sophie Heller: was

[00:07:23] Maxime Manseau: Go ahead. Sorry.

[00:07:24] Sophie Heller: Yeah. And so that, that was something that helped us by bringing on the Hugo Tech team. We were able to release live chat for the first time. Of course it was a question of numbers. If we only had five people working Monday through Friday, we weren't going to have anything close to, I guess we had more of a one business day email response time.

[00:07:42] Sophie Heller: But that was a big step. I think having, a lot of people and being able to staff the, the volume that was coming in, which was about 25, 000 tickets a week at our busiest time wouldn't have been possible without having a large outsource team.

[00:07:56] Maxime Manseau: 5k tickets a day. Yeah. A lot. And so what are basically like the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing customer support?

[00:08:04] Maxime Manseau: What do you think?

[00:08:07] Sophie Heller: So as we've mentioned, of course, cost comes up. flexibility, being able to tell your outsourcer, okay, in our busiest times, we need 50 agents on the front line. Whereas when we're a little slower, we'll cut down to 30. You have those advantages, you have more time coverage, if you're working with an outsourcer in a different region.

[00:08:27] Sophie Heller: And then it also, in OutSchool's case, so many things were on fire at the same time. So support was just one of the few things that I owned during that transition, and I don't think anyone at the company would have had the time to schedule agents to think about some of the forecasting and budgeting questions.

[00:08:44] Sophie Heller: And so our outsourcing partner was really helpful in helping us, close those gaps in a way that we wouldn't have been able to do competently while under so much stress.

[00:08:53] Maxime Manseau: You mentioned the cost when we had a chat like a few days or a week ago you, you told me you didn't handle budgeting.

[00:09:00] Maxime Manseau: I think it was your head of ops. You mentioned outsourcers were about like three times cheaper than your in house support agents. Is that correct?

[00:09:08] Sophie Heller: Yeah, that, that's correct. So our escalated team was fully in house and depending on region, they were paid between 22 to 25 an hour. And so using an outsourced partner was about three to four times cheaper per agent.

[00:09:22] Maxime Manseau: Use like the company you use is in Nigeria, correct?

[00:09:27] Sophie Heller: Hugo Tech.

[00:09:28] Maxime Manseau: Okay, got it. And so just something I want to share here with the people, like I, at least this is my opinion. First there is no I don't believe like there is good or wrong answer about, like outsourcing customer support.

[00:09:42] Maxime Manseau: It's first really needs to be based on your needs and when you're paying. Trying to achieve over the next quarter's right. But like this within hour is not about pushing people to outsource supports, like for many companies, like it's not the right moves and not the right strategy, but I think it's just worth the time.

[00:09:59] Maxime Manseau: Worth taking the time to just, look at the pros, the cons. One of the cons obviously that comes to my mind and we'll take talk about it later are like the culture in a sense. I think very tough, very tough. Perfect cultural fit, at least to have the same cultural fit that the people you have in the house.

[00:10:18] Maxime Manseau: But I'm sure it's a challenge that can be managed, right?

[00:10:22] Sophie Heller: Sure and I see a question about that in the chat now. I'd love to speak to that that cultural challenge.

[00:10:29] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, go ahead. So maybe I'm just going to read the question, like Joshua is saying how are you able to do all of that while also setting up the outsourcing?

[00:10:37] Maxime Manseau: Talking about like the documentation, the training and all. And yeah.

[00:10:43] Sophie Heller: I'll say that, I think that this, the situation was unprecedented, but also my position during it, it definitely helped living alone during a pandemic where in the San Francisco area where I lived at the time, things were very locked down.

[00:10:56] Sophie Heller: And Yeah. So definitely an easier time. It was a ton of work. And I think that, the pandemic was the reason that we scaled like that. But I think it also contributed to myself and the other early members of the OutSchool team being able to do all of that. Oh, it was a great way to stay busy during that time.

[00:11:12] Sophie Heller: So yeah, I think the other thing there is that it was incredibly painful for me. So the first two years that I was at OutSchool until the scaling hit, I knew most of our teachers on a name by name basis. I had trained a lot of them. I knew many of our parents as well. So it was so painful for me to see the tickets coming in and knowing I can answer these questions and even trying to go into intercom and do it on an ad hoc basis.

[00:11:38] Sophie Heller: So it was painful for me knowing that if I was going to write documentation, think about training to get our our first two outsourcers in the door. I couldn't do tickets and then also create, lay the foundations that like really prioritizing. So my first priority, I didn't work on all of these things at once.

