237: Fireside with Sophie Heller

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode two hundred and thirty-seven of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today, welcome Sophie Heller for a fireside chat. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today for the first time, Sophie Heller. Sophie, it is lovely to have you join me. Hello, and I would like you to introduce yourself for the benefit of our listeners.

Sophie Heller: 0:44

Hi, good to be here, Charlotte. Um, so my name is Sophie Heller. Um, I'm at a company called Out School. We do online live classes for kids, which um, as you might have thought a few years ago, who's doing that? What Zoom? Why would you have your kids take classes online? Um that changed a lot during COVID. So I'm here to talk about um what we needed to do on the support side to go from being a tiny company to overnight being not at all a tiny company.

Charlotte Ward: 1:11

That must have been quite a journey. Well, well, welcome. It's lovely to have you. I I do know of out school and I homeschool my children, so full time and was doing so before COVID. So I have come across outschool, but as you say, this last couple of years has been a particularly special time for you, hasn't it? Um, so so let's talk about that a bit. So so maybe set it up with kind of what did your team look like before we got the news of, you know, this is this strange virus.

Sophie Heller: 1:41

Yeah, so it's really been quite the journey for me specifically. Um, I joined the company in spring 2018 as the second employee. So I came on and I was the entire inbox, right? I did all the tickets. I also um we have a lot of vetting procedures for our teachers, for our classes. So I was the person interviewing all of our teachers, looking at their classes, really doing anything that needed to be done at the company. Um, and by the time that uh March 2020 hit, for me, out school had really grown a lot. In my two years, we grew to be about 25 people. Um, I was already thinking, like, how am I going to manage working in such a large environment? I'd never worked at a company that big. I'm so used to just coming in sub-five. So you'll imagine my shock um talking to you now today. We are a 200-person company, Series D, fully distributed, just wow, so much has changed.

Charlotte Ward: 2:33

Yeah, yeah. Wow. Wow. Um, and and I guess, you know, one thing we should we should be clear about is that um out school itself, I guess, is a two-sided marketplace, isn't it? You have your parents and you have your teachers. Um, does that add to the to does that compound things when you're going through essentially hypergrowth, which is what you experienced as you hit March 2020 onwards?

Sophie Heller: 3:00

Oh, definitely. And especially from the support side, right? Because um, as you mentioned, when we started, we were a marketplace connecting individual families to individual teachers. So there are a lot of different use cases supporting families who are looking to purchase classes. Maybe they don't know how to use Zoom really well. They have technical issues versus teachers who are trying to grow their businesses, use our platform. We have a lot more uh complicated functionality for teachers. So that definitely compounds things. And I think that uh over the last couple of years, so many things are different. And one thing that's uh come up, we have a lot of different initiatives now. We work with schools, we work directly with employers. So we're just seeing a lot of different use cases that call for a lot of different types of customers to support.

Charlotte Ward: 3:44

Yeah, that's interesting. So tell tell me about uh, you know, you you were without school for a while before COVID hit. And then tell me what happened in in March 2020 for you personally and for the support environment there. What like, I mean, I I know there'll be things you can't tell us, but like what what did you what had to change overnight?

Sophie Heller: 4:08

Totally. So so much of it had to change. Uh by the time March 2020 hit, we were five people in support. So for me, that felt really big already, right? But we um, so I guess the best way to kind of tell this, um, it was a Friday the 13th, March 13th, 2020. And it was the freakiest thing because schools were starting to close. We were already working from home in San Francisco, where the company was headquartered. And literally overnight, things just fully change for the business. So we released a free classes program that afternoon, basically giving um a small amount of funds to families affected by public school closures in the US. And classic move, you know, release a new initiative on a Friday afternoon, right? Um, and so I kind of knew that the weekend it might get a little busy. We might, you know, see some things happening. But imagine my surprise, it's Saturday morning, 8 a.m. And I'm getting all these texts from coworkers across the company. Where are you? Are you not working? And I'm just thinking, like, okay, like I've been working from home for a while. It's probably like Thursday, and I'm just super out of it. But no, as it happened, we we 10x overnight. We had thousands of tickets coming in about this program and the entire company of 25 people, we just worked through the weekend and we basically had to spin up our support team to get to about a month or so later, we were 100 people or so in support. So we did all of that just over the first uh few weeks of COVID.

Charlotte Ward: 5:33

And that's incredible. That is an incredible so 10x in volume ticket volume overnight. And then if my maths is correct, that's 20x in head count in the support team in the first what time frame did you give that? Like a month? Um, I guess over the first month or two.

Sophie Heller: 5:49

So we did a couple different things. We we outsourced our support. We had to um basically from the ground up build a lot of tools, set up policies, procedures. So yeah, I guess over the first couple months or so um of the developing situation, we were all we were also just completely changing the face of our company.

