Support and service are just one of the pillars within customer experience., and these days, many startups deliberate between hiring their CX support in-house, or outsourcing through a BPO. While it depends on the type of product/service, Katya is a champion of hiring CX in-house.

At Tomorrow Farms, Katya made a case to her Founder/CEO outlining the pros and cons of hiring CX in-house vs outsourced, and ultimately reached a conclusion to hire in-house. Here are some of the examples she used to make her case:

With an in-house team, there is an opportunity to create strong relationships between the brand and its customers, and an in-house experience team will make it easier to maintain a consistent and branded experience. With an outsourced team, it’s possible the CX team will work for several brands. With in-house, they’ll focus on your brand and products—as a result, this allows for the customer experience team (1) to have intimate product familiarity, (2) to truly capture the voice and tone of the brand and have in-depth brand knowledge, (3) to be deeply invested in the mission and therefore be more encouraged to deliver a world-class experience.    An in-house team helps improve and ensure (4), brand reputation, for example: so that your brand doesn’t risk losing trust from customers for outsourcing the face(s) of the company, (5) standard of quality (the CX team will likely feel more confident asking and answering questions about the product and brand if they’re embedded into the company rather than as a third-party resource—as such, you’ll have more control over how the customer experience team represents the brand and interacts with your customers), (6) that your company's customers are treated as humans, with an empathy-approach, rather than as a transaction, and that (7) cross-functional collaboration between customer experience teams and other departments will improve the company's products and content.    (8) It’s also more efficient to implement guidelines and protocols and make sure they’re being used, (9) it’s easier to control response times, and (10) to iterate on the customer experience across various touch points when the team is part of the internal structure.

All in all, whether a company chooses to hire their CX support in-house is dependent on various factors including type of product/service (straightforward vs nuanced), the stage and size of the company, recruiting budgets, and more.

In preparation for the launch of Tomorrow Farms' first brand and product (Bored Cow) launching direct-to-consumer, Katya led a Hypercare plan. For those unfamiliar with the term Hypercare, it's the immediate period following a go-live that requires extra attention and support to help sure a seamless launch/adoption of a new system.

Katya identified the areas of focus for the Hypercare plan, gained leadership and cross-functional in-put and buy-in, and met with both department heads and teams to identify and discuss any and all risks that could occur during or post-launch. As Katya's focus was specifically on the Customer Experience team, Katya outlined every possible issue, the severity, the probability, mitigation steps and solutions steps to take place in the event that any of the Customer Experience issues arose. Some examples of what she identified as prospective CX issues for launch were staffing shortages, receiving more CX inquiries than we expected and planned for and an outage with the help desk CRM.