203: Fireside with Hannah Steiman

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and three of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Hannah Steimon for a fireside chat. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today Hannah Steimon. Hannah, it is lovely to have you join me for the first time. Um, today for a fireside where you get to bring the topic. So I will ask you about that in a minute, but first, would you like to introduce yourself for our listeners?

Hannah Steiman: 0:49

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be on this podcast. I've followed it for a long time. So it's great to actually be on it on the other side this time. My name is Hannah Steiman, and I'm chief operating officer of Peak Support. We provide customer service outsourcing services to high-growth companies. We've got agents in the Philippines and the US. And uh yeah, that's about it. That's about it. I'm excited to talk more about it today.

Charlotte Ward: 1:15

Awesome. So so I'm guessing outsourcing is the topic of the of the day then. So so um, I mean, I gosh, it's a long time since I outsourced any support work. Um, I'm talking the better part of 20 years. So maybe things have changed a little bit. Right, right, right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so tell me about, I mean, maybe like just first of all, what like how how do we even get started nowadays? I mean, like, I just imagine, like, I'm I'm not the lead, I'm not the host of this wonderful podcast. But imagine I'm kind of a lay person who doesn't know very much about this area, which might be true. Um how do we even get started? Like when we're thinking about how um we're thinking about support teams, where where to begin with with outsourcing?

Hannah Steiman: 2:09

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think where I would start to start with is what are the challenges that you're looking to solve for? Um, to see if outsourcing is the right solution for you. And typically the the biggest challenge that we see from our clients and potential clients is they really want a solution for scaling their support team in a sustainable way. And that doesn't just mean cost. Um, in some cases it does mean costs, but it really means taking the whole operational details of scaling off their plate. Um, you know, we've got, you know, companies might come to us where they have a five-person support team, but they're thinking, oh my goodness, I'm gonna have to get to 10, I'm gonna have to get to 20, I'm gonna have to get to 50 or more. And they might only have 50 employees. Sometimes the support team can be half the company. So depending on the type of product they're selling. So it's it's really about how can I find the talent in a repeatable, scalable way? Um, you know, if I need to find a lot of people quickly, how can I do that? Well, without massively, massively expanding my HR team purely for the purposes of finding and training customer service agents. So we really um take all of that off of our clients' plate. And I think that's that's where I would start. I think that's the biggest challenge that most people are facing when they start thinking about outsourcing. There are other challenges, but um, you know, really thinking about that is understanding what problem you're trying to solve.

Charlotte Ward: 3:36

I I think that's that's a really interesting set of considerations. And and being the uh the the only historic how outsourcer that I was, um, I and having not done it recently, back in the day, the only consideration that I was ever presented with was one of cost. So I've never I've never really thought about it as simplifying things for me as a support leader. I think I've only thought about it as a cost saving and frankly, something of a hassle. But but so you you can take so much of the stress away, can you? What kind of so how what kind of stresses can you relieve me of?

Hannah Steiman: 4:13

Right, absolutely. Um, well, I think a big one is recruiting. Um, so you know, just going out there looking for your next agent, especially if you're trying to do that at scale, all of that effort around recruiting. Um, the second one would be training. So we, most of our teams, you'll have a dedicated training person from our centralized training team. That person gets trained by the client, and then they're able to train all of those new people that come in. They get up trained on every new skill that comes in, and then they can just really handle that, take that off your plate. Um, we do reporting. So we'll do build a custom KPI report for our clients. And often that KPI, sometimes that KPI report covers the internal team as well. So the client's own team members. Um at times it's even covered other outsourcers as well. Um so you know, we deliver very customized, very detailed KPI reports. We have an account manager who's there with you, um, working with your team lead to just make sure the team is reporting up to up to standards. So if there's a performance issue on the team, that's not on your plate, that's on our plate. You know, hey, our QA score slipped, or hey, this one agent is not working up to potential. I mean, obviously that's still on your plate. You know, you as the client, you're you're still probably worrying about that. But really, the responsibility for solving that problem is on us.

Charlotte Ward: 5:33

Oh, okay. Okay, yeah. So it's a really um, so it's a really bespoke relationship then. So I guess obviously, like uh as the provider of these services, there is a certain amount of like experience and repeatability you can bring to it, bring to the whole model if you're running this at scale of across multiple organizations. Right. Right. But as a but as a client, as somebody who wants to scale in this way, who wants this number of agents, we have this problem to solve. The the uh the simplicity that you bring and and like the relieving of those stresses is uh is um quite significant, I would imagine. I mean, uh it's uh for me as a support leader, all those things you just talked about, particularly the training, particularly the recruiting, they're time consuming and they they might not even be necessarily very costly, right? But but I guess you know, uh an in-house recruiter or a few hours of mine here and there or whatever. But the stresses that are involved with that and and the the variability, because I'm doing this in a pretty ad hoc way, whereas yeah, what what you bring is a repeatability of experience, right?

