Ramping a Core Customer Support Team on Short Notice

You’ve developed an app, or a game, or a new product, and your team is small, passionate, and hands on.  For the most part, everyone wears multiple hats, and helps engage with your customers/community.  And then the magic happens: you’re featured in the Apple Store, or Oprah declares her love for your product, or it’s gone viral.  I’d imagine you would start counting your money, then have a panic attack noting crazy spike in product demand or customer inquiry or social feedback, and shortly thereafter… you would call us.

We shine in short notice service ramps, and have a tenure of experience in such extreme situations to back it up.  Overall, we rapidly employ a three-pronged approach that involves our People Operations department finding the best candidates from our expansive team across the globe, providing a seasoned manager to work hands on with you and our teams, and employing our operations checklist covering all additional, necessary information and access details not already be noted in the scope of work.

But the brilliance is in the process and details.  Without getting too specific, here’s a bird’s eye view of how we ramp core support teams.

Yeah, we’re profiling.

Every brand is different, and we want to make sure we’re customizing our support approach to your customers.  We’re looking for a few key ingredients, not limited to the following:

• Tone.
• Experience.
• Availability.
• Enthusiasm.
• Personal knowledge base.

Shut the screen door!

After we’ve identified the ideal mod profile for your project, we start filtering through our troops.  It helps to have a large pool of candidates to draw from already (we have roughly 10,000 globally).  After locating a sizable crop of mod-excellence, the next step for us is a candidate screening.  Prior to a mod joining our team, we go through the legal screening steps.  This process is narrowing our options to the best of the best for this position and client.

• Review background and previous project success.
• Identify specific availability for scheduling.
• Test the mod’s basics (industry knowledge, thoroughness, and communication skills). 
• Test discipline skills (project position specific) and troubleshooting ability.

All of this communication happens quite quickly and efficiently with the aid of our amazing People Operations team.  It isn’t until the next phase that we really get hands-on with on-boarding core teams and ramping to your specific project and unique customer needs.

Stay tuned for Ramping A Core Customer Support Team, Part 2.

Josh Smith
Project Manager