People Delight sells outsourced (mostly) offshore customer support, so the source is only a little biased.
Though having direct experience with this, these numbers are pretty good. Few places will need a dedicated VP/Director level for a 6 person team though, and if they did, that would apply to outsourced teams as well.
In other words, part of the problem. The coders get all the perks, the free sodas, stock options, the high salaries, etc. The front line employees get a commute from Stockton and an opportunity for an extra dollar an hour wage next year, unless there's a wage freeze.
Supply and demand! Software engineers are much harder to find than support staff.
They also bear a lot more of the burden than a front-line support person, as the problems they solve are much more complicated, and need to fit in with competing interests beyond one customer's single support request.
> They also bear a lot more of the burden than a front-line support person
I'm not sure about that part. The amount of abuse those people have to withstand without being allowed to defend themselves (because "it's a customer, be nice!") can break even the calmest person.
Yes, it is a rare kind of person who can be good at being front-line support for very long. Especially for one of those outsourced-support outfits that isn't actually allowed to help the customer.
I kinda kid about the last part, but even when it's internal, being front-line support is brutal, especially for low-value products. The customer knows they can usually get free stuff by being mean, and it's the front line support rep who has to deal with that, almost always without the power to fire the customer. Half the time, they have to deal with corporate policies that are set in place really to get rid of customers who actually use support, but that don't want to admit this obvious fact. This requires an ungodly amount of patience.
That was one of the reasons why I think doing support for your own company is so much easier; you can actually say "Hey, uh, I don't think we can help you, how about I give you your money back and you go talk to a competitor?" you don't have to pretend to be ineffective until they leave on their own, which is essentially what the corporate policies are setup to do. It's soul crushing.
(I mean, developers get paid more because businesses notice when their developers can't develop; businesses seem to be largely okay with ineffective customer support. I suspect you would have to come within 70-80% of a developer salary if you actually wanted to keep effective customer support people. If you look at very high dollar products where support people are expected to actually help customers solve problems? they pay in that range; sometimes better. )
Amen. The sheer stupidity of running a low value unempowered astroturfing support org to isolate your developers from listening to customers is matched only by the frequency with which it seems to be done.
> [Software engineers] also bear a lot more of the burden than a front-line support person, as the problems they solve are much more complicated, and need to fit in with competing interests beyond one customer's single support request.
I think that's overly glorifying what engineers do and under appreciating support resources.
Most engineers that I know, highly talented or not, wouldn't last a week in a support org because they don't have the required soft skills.
And honestly, I think every engineer should spend more time talking to their support teams. It puts things in perspective when you realize that that bug you wrote or fix you delayed made someone's life a living hell when an irate customer kept badgering them about a fix.
In a tiny startup I fielded support calls until we were able to bring in more support staff.
My attitude at the time was to provide the support that would expect as a customer. This means that I understood the customer's problem, understood the product, and made an effort to solve the customer's problem. If the customer encountered a defect, I was honest about the defect and explained how to work around the problem.
I completely defend my statement, that, as an engineer, the problems that I solve are much more complicated then when I had to fill in while we were between support staff.
A support person's role is being an expert in the product supported; and clear communication. That is much easier than implementing a product where there are competing interests; and one customer may expect the product to behave in a way that contradicts what another customer expects; and contradicts what's in the business's best interests.
Furthermore, there is no formal eduction required for being a member of support staff; nor is there a requirement for the kind of accomplishment of skills. The appropriate analogy is nurse to doctor.
Curious what product field was for your experience?
In my experience, support issues tended to involve legacy application technology and/or environment issues (usually antivirus given the nature of our product). Support for anything non-trivial involved WinDbg dumps or SQL dives in cooperation with development.
Did your support experience include working the issue back through development for a hotfix and retest until resolution?
Support staff must be hard to find if you have to look beyond the valley. The same argument could be made about having a team of outsourced coders; you can find much cheaper coders if you hire outside of the country, non?
Supply and demand! Software engineers are much harder
to find than support staff.
Sure. The thing is, our society has a funny relationship with social class.
Nobody wants to think they're busting their ass to enrich someone who thinks they're better than you. That's not the kind of thinking that inspires people to work 10 hour days because they really feel dedicated to Twitter's world-changing mission! So our society has, in some ways, a sort of perpetual denial that class is there. People who want to be elected president have to be "someone you could have a beer with" and CEOs of billion-dollar companies have to let everyone call them by their first name.
If your company only employs engineers, and your cleaners mostly work at night, you can retain that impression pretty well. Everyone here is the same!
But the moment people notice there are support workers who don't get free snacks because they're lower on the status ladder, you can't really retain the impression that everyone is the same.
burden? i don't think so. I can code for hours but I am in awe of good support people. They have amazing skills at maneuvering situations. I would have glenfiddich in the coffee cup before 9am if I tried that role.