Hannah Steiman: 6:43

Yeah, yeah. We've got the benefits of scale because this is all we do. Um, whereas you've got your full-time job as the leading the team. Um, and then also, you know, think about it, it's not necessarily I just saw recently that you were hiring, um, but you know, a lot of times where we come in is the team's gonna have to double, triple, or 10x. And so at that point, all of those costs do actually become quite costly. And um, and it takes more than just money, it takes the attention, it takes the attention of people like yourself and other senior leaders at the firm who the company really needs them to be focused on something else, really to be focused on their their core jobs, right?

Charlotte Ward: 7:19

Yeah, on the business itself. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So if I was to like if I was to think about how I might make the first step. So I've got I've got the a a vision of the problems I'm trying to solve, and I also know it's gonna be comparatively stress-free. I know you're gonna solve you're gonna We're gonna solve all your problems. Yeah, solve all my problems. Um how does how does that relationship kick off?

Hannah Steiman: 7:50

Like sure, yeah, absolutely.

Charlotte Ward: 7:52

Yeah, how do we?

Hannah Steiman: 7:53

Yeah, well, absolutely. So people come to us, and I'm sure to other outsourcers in a lot of different ways. Um, the majority of our clients have come to us by referral from folks we've worked with or from other clients. Um, of course, increasingly compared with 20 years ago, people are finding us through digital channels, um like G2, a lot of directories like G2 and Clutch. Um and uh sometimes we have no idea how people came to us and sometimes they have no idea how they actually heard of heard of us. Um, but it really starts with a call with our sales team to see if we're a good fit. And then it's the solution design phase. Um, and sometimes that's really easy. Sometimes it might be very straightforward. It's an e-commerce client and we look at the volume and it's email only, and we have a really good sense off the bat, you know what, that's gonna be five agents from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. And sometimes it's a lot more complicated. Maybe it's highly technical, um, maybe there's some unusual shift needs. Um, maybe there's particular, um, they need a more customized security plan. You know, that I would say more often than not, there's some level of complexity to it where we really have to work closely with our operations team to come up with a to design a proposal and say, okay, this is how many agents we think you're gonna need. These are the shifts we're gonna put them on. Um, and you know, it's a pretty extensive process of customizing the solution for the client. Um, and then if they say go, um, then it's launch time. So at that point, uh we we have a pretty intensive meeting with our security team to make sure we understand the security risks and make sure those risks can be mitigated. And if there are any special needs, we can incorporate those. And we introduce the person to their account manager, the client services manager, who's really going to be their right hand for the entire relationship. Um, so the the account manager and the team lead or operations manager work together. The team lead or operations manager is managing the team directly, the team members report up to them, they're really responsible for day-to-day operations, and then the client services manager works closely with them to make sure the engagement is a success. So they really oversee the launch. Um, the launch is typically um it's it's usually a train the trainer model. Uh so typically you would start training our team lead and our trainer. Um, and then at times the whole team would be there as part of that training as well. They don't have to be, it depends a lot on the schedule and timeline. And we learn everything from you with the goal of eventually taking on all of that. So the goal is the team lead and the trainer really start to own your training and your materials and gradually just take that on. So we're managing it um entirely ourselves. Um, and then we're owning the training materials, we're building them out as as new um, as new product changes come up, new process changes, um, we are really taking that off your plate. Um, so yeah, that's that's it in a nutshell. Does that answer your question?

Charlotte Ward: 10:54

I think it does. I mean, I'm I'm quite impressed with the amount of of uh work, frankly, the amount of load that you're taking on through that whole process. I mean, it started to be music to my ears when you started talking about shift management alone. I just like just thinking about what my current like I've got a quite quite small team and just managing their shifts 24 by seven in a Google Sheet at the moment. Like a lot of data's out there.

Hannah Steiman: 11:23

Yeah. Right, right, right. Oh, and the other the other piece of that um is quality assurance. That's the other piece that we take off. We have a centralized QA team. Um, so that's one other piece as well.