[00:11:57] Sophie Heller: I don't think even, with all of my pandemic stuck at home, free time, that wouldn't have been possible. So the first thing I did was create documentation and it was really challenging because everything was obvious to an extent. I'd been there for a while. I took a lot of time to train all of the new employees who came on.

[00:12:16] Sophie Heller: So no one at the company had ever needed to write down, okay, if we have a refund request, what do we do, or what is our policy on teachers teaching this kind of class? And so what I really did was just took a step back and I tried to extrapolate. So I thought, okay, we have these new agents and new teams coming in.

[00:12:34] Sophie Heller: They know literally nothing about out school. How would I explain, even things that seemed incredibly obvious? What are our top 10 or so processes or types of questions that come into the inbox and how do I write them out step by step? And each time I encountered a message that needed to be sent, I wrote the language and that, that was especially important because.

[00:12:56] Sophie Heller: Not only did we need agents to be very speedy once we introduced live chat, but I think, and, someone else asked here about company culture, a lot of our agents were not native English speakers. And so having the, preset language, I think was incredibly, it made them quick and it made sure that all of the responses given were super accurate.

[00:13:15] Sophie Heller: And I, especially as an education company, it was very important to me that all of our written materials were just excellent grammatically correct English.

[00:13:25] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. And I think just to complete like your answer regarding Joshua I would say that, your situation was a bit atypical because I would say in a perfect world, you first want to have all your documentation process ready, right?

[00:13:39] Maxime Manseau: And then outsource, but in your case, because of the scaling and the pandemic, you had to do like, All of them at once. Yeah. But I will recommend all the people here were like thinking about outsourcing. I don't know what's your take on this Sophie, but to basically have a clear idea of where you're going, what the process is, if you're still like at the stage where you're like changing your support operations, you don't have clear processes, you don't have clear workflow, I'm not sure, it's helpful, you first need to focus and organize your shit together basically, and then outsource.

[00:14:13] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, exactly.

[00:14:14] Sophie Heller: Yeah, so we were in this unfortunate situation where I needed to fly the plane while I was building it. So I definitely we had no choice. Our hands were tied. We had all these customers who were waiting for, a month at a time to get just a basic response from us, basic refund.

[00:14:30] Sophie Heller: If I were to do this, so OutSchool became a 200 person company, Series D, a lot more established, much more process y, specialized teams. So if we were to set up outsourcing at the current stage of the company, I think that would easily be a one or even two quarter project just to get a few materials passed to an outsourcing team.

[00:14:50] Sophie Heller: I definitely documentation for me is a non starter. If you don't have that, then it's really difficult to outsource because you really outsource agents are great at following procedures, but. They're not great at, cause they're not employees of your company. They're not going to come in and make a judgment call and decide what your policy should be.

[00:15:10] Sophie Heller: They're going to follow something that you're providing to them. So that's the first thing that you need to have just really strongly documented processes.

[00:15:17] Maxime Manseau: Eventually, I'm not even sure you would like, if they could take initiative by themselves, I'm not even sure you want that, because they might not respect your guidelines your, I don't know, like that would be difficult.

[00:15:29] Maxime Manseau: Like you just want you just want people who apply basically the rules you gave them and you need to define the rules, right?

[00:15:37] Sophie Heller: Yeah, and that's true. One of the major areas I owned at OutSchool was our refund policies and the ways that they were implemented in the inbox. And so we definitely saw instances before the refund.

[00:15:49] Sophie Heller: In my head, they were really fleshed out. It was clear, here's a situation you give one where you don't give one. But until it was even more fleshed out, you'd see differences from agent to agent, or some agents, maybe they weren't getting higher CSAT scores or QA scores, so they were more generous with refunds to improve their own statistics.

[00:16:08] Sophie Heller: So yeah, you definitely don't want agents going in and make, making those decisions because oftentimes they'll deviate from what you'd want in an ideal world. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:18] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. And Sophie, could you walk us on the maybe common pitfalls to avoid when you're trying to outsource customer support?

[00:16:29] Sophie Heller: Sure. So I think that one thing is really making sure that you're not signing a very long contract with a partner before you've gauged whether they're a good fit for your business. So I think this kind of goes into someone below asked a cultural question. And for me, so we had a Hugo tech or BPO in Nigeria, who we engaged starting in the spring of 2020.

[00:16:54] Sophie Heller: And they're still the sole outsourcing partner at out school. At that time, we also engaged a larger U S based much more established company, Hugo tech was a startup still is. And I really saw a lot of cultural differences more so with the U S because they were very very bureaucratic. Not adaptable.