I don't agree with this. Might've been true a few years ago but good engineers can be found all over the place. A good customer service person who can easily navigate between customers and internal teams is much harder to find and way more valuable in the long run. We've seen this first hand and constantly evaluate how we can bring on better customer-oriented people that are able to wear multiple hats.
Yes!!! On the other hand, many of our agents are completely stoked to work for a cool company (e.g. a Bay Area startup), from home, without the commute. They are happier, stay longer, and have way fewer sick days etc. Great article on that here: https://fyiliving.com/uncategorized/telecommuting-linked-to-...
Every company I've been in has had people advance from support to things like sales/marketing/sys admin - being in the company or at least in the industry has helped a lot!
If you're in the same building as everyone else, sure. However, the company in question outsources, even as far as having everyone work from home. So there's a much smaller chance of building the camaraderie needed to build such advancement options.
We definitely tried to keep the estimates reasonable. For SF we've found that a lot of companies prefer onshore, albeit out of state, for staffing their support.
Austin, Denver, and Portland seem very popular for SF area. Inexpensive office space and good labor pool with progressive values.
We've stayed on the peninsula and done our best to raise productivity (and thus comp) through training, retention, and technology. Wasn't easy but working well now.
Not judging, just curious, do progressive values really matter?
I'm based out of a fairly cosmopolitan southern city, and I'd be hard pressed to construct a scenario where I could only find someone so unprofessional and conservative enough as to make a difference to the customer.
Agreed, but your phrasing was interesting: two hard business qualities and one social one. The other thing that made it stick out was it sounded like progressive values were a litmus test for candidates.
Maybe it's living in the south (where my social views tend to put me in the minority and hence used to dealing with ideological disagreements daily), but SF in particular seems pretty intolerant of the idea that lovely people might also happen to have different social opinions.
Sorry - I didn't mean the candidates at all. The article was about SF startups, and many use progressive values as a selling point. I don't think you're wrong to see some intolerance.
We've got 50+ people in the South (GA,SC,NC,FL), so I'm only calling it as I see it, not as I'm doing.
It's weird that $15-18/hour is considered pricey, when you could get 3-4 support staff per run-of-the-mill SF developer salary.
"All I want is someone who has the social skills to talk to clients, technical skills to be familiar with the stack, and the nous to troubleshoot issues based on the partial info that clients provide!"
Support sucks. You get the short end of the stick from everyone - clients, management, developers - and there's little in the way of benefits for doing so. No wonder there's a high turnover in the field.
If they're expecting actual technical support staff (people who have a technical ability as well as client facing abilities) to work for 15-18/hr they're insane. Again outsourcing that sort of support is equally difficult for the same reasons outsourcing engineering is difficult with the added bonus they need to be effective communicators, generally in english.
You're right, I've seen the type of Orgs in SF where 15-18/hr is the base wage and it's not healthy (for the organization or the people who are working there).
For the most part, I've seen that the type of Orgs with those support wages are likely just trying to throw bodies at support volume. $16/hr for another human to answer X amount of tickets with a Y% satisfaction over Z amount of time. Their customer base is probably B2C or B2B with a large SMB base.
The model is bound to fail, particularly for communication reasons. The type of Org that employs this position is also likely to not have the product feedback loops that connect Support (reactive) with the Product/Eng teams (proactive...hopeuflly). This means product is not addressing bugs quickly or fixing usability issues that support agents frequently work around and explain to frustrated users. It also means they likely don't have adequate internal tooling to solve problems in real-time.
It's a form of technical debt that is REALLY hard to measure - I believe this is because there's too much focus on "standard" support metrics like NPS, FRT, # of touches... Yes these are important, but they are surface level stats for maintaining a basic, "good" support experience. Great support experiences require tighter integration with other teams with better data.
There's no one right answer, but likely a spectrum of options that need to be analyzed for which works best for you.
- Have an international customer base? Maybe outsourcing could be a great option to keep costs low and cover more timezones
- Not interested in outsourcing? Stay in the US and build a new office with talent outside the Bay Area (check out Lyft's Nashville office)
- Do you absolutely need Support to be in HQ? Make the commitment to higher wages and staying lean and effective, not just as a Support team but as 1 company together.
I would also draw a distinction between B2B businesses with Customer Success needs and B2C businesses. Perhaps I should modify the blog post to reflect the assumption that this is basic question-answering support, rather than technical support.
