Team Goal: Build and launch an effective customer support team focused on customer satisfaction, trust and education for the purpose of the ROI being recurring user loyalty and increasing steady revenue streams. Turn users into advocates and win the market!

Defining the mission: The support department should proactively educate users by maintaining quality FAQs and public facing knowledge base yet quickly reacting and responding to user support questions with empathy and advocacy. Users should trust us with their money.

Internal Goal: To ensure that everything the company does systematically on the front lines and the processes behind the scene impact the customer. We need to create balance between how we operate and what the customer expects from us. When the customers consistently use the product, that’s when the product has been foundationally established. Low churn-high retention-better reputation

Support Regions: Global: US, Canada, Europe, LATAM, Africa, Middle East, Asia Initial Launch Volumes: ~4M users
Initial Launch Date: Mid to end of October

Pre-launch First 30 days: Define, Build, Impact and Optimize

★ Define
○ How and when is support available

■ Ticketing

• ●  M-F, except bank and national holidays

• ●  Weekends with 72 hours response times

■ Live chat (maybe v2 but pretty easy to launch, depends on staffing) ● 10am-7pm EST / 7am-4pm PST

• ○  Initial Metrics, KPIs and Benchmarks - expected weekly user tickets 100-200 (+/- depending on business model and product integration)

  • Create a dashboard with defined metrics so SAs (Support Agents) can track their performance and contribute to process improvements & to report insights cross functionally

  • Ticketing at launch (weekly) - pushing obtainability yet actionable

    • ●  CSAT: Customer Satisfaction: 85%+

    • ●  CES: Customer Effort Score: 1/ 2 on a scale of 1-5

    • ●  Average first response time: 3 hours on weekdays

    • ●  Average resolution time (handling time): no longer than 48 hours

    • ●  First contact resolution: this is tough in payments/crypto but

      should be measured

    • ●  Interactions per resolution: how many touches to resolution - 3-5

    • ●  Overall resolution rate: Backlog vs resolved: 95%+

      • ○  Typically due to cross department due diligence or partner integration

      • ○  Depends on what kind of platform access/permissions my team has

• ○  Building the team and techstack ($266,010-335,940)

● Team roles 🚀

• ○  User support

  • 3 Support Agents (SAs) - $40,000-$50,0000

  • 1 Technical SA/Zendesk Admin -$70,000-80,000

    ● 200 tickets per week (user/partner). 50 tickets per SA a week. 10 resolved per day (without chatbot)

    ● Gives the team plenty of time to focus on improving proactive documentation

• ○  Partner facing - maybe scale later or leave duty elsewhere?

■ CSM - $100,000-$115,000

● Would like initially if account lead is not going to fill this duty - need to define who will have this duty

● Techstack
○ Zendesk Ticketing - $5940/yr

• Suite Professional- has the best customization for easy scaling and cross departmental use in addition to knowledge base publishing, chat availability, chatbot, partner portal VIP access, call/voice (to scale)

• Allows for multiple KB which allow separation from customer vs partner

  • ●  can be used as a lead source for net dollar expansion– include bug releases, bank holidays, product marketing new features: support can be a sector of sales!

  • ●  $99/mo/agent x 5

○ $495/mo : $5940/yr

○ Internal Department Documentation (below) ■ Confluence- attached to Jira

• ●  10 users - Free!

• ●  10+ users go to standar tier at $5.50/user/mo

★ V1. Build: Documentation & Resource Need to knows

The first 30 days is the most critical stage.Listed from highest priority to lowest. Building the first version of documentation simultaneously should take 3 weeks. The documentation works off one another. External and internal knowledge bases will have similar content. Topics written in the knowledge base will relate to macro responses, etc.

