HOPLA has implemented, set up and is currently co-managing a US-based Beauty Subscription Brand Company with a Work-from-Home Customer Support Operations

About the Client

The Client is a US-Based Beauty Subscription company with over 4.3 million subscribers. The nature of their business required customer support teams across various skill-level (approx. 10+ different support tiers) to handle simple customer inquiries to more complex escalated issues.

Client Requirements

The company had various outsourced teams in the Philippines in a traditional Brick & Mortar (B&M) BPO model and was keen on exploring the work-from-home set-up through a reliable partner for reasons such as: 
  1. Cost-reduction 
  2. Wider talent reach, especially for specialized tiers.
  3. Have better control over implementation of various strategies to improve the quality of resolution provided by agents.
  4. Better agent retention and scores on targets set by the client.
  5. Day-to-day control over their staff members from an operational management as well as technology (AWS setup) perspective.
  6. The Client needed an agile company to support quick and effective realization of fully remote operations due to the impact of COVID restrictions affecting their B&M BPO providers.

Challenges

This project was the company’s first foray into the remote working set-up and therefore: 

Challenge 1: Their training materials were specifically created for B&M learning.

Challenge 2: IT set-up to support a fully transparent and data secured environment was nonexistent. 

Challenge 3: The client had little exposure to the work-from-home environment and testing the model with minimal risks was of top priority.

The HOPLA Solution

Solution 1: From the onset of the partnership, HOPLA and the Client maintained very close collaboration especially in identifying key leadership roles that will guide the team towards a successful engagement. Highly qualified Team Leaders, Quality Leads, and Training Leads were identified to support in fine-tuning the client’s training materials to be effective in a fully-remote learning environment. HOPLA Operations Team helped the leaders in identifying effective LMS, training path, training KPI’s and training strategy to support a successful pilot team training, onboarding and nesting. 

Solution 2: The Client, invested into making the remote set-up work for their Support team, has worked with their in-house IT department to launch a remote desktop protocol system that will be used by work-from-home agents. This RDP allows them to control and maintain the integrity of the data the agents handle through their own systems. This is supplemented by an army of remote working tools that are part of the HOPLA suite of services making remote working seamless, secured, and transparent. 

Solution 3: Because it is the client’s first foray in remote working, we have ensured that we are able to build a strong foundation to allow a seamless growth process. We have set a pilot team of approximately 30 FTE, starting off with identifying key leadership positions then finding agents that have the capability to support a quick development of any new agents through a buddy-up system we have implemented. 

Results

Through effective client and HOPLA collaboration, the Pilot Team yielded great results surpassing the target set by the Client that is patterned based on their set B&M BPO targets. The client’s outsourced HOPLA team hit the ground running, hitting the targets above 15-20% immediately during the first quarter of implementation. QA checks, which were very important for the client, also hit the 100% mark from the onset and continued to be between 95-100% from implementation to date. 

The investment of both the client as well as HOPLA in creating a good foundation in terms of training materials and processes, tools, and key leaders in the team allowed the client to build a high performing operation of more or less 100 FTE in less than a 5-month period. 

This project not only allowed the client to realize how effective the remote set-up can be with the right level of support and collaboration but also saved them an additional  30-50% in outsourced cost vs. what they were paying their current BPO & work from home vendors.