You can get that in low-cost areas where there's more smart people than IT jobs. A nearby city has all kinds of technical people working at that or similarly low rates. They usually have accessed to a higher-paid person who does the real, heavy lifting when it's necessary. It's usually not, though. The cheap, young people learn more as they go with constant turnover but a steady number staying at any given time to train or help newest. Also, many companies start people aiming at better jobs in such support roles claiming it's the grind that "everyone goes through." ;)
If they don't want that, they can try to get one of the few, high-paying jobs in specialist work with almost no experience or take the risk of a move on whatever college or broke people have saved up. Most take the local job at least to start with.
I have to say I think your comment is an insightful one. Few companies see support as a way to differentiate themselves. But if you think of the really transformative companies they think of customer service as a competitive advantage. The way I put it to our clients is: think of all the money you spend begging customers to engage with you - tv advertising, online ads, events, yada. Then you literally have someone on the phone and they want to talk. Maybe for an unhappy reason but they want to talk! Is it at exactly that point that you decide to minimize the conversation? It makes little sense. Instead when you have them on the phone you could literally make their day, in a million different ways. And it's totally under your control.
If they're so valuable, why are companies like yours trying to keep the customer support people from getting the benefits that the rest of the people working for the company getting? Those people need to eat too, those people are taking risks too, those people have families, have dreams. Your service just furthers the problem of why so many non-technical people struggle in this area.
This is a tough question but I don't want to duck it. There is no question that any company creates value by taking advantage of a pricing difference - whether it's the price of labor as measured in wages and benefits, or the cost of making a widget using a new technology, or something else. The reason I feel good about what we do is that I feel like we are helping spread some of the [highly concentrated!] economic wellbeing from the Bay Area to other places that can benefit more from it on the margin. That's totally separate from how rough it is for lower skilled folks in high cost markets to make ends meet...which is a real problem, I agree.
No, what you're doing is further stratifying this country. You don't offer any opportunities to advance. You don't offer the benefits you offer your programmers. You take advantage of income disparity. You take advantage of people who are in smaller towns. If you really wanted to take that well-being and spread it, you'd offer stock options, you'd offer them decent insurance, you'd offer them a future.
I have no skin in this game, but it seems to me that you're being unfair.
There's a story that goes around the nonprofit sector about activists stopping sweatshops in developing nations. The wages there are terrible, the working conditions inhumane. So it's good that they stopped the sweat shops from existing. Right?
Well, they went and checked some time later, to measure the effects of the change. It turned out that the children who had been working at those inhumane sweatshops had turned to the next best alternative:
It seems like your argument has the same structure. I don't know anything about People Delight, but if it's the case that this is the business model that makes it economically feasible to provide jobs to people for whom those jobs are the best option, then I think it would be a mistake to force those jobs out of existence because the jobs couldn't provide even more benefit to the workers than they currently do.
I want everyone, everywhere to have all they need and want, and to live happy lives on their own terms. It just seems like you're being unfair to fapi1974 by asking him to do it singlehandedly.
This is the fallacy of the broken window, and not the entire story. After the mistake in Bangladesh, the activists learned from their mistakes, and the next country got rid of sweatshops, plus provided education and stipends for the children so that they didn't have to go into those poor situations.
This isn't about forcing those jobs to go away. This is about keeping companies from exploiting these workers. The workers that People Delight are exploiting don't get the benefits tech firms bandy about so freely, can't unionize, don't get the opportunities to advance. There is money to be made there without exploiting, but things don't get better unless you criticize the people doing the exploiting.
It may not be his money (it's the business's money), and the goal of the business isn't to spread well-being. He just said he feels good about it because it does some to spread that well-being, and it does.
I really see nothing wrong with hiring remote workers with compensation at a rate that's acceptable to them. It's not taking advantage of anything--they choose to live in small towns with a lower cost of living.
> Support sucks. You get the short end of the stick from everyone - clients, management, developers - and there's little in the way of benefits for doing so. No wonder there's a high turnover in the field.
This is because support departments are viewed as cost centers, not profit centers.
People who work in cost centers generally get treated badly. If their manager can figure out how to lay them off without affecting customer retention, it's gonna happen.
Even to run this setup in India and Philippines it is too tight provided we expect some profit after giving salary to employee. But if this can be upped to about 20$ then you can get excellent support provided the telephony cost(acd etc) is born by the company. If anyone interested in long term(2+ years contract) up to 20+ agents with 20% turnover for day shift and 40% turn over for night shift then contact me
I don't think that teams with only six people are that interesting. In terms of cost, it really does start to matter when your employing 100+ support teams, where the skills required may be somewhat limited.
One of my previous employers is a large telco, with two locations, one in Copenhagen and one in the other end of the country. When I left, the plan was to close down the entire support team in Copenhagen and move those tasks to the other office. The benefit was/is that you can pay people a little less, while still leaving them with a better work-life balance, due to lower rent and shorter commutes. As a bonus the "office" space is much cheaper.