[00:17:15] Sophie Heller: The agents, they, we had thought that using native English speakers, people who had more of a cultural basis that was similar to our customers who are mostly U S and Canada based would be easier, but in a lot of ways, it was much easier to work with the Hugo tech team because they were a startup.

[00:17:32] Sophie Heller: Like us, their leadership is really great in adapting and coming to us and saying. Really being a thought partner saying that certain workflows could be improved, that we could be going about things differently. Versus the U S partner. They just really didn't provide that same partnership at the leadership level.

[00:17:52] Sophie Heller: And so to me, culturally, yeah, we had to deal with, I think I saw Wentzforth in a ticket once, some more kind of British English or some expressions that weren't the same, but. That was a lot easier to deal with than the kind of attitude of, not wanting to make changes or have agents, learn new tools and technology and investigate things for us.

[00:18:15] Sophie Heller: So I think that I think really looking to see is the outsourcer, do they have a similar way of doing things to your business? Do you think that, cause assumedly if you're outsourcing for the first time, maybe you're not a startup, but you're probably a smaller company, a little bit newer to operationalize and support.

[00:18:34] Sophie Heller: So just really think about, you want to work with someone who works in a similar way to you.

[00:18:39] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. And in terms of, this is a good point. Like in terms of size, you want something, someone who adapts to yourself, if like that, If you're pretty new, you don't want like a company who have any huge processes and where like when you need something to be changed, like it takes months.

[00:18:56] Maxime Manseau: So I guess like depending up your stage, it's a good, it's a good insight. You need to really make sure like the right partner you're looking for. And also I think you, you mentioned to be very careful on not being, sorry, I'm gonna rephrase it. You mentioned being very careful on the minimum length of the contract, right?

[00:19:19] Maxime Manseau: Can you tell us a bit more about that?

[00:19:21] Sophie Heller: Yeah, so we were I didn't personally negotiate the contract with the U. S. vendors. So I'm not remembering if it was one year or two years, but it, I do remember that it had a certain agent minimum and that it also included an additional fee for the leadership on top of it.

[00:19:39] Sophie Heller: And we. We didn't really have stable we weren't getting that same level of partnership. They weren't a value add and we were locked in a way where it was really clear to me within a month of engaging this partner, it was clear that it just wasn't working out and we were able to downsize. We started with 25 agents there.

[00:19:55] Sophie Heller: We downsized to five agents and then two or three people on the leadership side. But we were locked in and it was, it became difficult to disengage the partner. And

[00:20:06] Maxime Manseau: so yeah, all the folks here listening to us, I would say Sophie advice, be very careful to not get locked on a long term contract, flag the partner doesn't fit with what you're looking for.

[00:20:18] Maxime Manseau: You just need to be like, Hey, stop. So be very careful with that. Yeah, and I

[00:20:22] Sophie Heller: think on another

[00:20:24] Maxime Manseau: Sorry, go ahead.

[00:20:25] Sophie Heller: Sorry, go ahead. I think on another point, being careful with how much you give to the partner, because it can seem tempting. Okay, I did the work, I talked to a few different companies, I've engaged this company, we signed a contract.

[00:20:37] Sophie Heller: Cool. Let's give everything to them, but you want to be really thoughtful about trying to, iteratively hand off just a few things. So with our Hugo tech team, we could have sent them all of our frontline support, all of our class and teacher applications, which they eventually ended up handling.

[00:20:53] Sophie Heller: We started the company off with just a simple use case. Processing all of our credits and refunds were manual. So just processing these manual refunds to give customers credit. And that was a really small thing that helped us out a lot. And we were able to see, Wow, this company is doing a great job.

[00:21:10] Sophie Heller: We, trust them and can give them more work. Versus if we'd given them everything and seen, Oh they're not doing as well on topic A. And topic B we realized wasn't fleshed out enough. It's a lot harder to retract it. And also thinking about your in house team, I know that I, every Monday I'd get to work, and I'd process 50 to 100 manual credits, and I was thinking like, okay, I have a Harvard education, and I'm manually processing credits.

[00:21:34] Sophie Heller: I was delighted when, after years, I was able to hand that off to an outsourcer. But, thinking about if it didn't go well, and your in house team had to take the task back, it's so much better to have never handed it off in the first place. Just being really thoughtful over there.

[00:21:51] Maxime Manseau: Okay, this is another super important advice to me.

[00:21:55] Maxime Manseau: You can't just handle, basically, your Even if you say hey, I'm gonna outsource, let's say a first line support, right? You can't handle like everything from the beginning. So maybe start looking at some type of tickets or like part of your product to support a small amount of agents.

