
HiOperator (YC S16) Provides Customer Support as a Service - katm
https://blog.ycombinator.com/hioperator-yc-s16-provides-customer-support-as-a-service/
======
busterarm
Somewhat tangential to what you're doing here, but I was a Technical Lead at
Support.com for 5 years. We did general support and malware-specific support
but we also had contracts where we would troubleshoot a specific product or
brand. We, like you intend to, had a large, distributed workforce.

While the business development team there (along with their head of training,
Mary Waltuch) are largely responsible for the constant failure of that
company, I think that SPRT's experiences proves unequivocally that this
business model does not work at any reasonable scale.

Your clients are strongly incentivized to demand your service at a
significantly lower rate come contract renewal regardless of what your cost to
deliver is. Your competitors, like Support.com and Sutherland, among others,
will happily underbid you. Aggressively. While I worked there, I had my salary
and benefits _cut_ at least once a year.

You'll cut costs by moving some operations to places like the Philippines
while not learning the lessons of others who have done the same. One bad
monsoon season and none of your workforce will show up for weeks/months.
Support.com learned this one the hard way, despite my warnings.

Maybe you'll show some backbone in negotiations, not bend over and take shitty
contract terms from "huge brands" like our bizdev did at SPRT. This is more
critical to your success than you can imagine. We sure did love hiring bizdev
people whose experience was at failed companies (RadioShack, Circuit City and
a bunch of people from Intuit who got sacked).

Best of luck to you. I really hope that you succeed...there isn't really good
service from anyone in this market segment right now; the training is poor and
it's a race to the bottom on price. Consumers need this to be good. Don't f'
it up.

~~~
liztsai
Thanks for commenting - it’s good to get your take on things. We’d love to
chat further if you’d like - ping us at hi@hioperator.com .

A few quick thoughts though. We are committed to keeping support local - in
this case in the US. We’re not trying to be the lowest cost option, nor are we
trying to handle the long tail of customer support. We focus on 80/20\. And
there is plenty of 80 to be had, even at scale.

There are a few specifics to how we’re organized and how we incentivize our
agents that we’re seeing help align incentives a bit better.

~~~
supercoder
I knew a few who worked at influx.com , similar story. This business is a race
to the bottom , clients want it cheap or they can just do it in house
otherwise

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liztsai
Hi there! This is Liz from HiOperator. We set out earlier this year to build a
scalable US-based customer service solution that we would have used as startup
founders ourselves.

Would love your thoughts! Happy to answer any questions and tell you more.

~~~
yalooze
I would love to hear some more detail about how you tackle onboarding /
knowledge transfer. How do you handle a more complicated business that may
have a lot of different edge cases? Do you just build up exhaustive
documentation?

Also, I know you're just starting, but I got to your site and wanted to read a
LOT more about your service than the information that was available on the
single page site. I was thinking: Tell me way more about how it all works, but
there was no where else to click! :)

~~~
ei8htyfi5e
I can speak about onboarding and knowledge transfer from the viewpoint of our
clients. Usually they give us access to their past tickets and we have an hour
long conversation where we ask a million tailored questions. Then clients put
us in a sandbox to play where we can't hurt anyone. To fill knowledge and
capability gaps, our ops managers pose questions to in-house teams, usually
over Slack, but it can be anything. Once everyone is comfortable, they let us
out into the world. :)

On the back end, I wish I could brag a little about this, but it is our
"secret sauce" so I'm just going to have to say it's proprietary and I believe
the beginning of something great.

To directly answer your first question regarding edge cases, it's simple: we
don't do them, opting instead to let your in-house team do the complex edge
cases. Over time though, we inevitably end up doing some of them as we find
commonalities across clients (shipping exceptions, insurance disputes, etc).

------
thinkmassive
Assuming your approach to handling the 80% is very systematic and process-
oriented than I suspect you are destined for success.

Having spent a couple years in enterprise support, I would guess that less
than 20% of the workforce carried over 80% of the weight. This was my first
experience working in a support organization, and at first I assumed it was
due to unusually lacking management, but after meeting people in similar roles
elsewhere I think it's par for the course.

Support seems to suffer from the Peter Principle[1] more than the other
enterprise departments. The few competent people who were around me were
almost always using the support role as a steppingstone to learn a new
technology, with no long term plan to stick around, nor any desire for
promotion within the organization.

Like many new hires, I starting identifying process issues that occupied a lot
of time that should have been spent more efficiently. I even documented the
issues and proposed changes to improve organizational efficiency to
management, who said "good stuff, thanks" but then went on fighting fires
instead of preventing them in the first place. These were very basic
improvements easily understood by anyone with a technical mindset who spent a
week or two observing our support process. A couple _years_ later and I hear
nearly identical ideas are finally being phased into the process. I take no
credit, because the people with whom I shared the ideas have moved on.

