Building World-Class Customer Support

We're always telling you that you can build star-quality workteams on oDesk — when we did it ourself, we tripled volume in our customer support department while cutting costs 60 percent.

It's the sort of problem many of our buyers face: oDesk was (and is) a rapidly growing startup that needed to quickly scale up a key department, and provide service on a global level as well.

"We used to handle all tickets as they came in via our web form," says Shannon Adkins, oDesk's Director of Customer Success. "We were resolving tickets within two business days, but the nature of our business and the critical work being done on our platform meant that was simply not a high enough level of support for our customers."

Fortunately, we know where to go to put together the kind of team that can meet that challenge. Shannon began hiring providers to staff our customer support system, and by April 2009 had 10. Six months later, she had 17. The team is almost evenly split between the United States and the Philippines, which lets us provide 20 hours of live coverage a day to oDesk's worldwide user base. This initiative has been so successful that Shannon renamed the "Customer Service & Support team" to better reflect its mission — and its effectiveness.

"Our goal is not to 'support' our customers, but to really help to ensure their success as they build a business on oDesk."

— Shannon Adkins / Director of Customer Success at oDesk

"Chat has become the priority of the oDesk Customer Success team," she says. "We've found that customers prefer an opportunity to have their issue resolved with just one touch, and we're able to accomplish this in seven out of 10 chats, compared to only four of 10 email tickets."

The support team, with its combination of chat and email service, is not only time-efficient, it's cost-efficient. Shannon has seen the cost of support drop 60 percent — from $5 a ticket to only $2. Part of that success is due to Shannon's skill at picking rock-solid providers, but also, she says, it's the nature of the distributed workteam.

"Our turnover rate is extremely low," she says. "When people can work from home with a flexible work schedule, we just don't see the turnover that is rampant in call centers or phone banks. Everyone on our team is really engaged."

Active Management

Shannon is every bit as involved with her far-flung staff as any manager could be with an in-house department. She leads a weekly 30-60 minute training session that examines a difficult case, inviting everyone to brainstorm how the team might improve its response. Team leaders — providers who started out as reps themselves — audit every rep's chats and perform on-the-spot coaching and feedback on how to improve.

"We have a group chat running at all times to allow agents to work with one another in real time when they get stuck," Shannon adds, "and we reward performance with monthly spot bonuses to highest-performing team members."

Jasmine Sison, a provider who joined the team in July 2007, says an engaging work environment keeps her motivated. "I am always looking to find new ways of making my work easier and faster without sacrificing quality," she says. "My potential is being discovered and my existing skills are honed and challenged. I love learning, and I get my daily dose from this team."

Shannon uses our oDesk Team app to both build community and motivate her providers.

"All metrics are published to the entire team," she says. "All team members know how they are doing relative to their peers, as well as how oDesk as a whole is doing. This eliminates a lot of fear and uncertainty, and is in line with the oDesk value of transparency."

Her well-thought-out model is really working for Shannon. Her team was handling 1,000 chats a month in April, and in five months it hasn't quite doubled in size but is handling three times as many chats. And she'll be adding another two or three providers by the end of the year. Shannon says her mission is to help everyone else on oDesk be successful, but in skillfully tapping the potential of remote workteams, she's created a great example of success in her own right.