[00:22:13] Maxime Manseau: And over time you add like other part of the product or the processes and you start building out like your outsourcing this way. Sounds great.

[00:22:23] Sophie Heller: Yeah, and one additional point on that note, if you have a very complicated process or something that maybe you need to see it in action before fully rolling it out, you can always roll it out to a really small subset of your team before just releasing it inbox wide.

[00:22:39] Sophie Heller: So we did that. We had a lot of complicated situations that would come up when a teacher didn't show up to class. And so we handed that, we put that in a separate bucket in Intercom, and we had five to ten agents from Hugo Tech who were staffed on that, as opposed to, I think it would have been a disaster for many reasons that are a little too niche to go into here, had we just handed that off to our entire hundred plus agent base.

[00:23:02] Sophie Heller: You can always start small, work out the kinks, and then have everyone on the team handling a topic.

[00:23:10] Maxime Manseau: Got it. Okay, cool. So just to make sure here can you confirm basically you outsources I would say you're level one, but you're level two have been in house always. Is that correct?

[00:23:24] Sophie Heller: Yeah I guess we didn't really have a distinction when it was me and four other people. We just were every ticket that could, that came in, whether it was just a school. Informational question or even a more serious we had because we worked with kids, there were more serious trust and safety issues that could happen.

[00:23:41] Sophie Heller: That was all just the same team. And so we had to create the distinction of what is a ticket that we think that the frontline could handle and then what is a ticket that either it's it involves more complicated technical investigation. It's a little bit Less of a fleshed out scenario. So we don't fully it's very case by case or, it's sensitive in nature, someone is really angry.

[00:24:04] Sophie Heller: There's a child safety issue at stake. And that was another thing that I had to do when developing documentation for the first time, getting a real sense of what would be reasonable for outsourced agents to handle and what is always going to need to be handled by the in house team.

[00:24:19] Sophie Heller: And as time goes on, I think we had initially, we had a 20 percent escalation rate of tickets, which is. Really bad for the, for a lot of reasons, really bad for the people working in those escalated tiers. And with the understanding that as time went on, we'd work to, and that's a lot of what my team did, really worked to get that percentage down and put more and more topics into the hands of outsourcers with all the materials that they need to be successful.

[00:24:44] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. I know like out there, there is like a perception that outsourcing support is only beneficial for cost saving, and may lead to a negative impact on customer satisfaction and so on. What's your take on that?

[00:25:03] Sophie Heller: Yeah it goes back to the situation we were in.

[00:25:06] Sophie Heller: I think the worst thing that we did for customer satisfaction was having tickets sit for a month and not respond to them. That's what we were able to do as an in house team. So I understand that's an extreme situation. But. It was so much better, even if our outsourcers didn't immediately know the answer, or I didn't provide them with clear enough documentation and training to fully close out a ticket, just the fact that our customers were starting to hear from us was a major improvement.

[00:25:33] Sophie Heller: I think that, in, in a more normal situation, I think that can also be the case. Maybe you have customers in different regions and they're not hearing back, if they're in Australia and you're not staffing over the weekend in the U S they're not hearing back for a really long time. I think, granted you want your outsourcers to not be sending them fully false information, but.

[00:25:54] Sophie Heller: Assuming everyone's, operating on good faith and they're trying to the best of their ability to answer questions, it's so much better to actually get help than to have to wait. I talked to a small startup recently. I had an issue I had to write into support and I saw they had a 72 hour response time.

[00:26:11] Sophie Heller: I'd so much rather deal with an outsourcing team who could help me quicker than that.

[00:26:17] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, I guess it, it depends also of the type of product you're supporting, but I'm currently also like using a software and they're supposed to provide an answer in two or three hours, like they're using intercom.

[00:26:30] Maxime Manseau: So it's live chat, but it takes more than 24 hours and it's helpful cause like, I don't have the answer. So I can't, I, I can't finish the work, then they give me just a piece of an answer. I need to wait another day. So I guess yeah. Time would be like, I would say like the first maybe thing to to consider.

[00:26:49] Maxime Manseau: Do you see something else?

[00:26:51] Sophie Heller: Yeah. So our customers and I'm speaking mostly about our parents. So they, they're dealing with experiences that involve their child. They're, those experiences are, I would say are much more emotional than, me trying to deal with this software company similar to the experience you're describing.

[00:27:09] Sophie Heller: So if their kid missed class and they're really unhappy or they, something weird happens with another kid in class and they need to record it. It's so much better to have, even if our outsourcing team couldn't fully solve things, if they were just gonna, say, Hey, we've received your message, we're passing it on to the internal team, just for our customers, knowing that their sensitive concern was going to be answered, that was super helpful, since in another world, Maybe they, maybe we took out the, we didn't have an outsourcing team.