Charlotte Ward: 11:33

Yeah, yeah. So so there's all these layers, isn't there? I mean, these are all the things that take effort to set up. I'm setting them up now, I've got some of these pieces in place, you know. I am just getting going, like shift management is early day stuff, but QA is a bit more uh, you know, advanced. And then when you're getting into like really like in-depth training materials management, it starts to sound quite a significant, um, a significant load that you're taking on. And and while we said um early on that there are some predictive, predictable elements to certain types of clients, as you said, maybe the kind of fairly standard, mid-range e-commerce, uh no particular needs, you know, uh that that are out of the unusual in terms of channels or hours or tooling or anything. Um that's predictable. You know how long typically and they they're probably able to tell you as well, right? What they t how they typically serve and how long and and like they they've got well-established channels, I guess, um, and processes. So um that would seem to weave quite well with with the predictability of that kind of um client for you. But how do you, as a provider of of this service, a provider of these people and all these other constituent parts, the quality, the training, um, all of that? How do you manage that for the not so usual clients? Like, I'm again like thinking of my own team, very deeply technical engineers, running 24 by seven support for a very clump complex product.

Hannah Steiman: 13:15

Right, right, right.

Charlotte Ward: 13:15

How what are the like I know there are differences? So, what are the biggest challenges for you as a provider there?

Hannah Steiman: 13:22

Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that comes down to the solution design phase and making sure we really understand what those complexities are, making sure that we can deliver the service, and then figuring out how we're gonna do it. Um, because we do do um uh quite a bit of tech support both for software and for hardware products. Um, really getting, obviously, we can't we can't get the equivalent of weeks of training in just in, you know, during the sales process, but but understanding what the tickets look like, understanding the complexity, um, understanding how long these are gonna take to solve, understanding what's the background. Do we need it, is this something you can train anyone on, or do you need a technical person for this? You know, so so how is this going to impact our recruiting? So it really starts there. It really starts with um making sure our sales team and our client services team understands the product as well as we can from the beginning. Um, and so that we we you know, we understand, you know what, maybe you need a much higher ratio of QA than typical. Um, maybe you need an ex maybe the team members don't have to be extremely technical, but the team lead does. Um, you know, just understanding various things like that and figuring out how we can make sure that we are building the right solution for you so that we're setting all of us up for success from the beginning.

Charlotte Ward: 14:40

Yeah, yeah. And that's the important thing, isn't it? Because there's when you put when you're front loading all of that effort, you you don't want to have to do it twice or three times. I mean, tweaks are kind of expected, but yeah, complete reboot would be painful. Um if um, I mean this is a uh a commercial free zone at the moment. So I have to kind of say that obviously there are plenty of BPO providers out there, but but I um but um knowing that knowing your experience in this area, if if I was thinking of this, if I was thinking of going to market and looking for someone um like Peak Support or indeed Peak Support to uh solve those problems for me. Yeah, what are the kind of um as a as a potential client to a a business like yours, what should I be considering? What should I be asking of any provider? What should I be evaluating and and thinking about as I'm considering providers?

Hannah Steiman: 15:41

Yeah, absolutely. Um so um I will start with uh this brave new world, as we're all talking about. Uh it's become the catchphrase of the yes last year, um these these trying times that we live in. Um so I think one piece that's really important to understand is um how is, you know, if you're talking to an outsourcer, how what's happened to you in COVID? How have you been disrupted in COVID? How have your clients been disrupted? Um, because even though um I look, it's really different geographically in the US, um, even just between the US and Europe, I know. Um, you know, in the US, people are starting to talk about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. That's not true in many places in the world, and it's not going to be true for a long time. Um, so really understanding that impact um is critical right now. Um, but that is, you know, that that's particular to these times. I think if, you know, in in normal times or in any time, uh, the first question I would ask is what's your account management like? So um do you have will you have a dedicated account manager? Um if so, who do we know who that person is? And how many clients does that person manage? What is the role of the account manager? Um, because there are some outsourcers that don't offer an account manager at all. Um you might just have a team lead who's shared with another account, for example. So um really understanding you need a point of contact, really understanding even if you don't know at the beginning exactly who that person is, um, what's that role look like? Um so for us, for example, our account managers typically manage no more than 10 to 12 accounts at one time. So they are really there to be partners with our clients. They are on talking to our clients every week, they are there as a resource, they are um, you know, if there's an issue with the team, they're gonna own it. It is their responsibility to solve it. So um so I would definitely ask about account management. What is the level of account management you're gonna receive related to that? What are the KPIs you're gonna receive? What is the K what does the reporting look like? Um I think I mentioned we, you know, we do completely custom KPI reports for all of our clients. Um we'll report every day if that's what our clients want or twice a day. Um, so what kind of reporting are you going to get? Um, another one is what kind of contact are you going to have with your team leads and agents? Um, so I base this on what we hear from other clients as one of their pain points with outsourcers. You know, I have a performance issue with my agent and they won't do anything about it. Or, you know, I can't talk to the agent. I have feedback for the agent and I have no idea if they're passing on this feedback or not. For us, our agents are on your Slack. You know, they're a part of your team like any other. So you can reach every any agent at any time, you can reach any team lead at any time. So, really understanding what is that relationship going to be like with your team lead and your agents. Because these are the face of your company, these are the face of your brand. You don't want them to be siloed. You really need them to be closely connected with you and with your in-house team if you have one. Um, so I have a lot more. I have plenty more I can I can go into it, but I think um that would be those would be probably the biggest ones. All those questions around how the account is going to be managed, who are those people who you're gonna be interacting with on a daily basis, and what is that relationship gonna be like? I think is really important to understand. You don't want to be surprised by that.