○ Proactive

■ External Knowledge Base (FAQ) - 1 week

• ●  Proactively provides solutions to common support ticket problems

• ●  Educate users about products and flow

• ●  Links can be shared in ticket/chat convos and

  marketing/blogs/socials

  ○ Reactive

■ Internal Support Resource and Training Programs -1 week
● Can be used for sales/post sales enablement tool with more

details about functionality and compliance/legal specifics and selling points

○ Product functionality, flows and demo resources

• ○  Partner business models and audience profiles

• ○  Customer journey mapping (internal and external)

● Compliance & AML: education vs verbiage-what we can and can't

say, indicators of questionable activities
○ Do not request PII/ID in ticket/chat- only confirm it

● How to Identify fraudsters digging for process information and how to report it internally

■ Macros - 1 week
● Canned responses for SAs to utilize as a one touch response and

faster resolution to common tickets. Ensures a QA standard across the team. Would like Legal/compliance approved

• ○  Compliance

  • Upload issues

  • Incorrect PII

  • Unsupported locations

  • Transaction Limits

• ○  Risk

■ Auto declines - reach out to banks

○ Fraud reports
■ Locking accounts

● Did the fraudster steal login information or did they steal PII and create a fake account?

○ Technical

• Authentication requests

• Bank statements- who is “COMPANY”

• Transaction statuses and processing times

○ Support Handbook and Team Accountability - 1 week

■ Documentation of internal processes and cross functional processes
● Defines escalation processes including cross department handoff

○ Will other departments also work out of zendesk for internal ticketing?

• if so, need to document ticket escalations process

• If not, how to request cross departmental

  confirmation on questions

• ●  Defines internal processes (do we want SAs to hold that liability?)

  • ○  Will support push refunds

  • ○  Will support create their own Jira tickets

• ●  Defines team level metrics around performance expectations and

  performance improvement plans (PIP)

• ●  Defines department’s core competencies

  ★ Impact:CrossDepartmentIndicatorsandChangeManagement:

  These indicators are extremely impactful on the evolution of our product, streamline cross departmental process improvements It is Important to understand where users are struggling. Help to pinpoint where to clarify knowledge base and macros and the success of product flow changes. We can also utilize these for A/B product testing. These insights should be shared with partners in effective partner growth conversations. It is important to consult partners on

proactively educating users via UI/X or FAQs on their landing pages as well. *Dispositions and tags can be created during the documentation stage and will be built upon as tickets are submitted.

• ●  Partner Tags

  • ○  Visuals on which partners are experiencing higher volumes of tickets.

  • ○  Are these problems segmented to a partner or across the board

  • ○  Are these problems on the partner side or on the product infrastructure side

• ●  Disposition labels - context of tickets

  • KYC flow/compliance

  • Declines

  • Reporting fraud transactions– **chargeback forecasting

  • Identifying fraud transactions - bot attacks, fraud rings (might want to

    sanitize fraud from CSAT)

  • Fee clarifications

  • Product vs delivery

  • Updating user info

  • Adding payment methods

  • Location availability

    ● Reporting

  • ○  Influence product sprints, roadmap, cross departmental processes and partner

    conversations

  • ○  Send weekly reports and summary rundown to cross department leadership

    ★ Optimize and scaling-60-90days+

    Within 90 days of launch, I’d like to have an entire honest assessment completed and a solid executable plan for scaling along with end to end data driven insights. Within this timeframe we should have insight into if we are properly placed in the market and be able to identify where we need to focus on growth and development. This plan will include automation, segmenting and actionable playbooks. I believe a growing company needs new processes that can continue to deliver a lot more value for our shareholders.

○ Assess Team headcount

• Based on ticket volume threshold per SA and accuracy of partner

  forecasting from sales/CSM

• Expanding User Support Agents vs. Technical Support Agents

● Do we have more technical questions from devs? ■ Categorizing and delegate SAs on speciality

● 1 inch wide, 1 mile deep OR 1 mile wide and 1 inch deep ■ Expand CSM team to build deeper partner relationships and grow

revenue

• ●  We need to understand the customer and business well enough to

  be able to interpret the data to improve; policies, new products,

  accounting programs etc.

• ●  We need a team to have a 360 view to determine if issues are

  sales, service or product issues. This affects our engineering budget. Need a team to champion feedback and improvements as we scale.

• ●  Do we add a commission or bonus plan for CSM?