[00:27:40] Sophie Heller: We took out the stuff where they're just acknowledging and then escalating the ticket. The customer has no idea what's happening in our world. So they're just seeing, Oh, I'm waiting three, four days to get a response from our internal team. Setting expectations is really helpful there. Whether it's something emotional or in a lot of cases, people writing in and looking for a refund, maybe they won't get it immediately, but they know, okay, out school that we've received the the ticket, someone's looking into it, someone will get back to me.

[00:28:07] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Oh, so to get a bit, I would say deeper, into the subject, how the company prepare its in house team for the transition to outsource support. So if tomorrow, like I have, let's say like 10 or 15 teams and I'm looking to double this team using outsourcing support, like what do I need to do?

[00:28:29] Sophie Heller: Yeah. So different from the OutSchool use case in which we were building outsourcing and the in house team at the same time. I would say if if you're starting from a more traditional standpoint, it's a lot about setting expectations. So having your in house team know these are the topics that will be handled by the outsourcers.

[00:28:46] Sophie Heller: These are still expectations that you are going to still need to solve these types of tickets. I think having a better understanding of how questions will get answered. We went through a lot of iterations of this at out school. At the beginning, we just had a Slack channel where anyone could ask questions.

[00:29:03] Sophie Heller: We asked that agents do this publicly so that knowledge could be shared. And that was my life for weeks. Just getting DMs or not DMs messages in this channel. Every three to five minutes and needing to, answer questions that were blocking costs, blocking agents from answering customers.

[00:29:19] Sophie Heller: So understanding for your internal team, who's going to be how are they going to help agents? How are they going to contribute their knowledge? And I think finally, wherever possible, trying to build connection between your in house team and your outsourcer, especially if people are on a really different time zone.

[00:29:34] Sophie Heller: One thing that we did at Outskool that I think worked really well, we had a bi weekly support meeting for everyone on the in house team and our outsourcing teams. And it was a time where We, we wanted people ideally to have their videos turned on in zoom. We did some breakout rooms and even just having this one meeting every other week.

[00:29:54] Sophie Heller: It was a great way to show, okay, we're on the same team. We're meeting each other. We're getting to know each other on a bit more of a personal level, talk through the common questions we're seeing. So I think anything you can do to build connection and it's difficult with different time zones, different cultures, but I think it goes a long way.

[00:30:11] Maxime Manseau: Okay. And did you have out of curiosity? On the people, the outdoors people, did you have a lot of turnover, in a sense they go, you have new ones, or not so much,

[00:30:22] Sophie Heller: yeah we did have a lot of turnover. So not all of this was bad turnover. I was really glad to see that.

[00:30:28] Sophie Heller: A lot of our agents were able to move to more project based roles. So Hugo Tech's QA team grew and was mostly staffed from the agent based QA training, other project based roles at the company. So that was part of the turnover. We, of course, did have other turnover, people just deciding to leave, not performing well enough, et cetera.

[00:30:50] Sophie Heller: And that was difficult. We did have every month or so we'd see a new class of agents come on, which could have been anywhere from five to 20 agents. And it was difficult, but one thing that made it a lot easier was having a really strong onboarding curriculum in Lessonly, the training LMS we use.

[00:31:06] Sophie Heller: That made it so that it was very clear and that's something I couldn't have done. I hired a training specialist to specifically own Lessonly and other in person or nine person live training facilitation. And I think that's something that made a huge world of difference in having that turnover.

[00:31:23] Maxime Manseau: Got it. Yeah. Okay. Cool. I think now if you are okay with it, we can maybe move to, to like how to do outsourcing sure. In a sense, go a bit deeper. So I'm super interested to know what kind of metrics you were using. To basically monitor outsource agents. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

[00:31:45] Sophie Heller: Yeah, so we used your bread and butter support metrics, CSAT, looking at SLAs, handle time, first medium, first response, and say the same types of things that we looked at for our in house team. One thing that made a huge difference, I built our first QA program. We were using Klaus as our QA tool and having a QA score in there that made a huge difference as well since we didn't want to, of course you want to make sure that customers are happy, but.

[00:32:13] Sophie Heller: There are a lot of scenarios where customers just aren't going to be happy. Maybe you're not giving them a refund back there. Sometimes people just can't be pleased just because of who they are. And so having a different way to measure agent performance, are they following workflows correctly?

[00:32:27] Sophie Heller: Are they. Personalizing their responses, giving empathy to our customers outside of just, be sad. So I thought

[00:32:34] Maxime Manseau: this was incredibly

[00:32:34] Sophie Heller: helpful.