Charlotte Ward: 6:10

Yeah, that's what's one way to put it. Um how did um so I mean, uh you so outsourcing helps with ramping up a big team quickly, doesn't it, for sure? Um and you but you still have to enable that team. You still have to provide the knowledge, the tooling, everything that you just said. Um, what was the what was the most immediate challenge and what did you have to work fastest on?

Sophie Heller: 6:36

Right. So it all kind of fits together. So as you said, outsourcing helps a lot, but you need to have a lot of resources to outsource. So previously, the makeup of the team, it was a lot of people who had been there for a couple of years, really knew the website, our teachers, just it just felt kind of like a mom and pop business. We knew a lot of our customers by name. We, you know, got on uh got on Zoom with them, walked them through issues. So we had to move to this world where suddenly you have um a hundred or so outsourcers coming in. And outsourced agents are great at uh getting it done, but they need really set procedures, they need set training. They can't just see a ticket and kind of uh, you know, quote unquote figure it out as we were used to doing. So I guess the first thing we had to do, we had to take a step back and really think what are our main problems coming in and how do we kind of extrapolate and make sure that we not even have full playbooks, but just just like consensus on how we handle issues. So we had very much of a like case by case, oh, if Sophie doesn't know it, like you can, you know, ask like another coworker, we'll figure it out together. Uh, we had this meeting every day that was basically like weird situations and support, and we'd just talk about whatever came up as a full team. So of course we couldn't do that anymore. We had a backlog of 15,000 tickets we somehow needed to get through. So yeah, I don't know what's uh I can talk, I guess, more about just kind of the process for writing out those playbooks. So we we had to get together, think about okay, how would we group our common issues? So we have issues related to refunds, class access, not knowing how to use the website. Um, just I'm just naming a couple of couple of uh things I'm just spitballing here. But we basically had to think about what are these issues and then what are the ways that customers phrase their questions. And then finally, okay, how do we even handle these things? Like what are our policies for, you know, a refund request comes in and it's this type of situation versus that type of situation. And, you know, being a marketplace, a lot of uh other factors come in when you're dealing with uh different sources of funding, you're dealing with the difference between supporting teachers and parents. A lot of these other initiatives were getting spun up. So things were constantly changing while we were starting to document them for the first time.

Charlotte Ward: 8:51

That that's a challenge, isn't it? When you're when your knowledge becomes a moving target.

Sophie Heller: 8:56

Yeah, absolutely. But at least for me, one of my biggest goals. So um a lot of the knowledge lived in my head at that point. And so we had these outsourced outsourcers come up and they were asking, I could you not maybe 200 questions a day in a Slack channel, every ticket they would see. Oh, how would you solve this specific situation? So I felt a real personal incentive, not just for the company, but for my own sanity to start to get this stuff documented and uh set out in a systematic way where it wasn't just one-off questions all day.

Charlotte Ward: 9:29

Yeah, yeah, that that makes sense. Um, what what was your approach there? Did it really come down to answer the question in that Slack channel and then document it in a more permanent place? Was it that straightforward, given that you'd kind of come up with this kind of classification system?

Sophie Heller: 9:46

Yeah, so it's a it was a two-pronged thing in that you know, you want to develop systems and make it easy for agents to get up to speed to answer those kinds of questions going forward. But on the other hand, you have a customer waiting for that answer. And, you know, you can't take a week or two to you know, kind of come up with the best process, the best way to explain it. So it was a lot of uh, you know, working for, I'd say the first six months or so of our growth, just working to build out systems. Um and you know, with the understanding that the more work we did on the systems, eventually the need for immediate questions day to day would disappear.

Charlotte Ward: 10:24

Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. So while you're working with the outsources then and you're creating all this knowledge and and and enabling them from a uh a knowledge perspective, what's happening to your your permanent your permanent support team? Is that growing as well? Or are they involved in a in a in support in a different way now? Are they doing more of that knowledge management now?

Sophie Heller: 10:49

So a couple of different things happened. So the people, myself included, who had been there for a while, we got shifted into more strategic focus areas. So um I worked mostly on building out tools. Uh, I now lead a team called the content and training team. So basically managing our macros to help center, our lesson lead training, all the materials that our outsourced agents need to be successful. Other people, you know, also moved to more set areas of our business, like looking at class of class listings coming in from teachers, teacher applications, those sort of things. At the same time, we also realized that while we uh staffed all of our frontline support with outsourced agents, there were still going to be ambiguous, challenging questions coming in that needed to be handled by more specialized in-house people. So we we also spun up an in-house escalations team of about, it's now about 10 people, but we had to kind of build that team out from scratch as well, which uh was crazy now that I think about it, just all of the different things that had to happen simultaneously.