This turned into a bit of a rant, but the gist of it is I see a huge
opportunity for disruption of the customer support process for any company
with regular case intake. For the sake of everyone who ever needs to obtain
support, which is all of us, I hope your team succeeds!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)

~~~
ei8htyfi5e
I know exactly what you mean! I worked for Marriott in support for one of my
first jobs and automated myself out of it in about 2 weeks so I could play
games on company time. People call in, I push 1-10 and go back to playing
while I make small talk on the phone until my scripts executed. :)

------
wheelerwj
I like the idea, but you guys really miss the mark on costs. I don't know
where you got the idea that any small business or startup would be okay paying
this. Definitely out of reach for 99% of the businesses out there.

    
    
      --------------
      From the website:
      --------------
      $999/month 
      Starting at $3.50+/case for most everything
    
      Starting at $1.25/minute for a voice operator
    
      8 hours of coverage, 5 days a week
    
      --------------
    

My small project handles about 30 cases per day, I spend about an hour on the
phone with customers, .

Suddenly I'm at $6,399 MINIMUM.

Nice try I guess.

~~~
ei8htyfi5e
I'm not sure how you arrived at that figure, but it seems a bit high for the
use case you described.

Now might be a good time to clarify our pricing a bit and state that our
pricing is not a one size fits all model. We analyze our clients ticket and
call histories and find a price that works for both.

The $999 is a minimum spend and from that we deduct cases and voice minutes.
The minimum covers training and overhead to ensure we're not losing money for
clients that are too small. We've also found that, in our experience,
companies who tend to spend less than $999/month are sometimes still at the
point where their support tickets are full of a lot of edge cases and are best
handled in-house.

We're aimed at small and medium companies, not individuals running small
projects (yet). Someday in the future hopefully, but we're not there yet.

~~~
wheelerwj
I arrived at the figure by using the numbers I also shared in my post. I
didn't know that the $999 was a minimum though, i just added it as a fixed
cost.

If you aren't ready for my small project, you aren't targeting small business.
We have a small team and the revenue to support it, which is well into the
average revenue statistically for small business.

If you don't hire within SF, your numbers don't make sense.

~~~
ei8htyfi5e
We updated the website so it's a bit more clear.

And for further clarification, your bill would probably be slightly higher
than the minimum, but quite honestly, we wouldn't feel comfortable taking you
on as a client for quite some time.

As we grow and move downstream, we'll lower prices and expand our offering. It
sounds like you're just downstream; nothing to get upset about. Just wait and
eventually we'll make sense for you too.

~~~
wheelerwj
> It sounds like you're just downstream

How would you know? You haven't asked me any questions at all? All you've done
is make assumptions and then tell me you didn't want my business.

~~~
daveed
They haven't asked you questions, but you have shared information about your
support usage patterns. So, I'd guess that they're still working with lighter
loads and plan to go larger from there. They didn't say they didn't want your
business for good.

------
jayajay
Reminds me of a recent negative experience with Apple Customer support. I had
an issue, and they bounced me around to several different people for pretty
much no reason. Then they harassed with me "Senior" Apple advisers after the
issue had already been resolved. It's pretty amazing that a company as big as
Apple still has no idea how to do customer service. Looking forward to someone
teaching them how it's done. Then again I also feel that it might be even more
complicated for a third party to support me with that...

~~~
liztsai
Thanks for the perspective! To be fair, we can't claim to have any experience
running operations at the scale of thousands and thousands of agents - we
think we know a way to get there someday soon.

As a related tangent, one thing we do for a few companies is essentially serve
as air traffic control. Even if we can't solve all of the issues and some
issues need escalation, we help make sure that it's only one hop away from the
right group.

------
BummerCloud
Incredibly optimistic about the future for HiOperator. Having run a 100+ agent
contact center, they are solving some complicated challenges that many growing
companies will undoubtedly face.

------
sinhpham
They seems to run an interesting tech stack with Elm + Elixir + Phoenix
[https://github.com/HiOperator/](https://github.com/HiOperator/)

Disclosure: knew this since just yesterday I was searching for Elm jobs to add
to my wesite
[https://www.jobsinnew.tech/post-49/](https://www.jobsinnew.tech/post-49/)

------
AznHisoka
does any company provide the inverse? I would love someone to call, wait on
hold, and talk to a customer service agent for me. keep calling until they fix
the problem.

~~~
ei8htyfi5e
[http://www.getservice.com](http://www.getservice.com)

We originally approached the customer service problem from this angle, but
found our approach better suited to our vision.

They are great and I've used them before.