• ●  Focuses on more revenue driven metrics- Churn, NPS, A/MRR, net dollar retention, health score,LTV etc

• ●  Can drive comarketing initiatives and case studies to enhance brand image

■ Support Operations/Administrator position?

• ●  To maintain Zendesk, KB, Macros,Chatbots, API docs

• ●  Allows SA to focus on tickets vs maintenance

○ Expand Support Outlets-setting different metrics/macros - first response
■ Do we expand to discord/socials - will marketing maintain this instead?

● Community Manager/ Social Media Manager - $75,000 ■ Trustpilot - $299/mo

● Public reviews - should not be implemented for the first 90 days until we stabilize processes and SA threshold. Need to have high enough headcount to have daily maintenance

○ Outsourcing
■ Do we add call center options? - depends on product offerings. Want to

prevent it being a sales outlet vs support

• ●  Can be expensive - some charge per minute and forecasting

  volume can be difficult. Need to be able to accurately forecast

  volume and dispositions before budgeting for this.

• ●  I've had success building, launching and strategizing call center

  teams myself

○ Have a solid internal documentation makes this easier

○ ****Embrace Automation****

• Enhanced chatbot to proactively answer common support questions or guide users to appropriate knowledge base article

  • ●  **recommend within the first 60-90 days

  • ●  Offers chat in many different language

  • ●  Will give us more insights into metrics

    • ○  Volume by channel (ticket vs chat)

    • ○  Chat duration

    • ○  % completed

    • ○  Wait times/Response/resolution time

    • ○  Abandon rate

    • ○  Link performance for FAQs

• Ticket automating - auto assign labels/disposition-QA

• Consider allowing SAs to connect via phone

● Post chat or ticket submitted for context to bring more value

○ Redefining Metrics

• Based on outsourcing and automation decisions

  • ●  More proactive resources = lower ticket inquiries=Slower headcount growth

  • ●  What KPIs are other departments co-owning?

• Quality Management platform

● Need to consider a QA platform as a training tool to provide documented feedback to SAs on real time ticket/chat responses

My thoughts on the start up stage and scaling:

➔ Do we outsource support: Initially– No

Outsourcing can be considered in the future to help the pain of rapid scaling, but we need to create a support foundation before we train an outside source. These teams are not necessarily invested in the product rather in the job. You have to train people who might not have a background in our service and will not provide the best responses. We also do not want an outside influence from a company whose motivation is their own revenue vs COMPANYs customer experience this early. Additionally, BPOs like call centers can be extremely expensive by charging by the minute. This can be hard to budget for if there are increases in call volumes due to fraud attacks or large partner launches. BPO might be the answer in the future once we have a solidified knowledge base. We need to proactively scale the department based on our own terms and forecasting. We want to have solid proactive user resources. Thinking of support only as reactive is not efficient. For example- higher unexpected volumes force SAs to focus on ticketing and chat vs maintaining knowledge base and FAQs and Macros. *The only consideration for startup outsource should be marketing efforts including brand marketing the website and social media posts.

➔ Major pain point in payments : fraud, educating users. partner expectations, accurate forecasting

Fraud is the biggest pain point in payments. Fraudsters are smart, they obtain user payment information or PII on the dark web, they can deploy automated fraud bots, create deceiving URLs, steal login information etc. Users think that the processor is at fault because they see our names on the bank statements.They think we are the frauders and that we are stealing money. They do not understand that the money doesn't go to us. This can lead to terrible reviews and lower BBB ratings. They get upset when we cannot issue the refund. They do not understand why they have to communicate with their banks. This is why proactive FAQs are important on both partner and COMPANYs websites. It is also important to consider this in marketing campaigns to build value outside of what our product is.

On the other hand, partners want a 150% conversion rate. They often do not understand risk rules and why users are being blocked from processes. Reasoning can be young email accounts, mismatched PII, even location (IP or VPN use). It is important to have a partner-facing person to be able to relay conversion metrics based off of user tickets and risk scoring to help guide them in realistic expectations, how to educate users but also to advise that higher conversion might lead to higher chargeback rates which does not equal profit.