Charlotte Ward: 19:12

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, and I I think that for me is, and and I'm I'm therefore assuming for a lot of people is is something that's a little bit fearful about this, um a little bit fear-inducing about this whole concept of having people that sort of work for you but don't work for you, that that are sort of part of your team but aren't part of your team, that yeah, they're there however close that relationship is, there is always going to be a disjoint. So I think I think like the reassurance that um we might get from the kind of questions that you describe um probably reduces that fear level if I if I if I feel that there is frankly an element of control. Personally, I'm quite a control freak.

Hannah Steiman: 19:58

Right, absolutely. Totally. Yeah. And it it's hard to outsource this. I mean, customer support is so important. And you know, sometimes we're on the phone with the CEO or the one of the co-founders. And this is this is their baby. This is so important to them. And they're very, it's very hard to let go. So, no, I absolutely, absolutely understand that. And it's funny because we were remote even before COVID. We were remote from day one. And uh so from day one, we were trying to figure out how do you build a culture where people who are working remotely can still feel like part of a team, can still feel together. It can, and the thing about being an outsourcer is you're always remote from your clients, no matter what, if you have a physical call center or not. And so I think actually we've become very good at bridging that gap because we were remote, because it was just built into our DNA that we want to be as connected with you as possible. We want to be on your Slack, you know, we want to um we want to travel and meet you and see you in person and and you know get to know who you are as a person. So I think that was just because we were remote, in some ways that was built into our DNA, which helps us break down that barrier with clients.

Charlotte Ward: 21:08

And I mean, in a in a COVID world, obviously anyone who's already operating remotely has that kind of advantage of not being in like a panic situation that we were all in in March last year.

Hannah Steiman: 21:21

But yeah, I mean we we woke up on March 16th and it was a day like any other day.

Charlotte Ward: 21:26

Exactly, exactly. I hear you, I was there too. Um uh having been remote for more years than I care to admit. But I think I think what you raise is kind of an interesting um uh point about this. It it's an interesting difference, I think, between the world now and the world two years ago, um, which is that I tell me if I'm wrong, but I suspect the world two years ago between any client and their outsourced provider, whether that outsourcing provider was fully remote or not, I I feel like there was almost a hard hard line between the two that was much more prevalent in those client organizations where they had a call centre or they had an office. Have you found the fact that suddenly all of your clients are remote as well and forced into that situation? Has that blurred has that blurred that bridge a bit? Did you blur that bridge? I don't know.

Hannah Steiman: 22:20

Right, right. That's a good question. Um, you know, I think I I don't feel like it's made that much of a change to us um because we were already remote and you know, so so I don't think it made that much of a difference to us. I do think things have changed, certainly since 20 years ago. Um, for one thing, just because of technology, you know, the fact that Slack exists, the fact that Zoom exists, you know, and all these tools existed two years ago. And, you know, I think we were already using them to break down those barriers with our clients. So I think that that technology, for folks who wanted to be remote, that technology that it's enabled it has been around for a while and has really has really made it possible to bridge those barriers. And I think also like for us, um, we just use our client systems. And I think in the old days, often going to an outsourcer meant you had to completely transition to their whatever system they used, and now they own all your stuff. Now, now it's that much harder to switch because you're on this, you know, proprietary software that the outsourcer is using. Now, if you're on Zendesk, great, just give us, you know, give us accounts on your Zendesk. And so that I think makes it much more frictionless for clients. And um, you know, we we're just coming onto your systems and adapting to you versus you being forced to adapt to some other system that we are on.

Charlotte Ward: 23:44

That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And um, the the final thing really that I want to touch on a little bit is about um sort of bridging those gaps a bit more. It's something that you touched on before around training and the the train the trainer approach that you have in place. Um again, just from the client perspective, how can I like enable that? How can I like maximize the chances of success of training any outsourced agent? But particularly in that model, particularly in that sort of train the trainer, because again, like it speaks to me a little bit like there's a little bit of distance, like there's an extra step or an extra, yeah. You know how can how can I enable that?