There's a huge benefit to place things like support teams in more rural areas of a country. You'll have an easier time hiring and retaining and the cost goes down. Companies, especially in the English speaking countries, just take it one step to fare and move the job out of the country. Sure it's cheaper, but you'll lack the cultural understanding that your customers will expect. Also you do need developers, sales staff and so on to actually be on site with the support teams once in a while. Having to travel abroad or even more than a few hours really hinder that interaction.
The other thing that comes with moving jobs into more rural / less competitive markets is lower turnover.
Preface: I know some support rock stars and have nothing but respect for the amount of crap they have to put up with above and beyond software engineers, but from a salary perspective there are better things they could be doing. A lot of which, doing support for long will train them for. Yet those those are the exact people you want to keep in your support org.
Customer support for every company is going to be different; there just isn't a formula. Some companies can utilize more automation because the types of questions fielded are going to be very similar (e.g. "where's my package?" or "how come there's a flashing red light?"). A team of 8 just about anywhere can scale to fairly high volumes.
But since we're talking about the Bay Area, and it sounds like specifically for a technically focused company (I'm thinking startup) the good news is that the core team is likely already fielding support because talking to customers is so important to the growth and direction of the product. Yes Bay Area salaries are high, but hopefully you're hiring high quality team members that are more than just front-line support -- they should be an invaluable part of your product and customer development process. You can't really put an outsourcing price tag on that.
Lots of companies have a process where the developers are insulated from day-to-day support roles -- and if that's working, great. But, the best companies have developers who want to talk directly to (or at least have support access to) customers and understand their problems first hand. This is where the high salaries more than pay for themselves.
I definitely don't think it makes sense for early stage startups to work with a vendor - there is too much iteration happening during the search for PMF. Where we see it start to make sense is when the company is hitting acceleration. At that point it doesn't scale to do side-by-sides for training. It becomes necessary to manage large number of high-turnover employees and become really good at hiring and training them. It's really specialized. Most tech companies that have scaled - Uber, Amazon, Google etc etc use outside providers. Which isn't to say that even when we get brought in (usually at around the 6 person mark in the blog post) that we don't spend a TON of time making sure that the communication between the front line agents and product/engineering isn't really good.
I run PartnerHero, and we only work with startups (many are name-brands, some are tiny). There is NO WAY you would need a VP or Director level person for a team of 6, or even a team of 60 (our teams start at 2 and go up 80.) Startups are not the same as "small companies", so traditional outsourcing doesn't work. I would strongly recommend hiring outside of the Bay Area (there are state nexus issues you will have to address) and put aside all the local bias. It's not just about saving money, it's about hiring people who will be excited to work with you and represent your voice to the stakeholders who matter the most: your users. Support (operations in general) is really hard and most folks don't get the love and acknowledgment they need. If you can't afford to hire full-time, experiment with interns (paid) and part-time hires. I would look at the Southeast, Mid-West and even Idaho/Oregon/Utah as great options. As for us, we have folks in Honduras, Brazil, U.S., Japan, Spain and Serbia. Great talent (for ops) can be found in many areas, with exceptional English skills and great empathy/problem solving skills too.
A lot of things cost a small fortune in Bay Area. On the other most of startups should provide exceptional support.
I believe it's hard to have exceptional support by outsourcing it remotely (unless the whole company is remote). Especially in young company, when every week a lot of things is changing. Also developers can apply changes based on support insights.
Though this might make sense for established companies, I believe initially at startup you should almost never outsource support.
Interesting read, thanks for sharing! Slightly off-topic, have you thought about making your blog more readable? There is grey text on grey background. I'm short sighted and when reading this on my computer monitor while eating lunch I had to actually print it to pdf to be able to read it conveniently. Your blog also breaks in "read mode" chrome extension that I usually use to alleviate problems with bad designs like this one.
$15k per year (or $208/person/month) for CRM/Chat/Phone seems high, unless they mean unlimited Salesforce.com license for each user and some add-one... (which for 6-person team seems an excessive choice.)
Actually (sorry late to the party) our company allows folks a great work/life balance. Not a small thing. Appreciated. Well compensated. No commute. For a person in SF that is a minimum savings of 2 hrs a day. Next enjoy team relationships. We do that through slack chat which keeps them close to engineers and other company team members, and keep those departments close to customers concerns. As for costs -- having a The entire US or global footprint to choose the most qualified talent also helps us ensure we are able to ensure the best person for our client, their customer and wage for the location of our team member - win, win, win.
Though having direct experience with this, these numbers are pretty good. Few places will need a dedicated VP/Director level for a 6 person team though, and if they did, that would apply to outsourced teams as well.