Forecasting can be difficult in payments, especially crypto. Projections depend upon product integration, business model and also partner facing resources. Will partners offer a level of support on their side? Do they have the first line of defense for fraud as well? Did the partner decide to use a whitelabel product with low quality UX? Are they utilizing crypto and how educated are their users on blockchain transactions? Just because a partner has a high amount of users, doesn’t necessarily result in a huge influx of support questions. These are the questions that need to be addressed at the front of the sales funnel and during onboarding. The result is a much smoother go live for partners and a prepared support team.

➔ What should an established customer journey look like?: verticalized and defined
It is important to define the customer journey and define roles early. In my experience, this is

frustrating to partners and users because there is no clear outlet for contact.

-Sales should only focus on new opportunities and closing sales ($ quota, win/lost ration, lead source QA and CAC)

-Onboarding should only focus on getting partners live (time to revenue, integration QA). -Customer Success should focus on partner growth and retention (ARR, net $ expansion, NPS)

-Support should focus on customer (users vs partner) product experience (CSAT, resolution time, educating)

I've watched sales struggle to close deals by spending too much time onboarding and pushing partners live , depleting their funnel causing inconsistent projections and missed goals. I've watched CSMs turn into glorified support agents attending to support questions vs value add conversation. This skews overall metrics and is very difficult to scale each team accordingly because it's not clear how much work is going into which role. If CSMs are indirectly answering support questions, then those questions are not documented. We do not have proper metrics to determine ticket volume and can only assume support is fully staffed.

➔ Segment Support: KB for users vs partners/devs:

User support should be measured separately from partners/devs. Users' questions are typically far less technical and are more educational. Partners/devs are far more technical and critical because they are maintaining the product at a higher level. They need to have an outlet to ask questions, but also provide valuable product feedback. Because of this, it is so important for post sales to work closely with the product team. We need to have a line of open communication to provide internal dev tickets but also track feature requests. Feature requests not only have an impact on how a product works, but also channel partnerships. I think of a partner/dev facing knowledge base as a revenue lead source because it will have more detail on new product releases or feature updates. Overall, post sale and product synergy prevent tech debt and enhanced product experience from all angles. User tickets should be separated from partner tickets.

➔ Do we charge for user support?

Charging for support is a form of recurring revenue. We could consider different tiers of support. Every partner cannot be considered a VIP. It is important to set expectations upfront. As we scale with more partners, it is difficult to redefine access causing a poor partnership in the long run. The tiers really need to be defined. I have witnessed companies struggle to answer, do we want to define who a VIP partner is based on volume forecasting or do we want to give the partner the option to decide what level of resources they need from us? This can also include means of communication via a CSM. Do they have direct contact via a Slack channel or only email or business portal communication? CSMs can maintain communication and can consult on whether they need to upgrade their initial selection but these conversations are going to depend on how the tiers are initially offered. I have previously based partner priority on volume and expected revenue. Partners needed to have a high value integration and a certain threshold

to be assigned a direct CSM and direct communication channel. This will also depend on budgeting and ability to staff a team to maintain higher levels of support.

➔ Where should support be located?

My most recent support team spanned 6 time zones and three different counties. The pros are coverage, obtaining the best talent and saving expenses on real estate. You can easily expand support hours even with SAs spread across the US time zones and you can staff your team with the most experienced members in the industry. Instead of spending money on an office (including rent/utilities/equipment), yearly, 6 mos, or quarterly reunions tend to be more cost effective. The cons of hiring outside of the US is having an HR team or platform maintain other country laws, holidays and payroll. For example, some European countries take multiple week holidays which leave a big gap in coverage. The Philippines have many stipends, night shift differentials and holidays but their salaries are typically half that of US candidates. You also have to think about SA onboarding- PH was difficult, they needed a lot of documents like birth certificates. I am very pro a remote support team. Just like with any remote team, setting clear expectations, goals and giving clear leadership are the ingredients for a successful high performing team. Communication is key.

You’re only as good as your worst customer experience