Case Study: Customer Support Marketplace

The Problem

• Setting up systems and processes for customer services at startups
• Finding and hiring the right talent for customer-services functions
• Getting flexible and remote work opportunities for customer-services executives

Our Solution

• Web-based marketplace app for businesses to put up their customer-services requirements where candidates can apply for relevant opportunities
• Allowing startups to hire and manage a fraction of support services or a specific number of support hours instead of hiring full-time resources
• Administrative tools to manage remote customer-service resources as per the defined contracts

Research

We started by performing primary and secondary research to identify the pain points of finding gigs for customer-service representatives and the problems around sourcing, managing, and measuring the performance of these resources for enterprises. We identified that customer-service requirements for smaller-scale companies are inconsistent and do not require a full-fledged team — making a solution that allows them to hire and manage a remote team of customer-service representatives on demand ideal for startups and SMEs.

Execution

Based on the research, we identified the features required to facilitate the marketplace and defined the scope for the minimum viable product (MVP). Next, we fleshed out the business and technical requirements for the MVP features. The primary challenge with double-sided platforms is the communication and interaction between the two user types.

We approached it by creating high-level user flows for both, then detailing the sub-processes while ensuring communication and data flow between the two user types doesn't break. We produced detailed workflows and data flows for both user types — customer-service executives and enterprises — along with a product requirements document for the development team to build out the platform.