Charlotte Ward: 11:53

Yeah, I I mean it's it's scaring me, I must say. Yeah, at the moment I find it hard enough just to hire a few people into permanent roles in a relatively uh you know steady environment. I can't imagine doing all of that in one go. Um, what what would be looking back now, something that you wish you'd done differently?

Sophie Heller: 12:17

I mean, I think for me it was just it was just such a big learning experience. Um, I never I've never thought specifically about going to business school, but I think now, even if I had kind of, you know, wanted to go down that road, I wouldn't need to, right? Kind of seeing a company scale from the ground up. So a lot of it was just kind of managing my own expectations, like, okay, out school is no longer a 25-person company. It's certainly not a five-person company as it was when I joined with the uh the original founders. So it was a lot of just adjusting to that. I think like one thing that made it that I probably have to do differently, and mostly because just uh the times have changed. So we had this backlog of about 15,000 tickets by the time April hit. And we're working behind the scenes tirelessly to put these systems together. But you know, customers don't know that. They're just continuing to write in to us, um, just email us, like, hey, I haven't heard from anyone in a month. I'm out of refund, or my kid can't get into class, uh, what you know, whatever it may be. And one of the things we were able to do because of the way the job market the job market looked at the time, we were able to hire 10 really strong people on a three-week contract just to clear the backlog. We uh we called them the uh the backlog clearer team. And it's great because a lot of those people now, um, we were able to find full-time roles for them at Out School, and almost all of those people now still work with us. But I think we'd have to approach that differently if something like this were to happen again, because you aren't going to find just top quality talent wanting to take such a short contract.

Charlotte Ward: 13:48

Yeah, yeah. You know, that that aspect of this has an echo for me of a story that Todd Curtis came and told on the podcast a year and a bit ago now, actually. Um, so he was at the time leading support for you need a budget. And uh uh they have a they had a different story, but but uh it wasn't hypergrowth, but but they had a different reason. They had a hellish new release and uh and their ticket volumes just a similar story of like thousands of tickets overnight, you know, and how you cope with that, how you cope with that. And um they employed us like they just went, they hired like mad on short-term contracts. And what I think is interesting is he said a very similar thing that a lot of those people stayed. A lot of those people were really great. And and that I I wonder, it makes me think that that idea of like a short-term contract in a time of stress is a really good proving ground for people.

Sophie Heller: 14:48

I think so. And I think it was great too that you know, we hired these people to do a very specific finite task to clear this backlog. And we we were still we continued to grow from March through the summer. And so we were getting more and more tickets, but we certainly didn't need all of those people doing in-house support once we had the outsourcers. So I think it's also just interesting to kind of work with those individuals and figure out. So one of them is now on my team writing help center articles, writing content for um our macro and playbook tool. And I think it was just interesting to kind of see people's strengths outside of this very immediate task and identify the best place for them at the company.

Charlotte Ward: 15:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um so having having reflected now on uh, you know, the the business learnings that that for that process forced you through, um what what's uh what would you prioritize going into this again? I mean, as you said, you kind of in a way had to do it all simultaneously, but do you do you think you overindexed in any particular area? I mean, I I kind of in my mind, I kind of feel like you know, knowledge is important, but may you kind of have to have it all. Did you get the balance right? Do you think? I guess that was a really long question, but what I'm trying to ask is did you get with it all have having to kind of level up simultaneously, did you get the balance right? Or would you would you add something into that mix or or change things around in terms of the sequencing?

Sophie Heller: 16:24

Yeah, and I I'd like to say that, you know, maybe these are famous last words, but I don't think that I'll ever experience growth like that in a career. Like most of my coworkers, even those with uh, you know, much more work experience than I do, just had never seen anything like that. So, you know, I hope the next time that um I have to go through something like this, it's gonna be on a much smaller scale. But at the same time, um I think that like it's really challenging to grow in this way when you're also um, aside from our escalated support team, we weren't hiring a ton across uh the customer teams just internally at the company. And so I think like for me, I'm I'm still in the process of building out. I hired someone to focus specifically on training less than a year ago. I'm currently bringing on someone to focus on our QA function. But I think it can be really challenging to build all these things out and then to also be, you know, kind of managing upkeep for all of these different systems and processes. So I'd hope that in the future, if this were more spread out, it would also be accompanied with in-house hiring for people to fully uh take ownership over those functions.

Charlotte Ward: 17:35

Yeah, yeah. Um, I I do think that there is a uh there is a benefit to growing all of those functions at a similar pace, as much as you can manage that to a similar level of like operational and functional maturity, as much as you can manage that as well. I think, I think, you know, when business functions, when when one business function has kind of developed everything, or is like really accelerating very fast operationally, and and another business function isn't operating, you know, accelerating quite so fast, and you get that mismatch. And I think this must be incredibly painful in in um periods of growth like out school have seen, but I think it's painful everywhere that I have seen it manifest is you know, joining up um business functions that are at operational, different operational stages, I think is really painful. Um, so I think there must be, I feel, an advantage to being able to say, you know what, we need these three functions and they can grow together.

