6 ms·

HiOperator (YC S16) Provides Customer Support as a Service

69 points by katm 10y ago

liztsai 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- npollock 10y ago
  Hi Liz, how long does it typically take to onboard a new customer/organization? And do you charge for setup?
  - liztsai 10y ago
    Our usual onboarding time is around a week although our record is 1 day for a company that was in a tight spot. We don't charge setup fees for most situations. It's built into the price and we want our customers to stick with us because they like the service - not because they've forked over a large upfront fee!
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Hey Liz! What would you say to a company on the fence who considers providing support a core competency within their org?
  - ei8htyfi5e 10y ago
    Hi, I'm Phil, the other founder. I'd say keep it as a core competency! It's important and it's why we're in business. We understand why you'd want to do that and all of the companies we work with feel the same. That said, keep in mind there will always be a lot of repetitive time consuming stuff, and that's where we excel. Everyone likes to think they're a unique and irreplaceable snowflake, and that may be true in total, but there are parts that can be handled more efficiently elsewhere.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- yalooze 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
BummerCloud 10y ago
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.
busterarm 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
jayajay 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
wheelerwj 10y ago
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.
- busterarm 10y ago
  That's 76,788 a year. Can you even hire someone to do product support for your startup in SF for that? Salary, Taxes, Insurance, Office space? I have strong doubts. And that would just give you _one_ person who can only do one call at a time. If you can't justify hiring an employee to do this, you aren't a target customer of this service anyway, I imagine.
  - wheelerwj 10y ago
    I KNEW this was going to be an answer. "OH IN SF YOU HAVE TO PAY SO MUCH MONEY FOR SALARIES so it makes sense if you're in SF." That's ridiculous and you know it is. Most businesses aren't in SF, most startups aren't even in SF. Yes, I know you think you guys are the center of the world. But there is a reason call centers are in lower income areas and its not because people are just getting around to decentralized support centers. Amazon has been doing this for.. nearly a decade already? Other companies do this in the Philippines. It has nothing to do with justifying an employee, it has everything to with justifying hiring 3-4 employees (or even 10) rather than one service who is just going to be a glorified answering service.
    - busterarm 10y ago
      Woah, guy. I'm not even in SF. Wouldn't work there for any amount of money. I'm just saying that the obvious immediate market for this to me seems to be towards b&m or medium-touch product sales businesses that are _in_ areas like SF. Many Bay Area startups are selling services to other Bay Area startups, that's just the reality of this sort of thing. If you're not their target market, you're not their target market. If you are looking to hire people and this ends up being a viable alternative you will save a ton of money. I worked in/around call centers for most of my first career, I know the score.
sinhpham 10y ago
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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
thinkmassive 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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. :)

69 points by katm 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
npollock 10y ago
Hi Liz, how long does it typically take to onboard a new customer/organization? And do you charge for setup?
- liztsai 10y ago
  Our usual onboarding time is around a week although our record is 1 day for a company that was in a tight spot. We don't charge setup fees for most situations. It's built into the price and we want our customers to stick with us because they like the service - not because they've forked over a large upfront fee!
toomuchtodo 10y ago
Hey Liz! What would you say to a company on the fence who considers providing support a core competency within their org?
- ei8htyfi5e 10y ago
  Hi, I'm Phil, the other founder. I'd say keep it as a core competency! It's important and it's why we're in business. We understand why you'd want to do that and all of the companies we work with feel the same. That said, keep in mind there will always be a lot of repetitive time consuming stuff, and that's where we excel. Everyone likes to think they're a unique and irreplaceable snowflake, and that may be true in total, but there are parts that can be handled more efficiently elsewhere.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
yalooze 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

BummerCloud 10y ago

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.

busterarm 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago

jayajay 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

wheelerwj 10y ago

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.

busterarm 10y ago
That's 76,788 a year. Can you even hire someone to do product support for your startup in SF for that? Salary, Taxes, Insurance, Office space? I have strong doubts. And that would just give you _one_ person who can only do one call at a time. If you can't justify hiring an employee to do this, you aren't a target customer of this service anyway, I imagine.
- wheelerwj 10y ago
  I KNEW this was going to be an answer. "OH IN SF YOU HAVE TO PAY SO MUCH MONEY FOR SALARIES so it makes sense if you're in SF." That's ridiculous and you know it is. Most businesses aren't in SF, most startups aren't even in SF. Yes, I know you think you guys are the center of the world. But there is a reason call centers are in lower income areas and its not because people are just getting around to decentralized support centers. Amazon has been doing this for.. nearly a decade already? Other companies do this in the Philippines. It has nothing to do with justifying an employee, it has everything to with justifying hiring 3-4 employees (or even 10) rather than one service who is just going to be a glorified answering service.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    Woah, guy. I'm not even in SF. Wouldn't work there for any amount of money. I'm just saying that the obvious immediate market for this to me seems to be towards b&m or medium-touch product sales businesses that are _in_ areas like SF. Many Bay Area startups are selling services to other Bay Area startups, that's just the reality of this sort of thing. If you're not their target market, you're not their target market. If you are looking to hire people and this ends up being a viable alternative you will save a ton of money. I worked in/around call centers for most of my first career, I know the score.

sinhpham 10y ago

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 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

thinkmassive 10y ago

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 10y ago
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. :)