One of my goals over the past few years has been to expand OPSWAT's support operations to overseas offices in order to better serve customers in their local time zone and to provide 24-hour support for our premium customers. In order to achieve this, we needed to make sure that a new support team could mimic the characteristics of the local support group, including: a deep understanding of our products; relationships with our engineers, product managers, and sales teams; and the ability to adapt to rapid introduction of new products, product features, and product behavior with limited documentation and training. Expanding and globalizing a support team that was ready to grow beyond the confines of the headquarters and sole office of the company was a daunting prospect!
Supporting our products requires technical acumen and creativity, knowledge of the product at a technical level, and the ability to guide customers who are often seasoned engineers and IT professionals. The quality of support we provide and the relationships we maintain are fundamental to our customers' success with our products. For this reason, it is important that we make certain that every Support Engineer is maintaining our standards. A remote office has to be passionate about making our customers successful, be open to constructive criticism and be willing to respond to our feedback positively and quickly.
For the above reasons, we decided against contracting out to an existing support service. I am sure there are plenty of quality organizations out there that provide good service, but after interviewing a few of them we determined that we wanted to associate with an organization of similar size to ours. The ideal team would be dedicated to the success of our customers, passionate about our product, and have the same sense of ownership in our objectives as we do. We wanted to make sure that every person on the team thinks of him or herself as "OPSWAT."
OPSWAT's Support Team in Vietnam
Today, we have successful support offices in Vietnam, Romania, and Hungary in addition to our headquarters in San Francisco. Here are some strategies I used to set us up for success:
Coordinate with peer organizations within the company that are also looking to expand
In our case, the engineering teams were also looking to open offices offshore. By partnering with those teams, there was enough critical mass to open self-contained subsidiary offices. Having multiple groups in one office results in favorable characteristics similar to our San Francisco location: an office where everyone is dedicated to a common set of goals, objectives, and approach, as well as an office where a support engineer and a software engineer can discuss and white-board a complex issue together.
Make sure you have a dedicated local office manager with a strong stake in the success of the office and company
The manager's sole focus should be on the partnership with OPSWAT; the strength of this relationship is crucial. It is important that you are aligned with your manager on quantifiable success parameters for the team: number of tickets resolved, average first response time, customer satisfaction ratings, etc. Parameters like this are relatively easy to explain and document. However, you also want to be aligned on qualitative parameters such as a desire to make the customer successful; passion for finding a solution for the customer; the effort put into researching an issue (as opposed to just passing it off to engineering); the tone when dealing with a customer by phone or in a ticket. Qualitative parameters are more difficult to measure, and thus challenging to document in an agreement between the parties, but they are imperative to the success of the company. For example, when I am looking for a partner, I want to get a sense that the person running the organization understands and buys into those principles. Ideally, I want an organization that is small enough to where the performance on these parameters has a significant impact on the success of that organization.
OPSWAT's Team in Romania
Personally interview each candidate at each new office
For instance, I let the local manager and team do the majority of the screening and candidate selection, but before anyone is hired I interview them via a Skype video chat. I personally interview candidates to make sure that they can convey the professionalism and attitude we need from our support reps, that they understand the expectations of the company and our group, and that they are as enthusiastic about the job as I need them to be. As we grow, more of these interview points are handled by the local support manager, but I still make sure to meet with every candidate as a fundamental part of the process.
Establish close relations between the different offices
Make sure to have a "one team attitude" rather than an "I don't know them and I don't get them" attitude. When people know each other, they tend to trust each other and to initiate collaboration. To foster personal relationships with outside offices, we have in-person group meet-ups and team building events. Additional events can be expensive and difficult to measure in a quantitative way (i.e. benefit over cost), but the qualitative benefits are obvious. A lower budget option is to send select people from one office to another for inter-office training. Select the most experienced, biggest domain expert, or the top performer from one office to visit and provide training/guidance to another office for a week or two. Finally, have regular office-to-office Skype video conferences where the staff of each office will continue to see and hear their colleagues from other offices.
Continuously improve processes, documentation, and communication
Moving from one local office to multiple offices means being more disciplined when you transmit knowledge about the products, customers, and the way you serve your customers. You can no longer rely on tribal knowledge or an analyst with sole expertise in a product that he keeps in his head. You must have an established on-boarding and ramp-up plan for new hires. You must make sure that new directives coming from headquarters get communicated quickly and effectively. An expansion of new offices accentuates the need to do what you should be doing already: Have a communication plan, have a documentation plan, and have defined processes.
OPSWAT's Team in Hungary
Have a good source for incoming talent
We have chosen to locate our offices near universities with strong computer science programs and have chosen local office managers that have relationships with those universities. This is a great way to fulfill the company's software engineering talent needs. It is also a great source for technical support resources. Outside the United States, we've found that there are many computer science graduates who are interested in working outside of engineering. A job that gives them exposure to international business allows them to interact with customers from all countries, and lets them sharpen their English communication skills all while utilizing their technical expertise is a very attractive opportunity. It is important to make sure that you always have a pool of candidates readily available. People will leave (voluntarily and involuntarily), and you need to be ready to backfill quickly and with minimal disruption.
Have a globally scalable support system
We implemented Zendesk as our system because it is a cloud platform that has a mature customer help-center and agent dashboard, making it easy to increase agent seats.
Budget and plan for IT
We use cloud-based solutions for most of our needs, but we still require IT to help us implement on-premises applications, configure the cloud-based applications, and provide inter-office connectivity.
Conclusion
With our successful opening of three new support centers, we are now moving into our second phase of support expansion: training our most trusted resellers in local markets to become first-line support in those local markets. We are still in the initial stages, but as we progress in our expansion plan, I hope to share further details for that model.