Hannah Steiman: 24:31

Yeah, well, and and the reality is there may be trainings that it really makes the most sense for the client to be very involved in. So um sorry, I have a four-year-old knocking. Can you hear that in the background? Should we pause for a sec? Yeah, take up, I'm on a call. I need you to um to not knock, okay? I'm being recorded for the radio.

Charlotte Ward: 24:57

That's okay. That's okay.

Hannah Steiman: 24:59

So just the shape.

Charlotte Ward: 25:02

So just that that's all right. So just that training piece, and then we'll just wrap up. Yeah. Yeah. Um so enabling the training.

Hannah Steiman: 25:13

Right, right, right. Yeah, so that's a really good question. And the reality is in a lot of cases, it does make sense for you or for the client to still be involved in some level of training. Um, so for example, one thing we tell our clients is if you're an e-commerce company, we want you to tell us about the stitching on the pants. You know, all the things that are passionate about, the things that make your product special. Maybe it's the UIUX design if you're a software program, maybe it's your company's mission and core values, all of that secret sauce that you're passionate about that makes your company special, we want you to train us on that. And so the trainer can take that. Um, often the trainer can can take that and then you know communicate that just successive rounds of agents. Um, but sometimes having that person from the from the company um be a part of that can be really special and can really make those agents feel engaged and feel excited about coming to work every day, which is ultimately what we want. We want them to feel as excited about your brand as you do. Um, so so there are parts of it that you don't necessarily want to just, you know, hand over to someone else. And I think that then there are parts that can very easily be handed over to someone else. So I think it's about finding that balance. Um, you know, and and also a lot of our training is very hands-on. It's not just um, it's not just reading things and reading tickets and and reading guidelines. There's always a big element of shadowing, what we call reverse shadowing. Um and um, you know, often, for example, we we have we do a lot of content moderation now as well. Um, so for content, you know, you're moderating around racist content, misinformation. And so for that, you have you have your guidelines, and then you really gotta look at examples. You really gotta talk through, okay, does this violate the guideline? Does this violate the guideline? Um, so a lot of that training is very interactive, and you know, there are pieces that um that we can do and pieces where it may not be that we can't do them, maybe we could do them, but there really is an extra added value from that, having it come from the client. Um, and then you hear the questions that our agents are asking, so there really is a mutual benefit there. So I think it's just about finding that finding that balance. And our our training team, having the training team there helps you do that.

Charlotte Ward: 27:31

Yeah, yeah. I I like that idea actually of finding the things that the uh client it the things that benefit the client to deliver, and then the things that actually are much more deliverable and in a repeatable manner, I think uh uh it makes a ton of sense. Like I don't need to deliver to every outsourced agent a bit of Zen Desk training. But on the other hand, like you said, if I if I'm if I'm saying even someone who's not the support lead, but maybe the the product guy or something who just evangelizes about the value this thing brings, then that makes a ton of sense because probably no one else can speak to that like that other person in the same way, yeah. Yeah. Um so final thing then, um, just just to close out on what's been like a hugely thought-provoking fireside for which I thank you is um it's just what's your like one last piece of advice? What what should everyone take away if they take away one thing from this conversation? I mean, they're gonna take hundreds, let's face it.

Hannah Steiman: 28:37

That's great. Awesome, thank you.

Charlotte Ward: 28:38

But what's top of the list?

Hannah Steiman: 28:40

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think um I guess the big one thing would be um some companies feel like I I think some people are worried for maybe some of the same concerns that you have. You know, I don't know if outsourcing is right for me. You know, my company's too complicated, my product is too complicated, whatever it is, um, outsourcing is not the right fit. Um, and I I think the one thing I would say is is it's an option. So if you're you you should consider it. You know, we can, you know, with with intensive account management, we're driven by your KPIs, your data. Um, you know, it can it can be done. And so if you're stressing about scaling, if if if all of these things are keeping you up at night, um think about it as an option. And uh you can always have a conversation. It you may be right, maybe outsourcing isn't the right fit for you, but I I want, yeah, I think people should know that it it can be an option even for teams with pretty complex needs.

Charlotte Ward: 29:38

That's awesome. Outsourcing is an option. I just need to get over the fear and have the conversations, right? Yeah. Thank you so much, Hannah. Thank you so much. Thank you. Oh, this has been great.

Hannah Steiman: 29:51

Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it.

Charlotte Ward: 29:57

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two zero three for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.