[liztsai]

Hi there! This is Liz from HiOperator. We set out earlier this year to build a scalable US-based customer service solution that we would have used as startup founders ourselves.

Would love your thoughts! Happy to answer any questions and tell you more.

[yalooze]

I would love to hear some more detail about how you tackle onboarding / knowledge transfer. How do you handle a more complicated business that may have a lot of different edge cases? Do you just build up exhaustive documentation?

Also, I know you're just starting, but I got to your site and wanted to read a LOT more about your service than the information that was available on the single page site. I was thinking: Tell me way more about how it all works, but there was no where else to click! :)

[ei8htyfi5e]

I can speak about onboarding and knowledge transfer from the viewpoint of our clients. Usually they give us access to their past tickets and we have an hour long conversation where we ask a million tailored questions. Then clients put us in a sandbox to play where we can't hurt anyone. To fill knowledge and capability gaps, our ops managers pose questions to in-house teams, usually over Slack, but it can be anything. Once everyone is comfortable, they let us out into the world. :)

On the back end, I wish I could brag a little about this, but it is our "secret sauce" so I'm just going to have to say it's proprietary and I believe the beginning of something great.

To directly answer your first question regarding edge cases, it's simple: we don't do them, opting instead to let your in-house team do the complex edge cases. Over time though, we inevitably end up doing some of them as we find commonalities across clients (shipping exceptions, insurance disputes, etc).

[npollock]

Hi Liz, how long does it typically take to onboard a new customer/organization? And do you charge for setup?

[liztsai]

Our usual onboarding time is around a week although our record is 1 day for a company that was in a tight spot. We don't charge setup fees for most situations. It's built into the price and we want our customers to stick with us because they like the service - not because they've forked over a large upfront fee!

[toomuchtodo]

Hey Liz!

What would you say to a company on the fence who considers providing support a core competency within their org?

[ei8htyfi5e]

Hi, I'm Phil, the other founder. I'd say keep it as a core competency! It's important and it's why we're in business. We understand why you'd want to do that and all of the companies we work with feel the same.

That said, keep in mind there will always be a lot of repetitive time consuming stuff, and that's where we excel. Everyone likes to think they're a unique and irreplaceable snowflake, and that may be true in total, but there are parts that can be handled more efficiently elsewhere.