SupportZebra

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of trust and safety at Linktree, a SaaS company. Our platform allows users to create a website with all their social media handles and favorite links. They can then post the website on their social media biographies, such as Instagram or TikTok. It’s a convenient way for people to explore links. 

It’s my job to build out the company’s trust and safety department from scratch. My team does content moderation — anytime something is reported as violating our community standards, it’s our job to investigate those claims. We also proactively look for content that may be illegal or violate our community standards. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SupportZebra?

I’ve engaged SupportZebra to form our content moderation team. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

SupportZebra serves as moderators who review reports and proactively search and remove content that violates our community standards. 

What is the team composition?

At first, we mapped out a small team of 13 teammates — it has since grown to 13 teammates. My main points of contact have changed over the years; 

How did you come to work with SupportZebra?

We found SupportZebra by searching for various organizations. I communicated with a couple of other companies that offered similar services. Ultimately, I picked SupportZebra. They were one of the more affordable options and treated their employees better, especially concerning mental health. 

In my field, moderators could be exposed to potentially disturbing content day after day. As a result, it was vital for me to work with a company that cared about their employees and was willing to invest resources into their mental health. SupportZebra was of that caliber, plus they took security seriously. Given that, I decided to go with them. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested around $500,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

The partnership started in July 2021, and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We track a couple of metrics to gauge SupportZebra’s work. For one, we set a threshold that each moderator should meet regarding the number of items they review. We also give them weekly or monthly quizzes to ensure they understand how we process reports and they’re all on the same page. Some common errors happen as our standards and internal guidelines change, but we expect them to perform well on the quizzes. 

Moreover, we review their actual items. We also quality-check each moderator's decisions to ensure they meet our expectations. Overall, we use these metrics to determine their team’s success. 

How did SupportZebra perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve met deadlines and exceeded our expectations in terms of turnaround times. Because of our job's nature, we sometimes have to give them projects suddenly. Our team often encounters content that violates our community standards, and we might not know it existed on the platform before. 

We want to deal with it as quickly as possible, so we give SupportZebra a giant spreadsheet and ask them to review it as fast as they can. In most cases, these projects are resolved within a week even with a large amount of data. 

Meanwhile, most of our communications happen through Slack. However, we also communicate with SupportZebra via Zoom calls. We try to have weekly calls with everyone on the team across time zones to ensure everyone’s on the same page or to check if they have any questions or concerns. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

What stands out the most is their willingness to take feedback. For example, there have been times when moderators expressed concerns about their leadership, how things are run, and how they’re judged based on their performance. Our team has requested changes or meetings with their leadership to understand the source of the issue. Then, we offer alternatives, such as allowing the moderators to work from home to keep the morale up. 

They’ve been excellent at taking our feedback to heart. They’ve made improvements and chances that have exponentially increased moderator morale — they’re so much more satisfied with their positions. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

SupportZebra should continue improving their leadership. The team leaders should have the appropriate managerial training before being given an account or a team of moderators. We’ve noticed this in the past: some of their team leaders don’t have the necessary managerial experience, and it shows. To be fair, they’ve worked on addressing this issue. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be highly communicative about your metrics. Data helps determine how much support you need from SupportZebra. For example, we’ve done much legwork crunching the numbers and parsing out how many reports an average moderator can review per day. We’ve checked how much our tooling affects that number and determined the improvements we can make to maximize the moderators’ efficiency. Overall, having an open feedback loop and constantly communicating data with them is beneficial. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the manager of customer support for Center, an expense management and corporate card company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SupportZebra?

Our goal was to ensure we could provide a great customer experience to all our customers. To do that, we needed assistance, especially with the volume we were quickly coming through on our support. We needed to organize and create a support structure within Center.

We knew we’d need a team that could take a high volume of support cases, especially on our growing card side of the business.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We use SupportZebra as our BPO service provider. We have three tiers of our support organization, and they’re one of them. They primarily assist our customers with the corporate cards side of the business, so we use them as customer support agents. SupportZebra handles phone, chat, and email customer-facing support. They’re on the phones and chats with our customers on a daily basis.

We initially had our tools to provide support to our customers. We were a smaller company at the time, so we had to create some onboarding resources, which we hadn’t set up before because we’d never had to onboard a big group of people. 

