<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-embed-handler wp-block-embed-embed-handler wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio">

</figure>

• Jim Coleman


• Co-Founder of xFusion

Sponsors:

• Prisync


• Spark Shipping

Links:

• https://www.xfusion.io/


• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-coleman/


• https://www.linkedin.com/company/xfusion-support/


• https://twitter.com/jim_coleman1


• https://twitter.com/Groove_Jar

Transcript:

Charles (00:00 ):

In this episode of the business. E-Commerce I talk with Jim Coleman about how to get started outsourcing customer support. This is the business of e-commerce episode, 155.

Charles (00:18 ):

Welcome to the Business of eCommerce. The show that helps e-commerce retailers to start, launch and grow their e-commerce business. I’m your host Charles Palleschi and I’m here today with Jim Coleman. Jim is a co-founder of X fusion where they provide outsourced customer support for e-commerce businesses. I asked him on the show today to talk about if you’re a founder and you’re thinking of hiring your first support person or outsourcing support, what are some of the do’s and don’ts and what are some things you should absolutely do to make your first support hire or outsource successful? You works with a lot of e-commerce retailers. So I think he brings some great advice to the table and has some great tips out. So let’s get into the show and if you have any questions, leave in the show notes and I can forward them over to Jim. So let’s get into this. So Hey Jim, how you doing today? Good, Charles, how are you? Good. Awesome. I have you on the show. I’m excited to dig into the topic of customer support and outsourcing. It’s very near and dear to my heart. So, so real quick, what do you, so you run an agency. Oh, so I was saying support essentially, right?

Jim (01:31 ):

We do. Yeah, it’s called X fusion.io. And we, we provide customer support customer success to founders. We started kind of scratching our own itch. My, my co-founder David and I are both business owners and we built out a team internally on, on each of our companies. And then wanted to bring that to the broader market so that we kicked off mid 2019. And it’s been growing since then.

Charles (01:54 ):

Okay. Yeah. So I feel like support is one of those things where everyone just want to, like the, it’s usually one of the first things you see, like you’re trying to word this correctly, the biggest time sink at the beginning, where you’re just spending a ton of back and forth. And a lot of founders want to kind of get it off their plate early, but I don’t think a lot know how or know the right way. Maybe they’re like running out of their inbox or just as no docs, just kind of doing everything out of their own head. What do you kind of see that? Do you folks usually come to you at the beginning when, Hey, you know, I’m a founder, I’m doing a hundred percent of support and I want to get this moving somewhere else. So [inaudible],

Jim (02:35 ):

Well, we have a really nice mix of both. So we have, we have solo founders that come to us and they’re just overwhelmed and swallowed up in support requests and other responsibilities. And then we also work with the existing teams to help them scale. I enjoy both, but I particularly enjoy working with, with founders because of the, the wins that we can help them achieve at the earlier level. And, and what I mean is just that we, we like to focus on helping founders get back to the highest and best use of their time. And I recognize that like everybody has to make the decision on like when is the right time to pull the trigger for them. And I recognize that, you know, we have to build up revenue before we have the, the, the bandwidth to be able to hire a team to handle support.

Jim (03:12 ):

But one thing I’d like to consider is like, if, if you’re at that place where you can afford to do so, and you don’t, then you’re spending a good chunk of time working on tasks that are not the highest and best use of your time. In other words, things that other people can effectively handle for you. And, and you’re not working on areas of the business that only you can handle. So what we’ve seen is that once once a founder will kind of take that jump and hire us to handle support, they really free up a lot of their time. And that allows them to move forward at a much faster pace than the other ways. So I just, I really enjoy talking to founders and, and, and just discussing their business with them and helping them get those early wins.

Charles (03:48 ):

What would you say if someone was kind of sitting there thinking about this because you have this obviously outsource, or do I hire someone a direct hire full-time if someone’s kind of way in that back and forth? Well, we do kind of tell them what they should, how they should be looking at that.

Jim (04:02 ):

Yeah. It’s interesting. Like w w we don’t compete with, or we’d like to think of ourselves as not competing with other outsource companies, but rather with the idea of hiring internal versus versus external. It, what I mean is like a lot of, a lot of outsource companies will provide a resource to answer tickets, for example, on a per response basis. So the idea is that one agent might be shared across, you know, five or seven clients, and they’ll sort of go into multiple different inboxes and it’s really hard to get high quality support. I’m just not a fan of that. It’s all of our agents are full-time dedicated. We really focus on the customer experience and we believe that if you deliver that next level of customer experience, that it will pay off in time and think like brands like Chick-fil-A, you know, there’s just something magical about what they do.

Jim (04:44 ):

Southwest airlines, Zappos. There’s a lot of these that they provide next level support in it. It creates the the culture in their brand and their brain’s reputation and really helps take them to the next level. So that’s the idea like we’re, we’re providing that level of service. So yeah, I mean, it just, it, it depends on, on, you know, the, the founder’s priorities and what they’re looking to do. There’s certainly pros and cons of each approach, but one of the pros, I guess, of, of outsourcing would be the, the built-in management as well. So we provide redundant agents to help cover the inbox. And then, you know, we also provide leadership and management over the inbox as well. So it really just depends on, on where the founders out and how much how involved they want to be in the process.

Charles (05:28 ):

Yeah. It’s nice to have the redundancy, right. Because even if it’s dedicated, that person is going to have like time off at some point, and I’ve done that before, back in the day, there was one support person here, and when they’re not here, you know, you have, the founder kind of has to step back into support and having a backup. That’s the biggest thing. When you go from one to two, then all of a sudden, like, all right, now there’s, but if you can’t do that, then yeah, it’s nice to have a backup when a founder is starting, how you, how do you get someone? Let’s say I’m doing it full time, right? Like I’m doing support myself as a founder. How do you ge