Finding and managing support staff

[chatmasta]

For those with customer centric businesses...

What have you found to be the best methods for recruiting and managing support staff? Our business is entirely email based support right now. I would like to get support staff who speak 100% perfect english and charge a monthly fee to answer 5-10 tickets a day. It would also be nice to spread these employees over the globe.

Does anyone have experience with the Philippines? What have you found to be the best way to manage a support team?

 

[Paper_Chase]

Tele-Direct is good. They are mainly a call center though. But they answer email support questions and chat questions as well. They answer support questions 24/7.

 

[chatmasta]

So do you prefer working with an agency over hiring your own individual contractors? For very specialized support, wouldn't that be difficult?

 

[Paper_Chase]

So do you prefer working with an agency over hiring your own individual contractors? For very specialized support, wouldn't that be difficult?

Totally depends on what type of support you need to provide. Most of my questions are "Why didn't my email receipt arrive", "When will my order ship", "My tracking information isn't showing anything yet", and the occasional return request.

Sounds like you need something more specialized. Do they need answer tech related questions? Is it possible for you to write a script for the most common questions and answers? If they encounter something they don't have an answer for they can tell the customer they will find out and get back to them within 24 hours.

Just off the top of my head, how about hiring 1 person full time in North America, and 1 full time in India. That way you have all 24 hours of the day covered. Have the person in North America manage the Indian employee. You will obviously need them working on something else during their shift if you don't have too many support requests. How about some basic link building or finding some guest posting opportunities? Managing social media accounts, etc.

 

[ncmedia]

I have this problem, good problem to have

I've gone through 3 people so far, each time better than the last, and no fucking way would I hire overseas for my biz, but that's just my biz. I've probably got the highest paid support person on the interwebz and she's local - previously I had a guy in Aus, and before that I tried the cheap route and do NOT recommend it. Get someone that does speak perfect English but more importantly they have experience with damage control and you can trust them. Filling up their time and giving them some incentive to make more or be proactive to better their process (refund stoppers, better canned messages, any improvements in your process) is enough to find someone great.

I've also found females to be much better at these tasks, especially heated situations or knowing when to be stern, I'm too emo with my biz to look after that side of it happy I have someone that actually likes the challenge.

Good luck OP, I'd advise someone close that you can call or even meet in person, and in time perhaps open up more of your biz to them to let them earn more and earn you more via incrementally more sensitive tasks (eventually I'd love to double/triple my girls pay to look after my whole biz which may indeed happen).