We had fun putting together the resources, and I trained the initial group of agents from SupportZebra on our processes. 

What is the team composition?

We started with five agents and a team leader. We currently have about 15 agents and a team lead. We’ve grown a lot with them, so our number could change in two weeks.

Additionally, SupportZebra has a great support team. A QA person is signed to our account, but they aren’t technically on our team. We also have a great account manager, so we work closely with other team members.

How did you come to work with SupportZebra?

We found them a few years ago. I think it was a Google search, but I can’t say for sure.

We wanted to increase our support team and ensure we were working with a partner who could provide a high level of service. We then identified SupportZebra in our initial research.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in April 2022, and our relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve seen an incredibly high level of service from SupportZebra employees. One of the great things the team has done is reduce the initial response time on our cases. Before, our initial response time would really vary, so our value was very different two years ago from what it is now. SupportZebra has reduced our response time to a quarter of what it was before, specifically for the card support side, which is the type of case they handle.

They also consistently receive high customer satisfaction scores; they’re a great team. Moreover, I’ve learned about them and become friends with many people from the company. They’ve seamlessly adopted our support organization. We look at the team as our coworkers and full members of Center’s support.

How did SupportZebra perform from a project management standpoint?

We haven’t had complaints with the support team. Everyone has been fantastic, from their CEO and executive leadership team to the agents. They’re also very responsive and consistent in meeting goals; they hold themselves to a high standard, and anyone at Center would probably agree with me.

We primarily use Slack and Salesforce. We communicate with the team via Slack, and Salesforce is our key management tool.

Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to give a shout-out to in this review?

Myla (Customer Service Manager) is our account manager. I went to an on-site visit with SupportZebra a year ago, and Myla was fantastic to work with during the entire week I was in the Philippines. Overall, she’s always been great to our company; she really cares about providing the best service possible.

What did you find most impressive about them?

SupportZebra has a positive people culture and wants the best for all their ambassadors, which is their term for their employees, which I think is great. Since the job is a 24/7 gig, they find ways to support their own and ensure everyone feels satisfied and has areas to grow in. Overall, they keep the culture fun and really care about their people; we have a kinship there.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t have anything to say. I love SupportZebra; I’m a big fan.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

New clients would be lucky and impressed to grow their support family. We work with SupportZebra as members of our company. I don’t think of them as a separate entity; we’re all just one group. If a company has the same mindset, they’ll get a great new group of coworkers who provide excellent service and are delightful people to work with.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of support at an insurance brokerage. I’m responsible for our customer service operations, administration, and support.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SupportZebra?

We needed someone to help us with many back-office tasks, including data entry and updating information in our agency management system.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

SupportZebra provides us with back-office support. They mainly help us manage all the communication alerts we receive from over 140 insurance companies. To do this, they log in to our website to pull out the information in the form of a notice or document. They then assign each notice or document to the appropriate team member in our office. We actually train their team on how we want each task to be completed, and they’ve been able to do so.

SupportZebra also helps us update information within our systems and send emails to our clients, including reminders and updates. 

What is the team composition?

We currently work with 12 teammates from SupportZebra.

How did you come to work with SupportZebra?

Our company’s managing partner met with SupportZebra’s CEO before, which started our relationship. We decided to work with their team not only because of the established relationship but also because their family-oriented culture mirrors ours.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with SupportZebra in 2016, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our engagement with SupportZebra has been going well. We initially started working with one person from their team, but now we’re working with 12 team members and continue to work really well together.

In measuring success, we look at each task on an individual basis. We track the success rate in each specific role and the number of tasks that need to be completed and take into consideration other factors as well.

How did SupportZebra perform from a project management standpoint?

SupportZebra has completed tasks on time and within budget and helped navigate through changes along the way. Their team uses their own project management tools, but we also use Microsoft SharePoint to track tasks. For communication, we primarily interacted through Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook.

Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to shout out to in this review?

Marchelle Kate (Team Leader) has been amazing to work with. She started with us in 2017 and has become the team lead.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What distinguishes SupportZebra from other providers is their ability to customize their services to meet our specific requirements. Simply put, their service isn't one-size-fits-all.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can’t think of anything SupportZebra could improve on.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs

Make sure to identify how individuals on SupportZebra’s team learn best. By doing so, you’ll be able to work well together and give them a better understanding of what you want and the results you’re looking for.