[00:32:36] Maxime Manseau: Definitely. And you, when we talk, you mentioned that basically, I don't know if I could say you had a bad experience with SLA, but it's not something that should be put on the front line.

[00:32:47] Maxime Manseau: Is that correct?

[00:32:49] Sophie Heller: Yeah, so it's a tough one because when we introduced live chat, we did need to have some sort of SLA because otherwise it's not live chat, right? And intercom especially, which we used, is confusing to users because it looks like live chat and it can function as email or as live chat and there's no way for the user to know.

[00:33:10] Sophie Heller: So we set a one minute first response SLA for chat. Okay. Which that, that was fairly easy to meet because it was more really just, hi, my name's Sophie. I'll be helping you today. What can I do? So we tried to, maintain that first response SLA. And then further down the line, we initially had SLAs for next responses.

[00:33:31] Sophie Heller: But we made those a lot more loose, because one of my biggest pet peeves was when agents would really try to hit the SLA, and I get it, it's stressful, you're, if you're looking from the agent perspective in intercom, you have that little counter, and then you get that red thing that says you missed the SLA, so I get why agents were really, focused on meeting it.

[00:33:51] Sophie Heller: But it's so much better. I don't care if you take three minutes to respond. If you give me the right answer, if you take one minute to respond, but you tell me something that's outdated because we had a product lease two weeks ago that reverses something or just totally incorrect, that's not helpful. And that's going to confuse the customer more.

[00:34:10] Sophie Heller: So that was a struggle that I really had throughout my time at out school just Making sure that agents knew accuracy was so much more important than the SLA. Much better to miss that.

[00:34:22] Maxime Manseau: And finding basically the sweet point between quality and speed, right? But if you had to choose between one or the other let's go for accuracy.

[00:34:32] Sophie Heller: Definitely quality. And and of course we did need to get back to customers and not have a one month backlog or not, we don't want to list an SLA of we'll get back to you in a few minutes and then have every response come back as an email so that we're not doing chat.

[00:34:48] Sophie Heller: But I'd so much rather have a more efficient, we might not be able to have a first touch resolution on every ticket, but. To me, the closer we get to that ideal is so much more helpful than a ton of responses that still leave the customer confused, needing to create another ticket, have the ticket escalated.

[00:35:07] Sophie Heller: So definitely my personal bias there.

[00:35:10] Maxime Manseau: Okay, cool. I'm looking at the time I've seen, we've been talking for 40 minutes. So let's, we'll try to to finish in the next 10. We'll see. But yeah, my next question. Questions, or it would be like. This is, I can hear the New York Siren you were talking about.

[00:35:26] Maxime Manseau: Oh,

[00:35:26] Sophie Heller: sorry about that.

[00:35:27] Maxime Manseau: No worries about it. So yeah my next question is like, how can I, as a company, basically ensure that my customers receive the same level of support from, my outsource team as they would from my in house team? Just making sure there is not like gap that can be seen by the customer.

[00:35:49] Maxime Manseau: Thank you. Sure.

[00:35:50] Sophie Heller: Yeah. So I think first off, like I mentioned, using the same metrics inbox wide to measure both outsourced and in house team members. I think if everyone has the same definition of success and is trying to fit it, in the same way, that's going to be helpful. One thing that I, if I were outsourcing again, I would be really bullish on having a training program created before bringing outsourcers in.

[00:36:15] Sophie Heller: And using that same training program, ideally in an LMS where people can get practice questions, using that for both types of team members so that people are brought in the same way. You don't have your internal employees. They're of course going to be exposed to more material than your outsourcers. On, on our Slack and Outschool, outsourcers only had access to a couple of support specific channels versus following along with all of the products happenings, other things happening across the company.

[00:36:43] Sophie Heller: But I think to the best of your ability, if everyone's working off the same set of documentation and training, that really sets everyone up to be giving similar responses to the customer. And then of course, too, as I mentioned before, having clear expectations on what is an outsourced question or, in a lower tier of your support and what is something that's only going to be handled higher up.

[00:37:06] Sophie Heller: Because then you can have everyone on the team working from the same information, but your internal people have more information that they're using to handle those more escalated questions.

[00:37:18] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. So basically what I understand is just making sure it's see the in house and the out house team has one team, right?

[00:37:28] Maxime Manseau: And maybe say but, I have obviously there is I would say some different levels depending on the specifications or specialization, whatever you call it. But that's a good advice because if tomorrow I had to start, I think by next year, I will really see it like the in house team and the outsource team as two different teams.