Sophie Heller: 18:40

Yeah, and I think uh I'll I'll add to that, I think that it really made a huge difference for us once we had an official training function. Since we were at a point where our help center was the only thing of the tools that I managed that existed before scale. So we had a pretty fleshed out help center. It was fairly not easy, but straightforward to line out playbooks, to write save replies, you know, because you're also you're responding to tickets. It's pretty easy to just save language and kind of you know compile it in a more structured manner. But I think we got to a point where we had the resources and it was frustrating to see like, why aren't the agents like we have the language written, we have everything documented in our help center, we had an internal wiki, like, why are people just not picking it up? And I think that's just a really that's a stage that a company can reach where you just need formalized training. You can't just be supplying people with written resources and thinking that they learn the same way that you do. And if you're, you know, kind of a smaller, scrappier startup with people kind of, I don't know, employing more of a figure it out type attitude, that's not going to scale, especially when you're working um with anyone who's not in house. They just won't have the same context, the same uh way to get up to speed that you do. So I think that, you know, setting up a training function as early as possible and you know as is feasible for for hiring reasons that that can make a huge difference as it did for us.

Charlotte Ward: 20:07

Yeah, yeah. And I I think actually, um, you know, to add to your point there about outsource outsourced agents, um in my experience as well, even if you have close collaboration on the hiring of those people, it still can seem um like you don't necessarily index towards all of the the values and needs and character traits that you would look for in a in an in-house hiring process. I don't know how true you feel that statement is, but I've certainly felt uh even with the best partnerships I've had in outsourcing over the years, I've still felt that disconnect with the hiring process. And so you can't index for all of the all of the nice to have, you know, that kind of self-starter, the problem solver, you know, the the the person who embodies your company values and and your needs. You you can't expect that from an outsourced agent, can you?

Sophie Heller: 21:05

Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And one of the other challenges we face um so we work with a couple different vendors and they're both great, but one of them is located overseas. And so we also confront the the agents have varying abilities of English um and they also I think just some of the the kind of cultural things that come into play like we have uh for example parents might write in about a specific American holiday that they won't have context on or I don't know just like certain uh certain phrasing can skew um more towards British English than American English. And most of our customers are in the US so I think that also just adds another challenge.

Charlotte Ward: 21:46

Yeah yeah for sure it English is not spoken the same the world over I've come to learn that if I've learned nothing else as a as a true Brit I feel like I I sometimes feel like the quirky one in the room talking a foreign language for sure. Yeah yeah divided by a common language my my friend would say for sure right yeah yeah um well I mean it's an amazing story our outschool has been on such a journey and it sounds like you've been on quite a journey with them. And you said you know it's unlikely that you'd see that kind of growth again. Would you want to is the question I have for you.

Sophie Heller: 22:28

Well I guess I'd say uh if you're you know gonna go through another uh life altering pandemic situation, it really is distracting and nice in a way to be working all the time. It was no like I really, you know, of course I noticed that the pandemic was happening but I feel like it wasn't until June or July that I fully emotionally processed it because I had this uh it was fascinating. And especially from the support perspective, you know, there are always things that bother you about the website or like things that are broken and like I don't know it felt for me like I was kind of talking to a brick wall like we could just make this change. It would be so easy. And so it was really nice to kind of have a fire lit under the rest of the company um and having a lot of just common sense changes that we'd advocated for in support just you know oh yeah that makes sense like we should do it. We have all these customers now but yeah sorry I lost my train of thought I I I just felt like I felt you reliving it then and that's why at the end I kind of sealed it so I so I have relief two years on right yeah absolutely it's it's just crazy to think about how much time has passed but I think we're in a really stable position now and I'm excited that I get to um especially with expanding the QA function I really get to focus on the quality it's less like things are still really busy but it's less like everything's on fire, right? I can think about like okay let's not just uh you know respond to people within a month and have it be adequate how can we have really great service that you know hopefully people can look to in the industry.

Charlotte Ward: 23:59

Yeah yeah living the dream listen Sophie thank you so much for coming and telling your story um I feel like you wouldn't necessarily have been able to give us quite such a complete picture if you'd if you joined me last year or certainly when 2020 was unrolling and I mean you wouldn't have had time by then anyway but listen thank you so much for joining me it's been an absolute pleasure will you come back and have another chat some other time uh I'm sure there's plenty more we can dig into on that journey uh at depth but it's been such fun to have you thank you absolutely thanks Charlotte that's it for today go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash two three seven for the show notes and I'll see you next time