Phone support, live in under two months
Took an account that had only ever done multilingual tickets and launched US phone support in 2020, from the first planning call to go-live in under two months. Two years later, did the same for chat.
Phone live in under two months (2020); chat stood up from zero (2022)
The knot
The account launched in 2019 as multilingual ticket support: four languages, tickets only, no live channels. In 2020 we won the client’s US phone queue.
Phone runs on a much shorter clock than tickets. A ticket answered within a few hours is on time. A caller on hold for a few minutes often hangs up. Everything we had built for tickets, from schedules and staffing to reporting and team structure, assumed there was time to catch up.
We started planning in late June. Go-live was in August.
What I did
- Coordinated the launch across three groups: the client, our internal IT team, and the consultants brought in for the build.
- Did part of the setup myself, including routing rules. Calls ran on Amazon Connect, with Zendesk as the CRM at the time.
- Staffed and scheduled a US phone team from zero, and added phone to the capacity plan next to tickets.
- Adapted reporting and team structure to phone, which is measured in different numbers: answer rate, abandonment, hold and talk time, and occupancy, watched through the day rather than reviewed the next morning.
- Worked through the go-live problems, which were almost all at the level of individual agents’ setups rather than the system.
- In 2022, did it again for chat: stood up a chat team on the same account from zero.
What changed
US phone support went live in August 2020, under two months after the first planning call. Chat followed in 2022.
Over those years the account went from four languages on tickets to 24/7 omnichannel support across tickets, phone and chat.
What I’d tell someone doing the same
Test every agent’s setup one by one before go-live.