[00:37:49] Maxime Manseau: But I understand that would be very important to just see it as one and only team.

[00:37:56] Sophie Heller: Yeah, since ultimately you have the same goals, you want to help your customers, you want to hit the full support team's inbox goal for CSAT, for response time, any of the other metrics that you're looking at and Joshua, yes, we used Intercom to measure these.

[00:38:09] Sophie Heller: At some point, we also measured NPS through a tool called Delighted, but when I say metrics, I'm talking about Intercom measuring. Having everyone just know we're here to accomplish the same thing and any ticket solved, regardless of whether it's closed out in an earlier tier or needs to be escalated, they're all contributing to those same metrics that we share.

[00:38:31] Maxime Manseau: Okay, cool. Yeah, makes sense. And what what are the risks you will see by running an outsourcing support team? I'm more thinking about security, privacy, what's your take on that?

[00:38:44] Sophie Heller: Yeah outside the security question, which really came up because we were dealing with kids.

[00:38:49] Sophie Heller: So a lot of rules like COPPA and just other data privacy things. I think at one point we didn't, we disengaged our U. S. vendor and we're doing all of our support. through Hugo Tech in Nigeria. And so that's a question of, do you rely on one outsourcer? And then what if something happens?

[00:39:07] Sophie Heller: I know there was a situation a little bit after I left the company where internet just wasn't working reliably in the, in the office in Lagos. So what do you do if there's some sort of political situation or even just an infrastructure? Thing like that internet connections, or I know some parts of the U.

[00:39:26] Sophie Heller: S. experience really bad hurricanes, flooding, you name it I think it can just be risky to have. All of your support coming from one place. So that's why, larger companies, I was talking to a friend from DoorDash recently, and he was saying, Oh it's here. One support is in this country and tier two is in this country.

[00:39:44] Sophie Heller: I know that much, much larger companies take a more varied approach. I think there's also the risk of, getting, and then this is something that as I said before, really focusing on getting everyone the same documentation and training materials. There's a risk that people could get different answers from your outsourcers versus your in house team.

[00:40:04] Sophie Heller: And you want to just really look at consistency and that's where in QA, if you're seeing that there's a certain topic, for us it was always refunds. If there's a topic where there's variance among agents, what can you do to really dive in and make sure that variance really goes away?

[00:40:21] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, Joshua has like a question. He wants to know a bit more about your tool stack. Especially for what you are using for documentation. Yeah.

[00:40:31] Sophie Heller: So unfortunately our documentation tool is now defunct. We used a company called Kenchi and they were a small startup that we were their first customer and that was one that was a lifesaver for me in March of 2020.

[00:40:47] Sophie Heller: So they were basically a Chrome extension that functioned as an internal wiki and a macro tool. So it's that agents would open it in the same window that intercom was in. And let's say they were trying to solve, it was a refund because the parent had a schedule conflict. In Kenshi, they could open up our playbook that, what do you do?

[00:41:08] Sophie Heller: If a parent has a schedule conflict, they'd see wiki type information about why this can happen, what are our general policies around it, any help center articles we need to reference. And then a step by step of. What do you do when you're solving this ticket? And then Kenshi was really nice because it would put in the steps, you could then intersperse your grows.

[00:41:30] Sophie Heller: So it made it really easy for agents to, okay, step one, look at this thing, step two, send this response, step three, find the ticket to this bucket. So I think that there, are some intercom itself has gotten a lot stronger on the macro front. About six months ago or so, they released the inbox 2.

[00:41:47] Sophie Heller: 0 products, which has much stronger macros. One thing that Kenshi did well was just having macros tied to actions like snoozing or assigning to a different bucket, triggering something in your admin tools. So intercom has definitely moved a lot closer towards that. And I know Zendesk specifically is really strong in, tying actions to responses, but.

[00:42:10] Sophie Heller: Yeah unfortunately can't, I can recommend the tool, but it just doesn't exist anymore.

[00:42:15] Maxime Manseau: Good ideas for like people out there if they want to start something. And the second part of Joshua's question regarding metrics, like basically what are you doing, where are you measuring all this through intercoms or where are you using like other tools to measure like your support metrics?

[00:42:30] Sophie Heller: Yeah, so all of the inbox metrics like CSAT, handle time, efficiency, those were coming from intercom and then Klaus was our QA tool where we were looking at just our overall QA score and different rubric areas like accuracy, empathy, personalization, etc.

[00:42:48] Maxime Manseau: Okay. Okay, got it. Anyway, Joshua, like by experience, like it's easier.

