Case Study
Our client, a Fintech software developer with commercial and individual customers, needed a strategic partner to help manage their customer support operations. As their product and service expanded, the company experienced a 190% surge in sales volume — and a commensurate surge in customer support requests.
They were also transitioning from chat-based customer support to email-based support and suffering a decline in customer satisfaction. Our client’s goal was to forecast the capacity and headcount needed for the next 24 months and establish performance metrics to measure efficiency and create accountability.
The client had previously worked with a business process outsourcer (BPO), but the client’s management team was spread thin trying to manage the BPO workforce. Moreover, our client felt that the BPO was more focused on quantity than quality of candidates and did not provide the flexibility or communication needed to support their growing business.
The first step in addressing our client’s challenge was building the right team. To provide talent that aligned with our client’s values, we not only had to find experienced customer support professionals but had to screen them thoroughly to ensure a culture fit. Additionally, these roles were fully remote, and candidates had to be available to work weekend shifts.
Despite these unique requirements, Aston Carter recruited 12 customer support representatives within five days of our client’s request. Our recruiting agility created a three-week cushion between hiring these representatives and their start date, allowing time to procure and provide assets and ensure that these contractors were prepared and confident in performing their roles.
The remote nature of these customer support roles — combined with our client’s need for performance optimization — made oversight and support of these contractors critical, so hiring a client engagement manager (CEM) to oversee our remote customer support team would be critical to the project.
Although recruiting for this role was challenging due to the temporary nature of the assignment, we drew on our deep network of experienced professionals, bringing on a CEM who had tremendous success managing our contract customer support team on a prior engagement with another client.
The CEM was responsible for onboarding, orientation and ongoing performance management, coaching and development of our contractor team. They kept contractors engaged through weekly 1:1 meetings and a weekly all-team meeting to set goals and establish camaraderie.
To measure and drive performance within the program, during the initial three weeks of the partnership the CEM met with the client’s leadership team to establish reliable metrics and informative KPIs — including:
The CEM also produced deliverables specified by our client and met with leadership regularly to communicate developments and provide visibility into performance dashboards.
Over the course of our partnership, our team resolved over 1,500 customer support tickets, averaging 206 tickets per week. We far surpassed the wait time median goal of 48 hours, finishing with a median time of 10.4 hours, and 81.4% of our tickets were resolved on the first “touch.”
Additionally, 92% of our contractors successfully finished their assignment with the client allowing for team continuity throughout the project; and we achieved an asset retrieval rate of 100%, recapturing all employee assets as part of our offboarding process.
Overall, our ability to work with agility and provide transparency and consistent communication made a big difference for our client’s customer support program. Our client continues to grow and define their position in the marketplace, and our managed solution allowed management to focus less on customer support functions and more on larger strategic goals.
Aston Carter consistently worked with an openness, transparency and agility that was lacking in our previous outsourcing partner. I would 100% recommend Aston Carter to any company looking to streamline customer support.
Customer Support Manager, Fintech Software Development Firm