[00:42:54] Maxime Manseau: You use your Ldesk, so Zendesk, and you do with what they have out there. Or if not, you just you, I would say push like everything like on the outside and then you can use BI tool to basically build a dashboard or whatever you want. So I would say one or the others. If you want after the chat, you can ping me and we can have a little chat about that.

[00:43:17] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. So maybe one or two questions before finishing and we should be good, Sophie. Great. How can I basically maintain a good communication and collaboration with the outsource support team. So I know you mentioned to over communicate I know you mentioned like a Slack channel, but is there anything else that comes to mind?

[00:43:42] Sophie Heller: Yeah. So that was the biggest change for me as someone, including Outskool, every company I've joined, I've come in sub five. And so the difference in change management and communication when you're a larger company and are working with an outsourcer, it's That was a big thing for me to process. So definitely over communicate if something seems obvious to, to me, I had all this institutional knowledge.

[00:44:06] Sophie Heller: I'd been with the company for years. I was looped into everything happening across our products, marketing, other teams, I had to assume that everything was going to get less obvious as. You went, down to our in house support team who are mostly in the inbox and not looking at other channels. And then of course our outsourcers who weren't in all of our Slack channels and just weren't, employees of the company exposed to all information.

[00:44:31] Sophie Heller: One thing that I saw change as the size of the outsourcing team grew, we used to rely on, and you mentioned, you see probably that I'm mentioning Slack a lot. We just relied on Slack a ton as a company, but we had to move away from using Slack as a communication tool as the outsource team grew. So we used to, we had an announcements channel for support agents where, you know, if I saw that something was happening in the product, I could post an announcement, some of my team could post it.

[00:44:59] Sophie Heller: And then we had a separate channel for agents to ask us questions publicly so that everyone can see the information. And that worked up to an extent, but it got to a point where too much was changing would release a workflow. And then a couple of weeks later needed to make changes or marketing had a new coupon out and there were different instructions for how to handle questions and support.

[00:45:22] Sophie Heller: So we moved away from having announcements in Slack and introduced a change log in Coda. Which is an internal wiki productivity tool that OutSchool as a company started using. And that was really great because agents had one place to go where everything was updated in real time. They had a bulletin board where they could see here are the updates for the week.

[00:45:44] Sophie Heller: Here's what happened. Here are new workflows, new help center articles, trainings you have to do. And so that made it really easy just knowing that there was one set place to look for announcements and I don't have to. Monitor slack or get a sense, I'm not like playing catch up my entire day.

[00:46:01] Sophie Heller: I can just go in and then either every day or every week, just look at the bulletin board and get a sense of what changed. So being really structured around communication was helpful. And then also having someone, I had someone on my team owning the bulletin board so that. All changes, I didn't want a situation where person a on my team put something in and then person B didn't see that person a put it in and it came in a different way.

[00:46:26] Sophie Heller: And Ella, that's Coda with a C. And so that, that was really helpful. We before the company signed up with Coda, we did a similar thing in Kenshi, our documentation tool. But I think just doing it in a way that's just really easy to see. Coda had some just nice features like. You click into a bulletin board update and then you can go and get linked to other.

[00:46:48] Sophie Heller: We ended up putting our internal wiki once Kenshi was no longer available, we put our internal wikis into Coda. And so it was really nice that it was a one stop shop for agents, announcements, and wiki to learn more.

[00:47:02] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, okay, cool. I think I don't have any question. I have like many others but We are short in time.

[00:47:10] Maxime Manseau: I don't know guys If you have any extra question, you should do it at the moment. We have three, four minutes and Sophia and I will be happy to to reply any of any question you might have at the right moment. Yeah.

[00:47:22] Sophie Heller: And I know it's always hard for me to think of questions on the spot.

[00:47:25] Sophie Heller: I'm always like, Oh man, it's two minutes after the meeting or whatever I'm doing. Feel free. I'm very

[00:47:31] Maxime Manseau: Yeah.

[00:47:32] Sophie Heller: To reach out. I'm very findable on LinkedIn. If you have questions after this,

[00:47:36] Maxime Manseau: if you have any question, feel free to Yeah to message Sophie. Hey, see you have a new friend, MOED.

[00:47:42] Maxime Manseau: Love it. Okay, great. Sophie, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate I feel we learn a lot today. It was great basically to, to talk outsourcing, especially like taking like a real use case. You went through with out of school. So thank you so much for your time. I guess I wish you an amazing afternoon.

[00:48:02] Sophie Heller: Thank you. You too. And thanks everyone for showing up.

[00:48:05] Maxime Manseau: Bye everyone. Take care.