2306 - Why Outsourcing Customer Support Works Like a Personal Trainer with Gear Inc's Adam O'Connor

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Adam O 'Connor. Adam, you are the Chief Commercial Officer at Gear Inc. You are found on the web at gearinc.com. Adam, it's great to have you. It's great to be here, Josh. Looking forward to our talk. Absolutely. Listen, I'm going to also, as of when we're recording this, you have a bundle of joy due very soon. So I just want to say congratulations, Papa. That's very, very exciting. I think sometime in the next few days. In the next few days, yeah. Okay. Likely to happen in the next few days. So if I have to run off halfway through the podcast, I apologize. There's the call.

1:36Listen, there's probably no better reason to hang up on an interview. So please, please do so if that if that should happen. So, hey, aside from being an expectant papa, you know, I always love learning what, you know, high level business folks do in their free time. What interests do you have? What are you geeking out on these days? Two things, really. Josh, I'm an absolutely devout follower of Manchester United, the soccer club, and they're not doing very well at the moment. So I try to hide that, and I've just told all of your followers. But they're going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment.

2:16But I try to see as many games as I can and do that. The other thing I'm really into at the moment, I think a lot of people are, is AI and building workflows, understanding how all of that goes together and how it can make people's lives easier. But I have found that AI only does so much and we definitely need humans in the loop to make it worthwhile for everything. So I'm geeking out on both of those at the moment. I can imagine. I can imagine. How has this year been, by the way, for football? For football, my team got all the way to the final and lost last year into a lesser final. But the season started off OK, ups and downs so far.

2:56But yeah, I live in hope, eternal hope. Don't we all, don't we all? Well, Adam, tell us a bit about Gear Inc. So we're a business process outsourcing company. We're in 24 different locations around the globe in 24 different countries. And we cover over 75 different languages. We do customer support. We do a lot of work on trust and safety in the online communities and making sure that people are safe online. And we look after everyone from SMBs all the way up to enterprise, some of the biggest companies that your listeners would have heard of. And everybody in between as well, across a wide range of different verticals, doing a wide range of different tasks.

3:39Well, tell me more. Why is that needed in this season? Okay, so for years and years, Josh, big conglomerates and big companies have used low cost destinations to be able to offer things that other companies can't, whether that be 24 seven support on customer service, whether it be finding people to follow the sun in terms of doing things. and in the last 10 or 20 years it started to bleed through to smbs being able to add people and they don't replace the workers that you have within your company at the moment what they do they free up the time of the people you have to really chase the revenue so they can do repetitive tasks they can do paperwork all of that kind of thing they can answer the phones but if you were trying to have a 24 by 7 customer support function completely based within the u.s it's quite cost prohibitive you have to do quite a lot of things whereas if you look to do it abroad or at low-cost destinations that have great english and great skilled people you're saving money and it's giving you a differentiator to your competitors as well so yeah um so what makes gear unique versus other call center services or support services um is are you unique based on the industries you work or what would you say would be, I guess, your USP?

5:02Really, it's the amount of different languages and the amount of different scope that we do. Every VPO has different skills and different target markets that they go after. We tend to look after a lot of the social media stuff for companies. We also do a lot of the customer service, bringing in AI to help it as it comes into all different industries at the moment. but we make sure that the human element on top of that is there, that people are looked after, and we make sure that the staff members become part of your family and part of your work rather than us telling you how we're going to work.

5:39We find out how you want to work and bring that into the relationship. Okay, so imagine now you're speaking to a room of founders and CEOs. They might just be handling customer support internally. and I'm curious, Adam, and if you were to give like a little mini TED talk about the things that you've learned and observed as you've been working with your clients, what are some of those, I'd say, transformative moments, moments of realization, what should leaders know? You can train people no matter where they are in the world to be part of your team and care about your company and really put your company forward, as you would somebody in your local office.

6:30COVID was both a terrible thing for the world, but it also accelerated companies being in the cloud, being used to working remotely, having people working remotely around the place. And it forced founders and owners to really think about their processes and how things will work. Taking that in the next step, if you've already experienced working remotely and you can do that, the next logical step is to find the skilled people at the best price you can to deliver the best to your customers. And that's really where BPOs like Gear come into doing so. Okay. Well, I'm hoping, you know, again, kind of where we are right now with AI.

7:12Obviously, I think, you know, a lot of your companies are looking at, well, how can we provide better quality of service using AI-enriched tools? What are you seeing? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's AI enriched tools that elevate people. I think the human element is still going well. And if I use sales as an example, if you go on LinkedIn, you see post after post after post of I've got my AI SDRs, they're closing or they're bringing me 4 ,000 leads a week, but nobody actually shows you the output. They only show you the workflow that they've built. In reality, that's because the quality that they're bringing through isn't what you need.

7:53AI can do a lot it can really help people and empower people it can't build relationships and we're still as a society buying from people because of relationships you either like the person you trust the person you want to buy from that so using AI as a tool to accelerate when a customer comes to you now to buy your product whatever that may be they already know everything it's not like 20 years ago when you were trying to sell the company to sell the product so using ai insights into that allowing ai to help you identify the pain points and how you should be able to position yourself is is really really powerful using ai to build an email where you have no human interaction and it just fires out i don't know about you josh but i get probably 20 of those emails a day trying to sell me something and they just go straight into the bin i'm not interested completely completely whereas whereas somebody who's got all of the information about gear and myself crafts an email from that information that says hey adam i noticed you were doing this blah blah blah blah blah that captures my attention straight away so i really feel that um ai is there and it's a really powerful tool but it's not going to win you the business without human element over the top of it so yeah well uh where do you think the future lies for customer support.

9:16Hey, and just so I'm clear, GEAR is, you know, obviously it's BPO. Do you mind maybe just covering the different, you know, kind of services that you provide? Sure. Yeah. So we do customer service. We do accountants, accounts payable, accounts receivable. We do software development. We do online trust and safety. We do lots and lots of different, Some PAs in the background, some engineers, a wide, wide range of skilled jobs that you can do in a remote setting that you don't need somebody sitting in your office to do. And as I said at the top of the show, you supplement your existing team and put their expertise to the forefront.

10:03Yeah. And I apologize. It blipped just a little bit there. Your website is gearinc.com. And obviously, if you hover over services, you can see everything that you do.

10:16The gear as a company, where do all of your clients come from? Like, are you do you have like your own internal outbound sales team that you use or how is gear managed to grow? Yeah, so we we use AI to supplement the outbound sales team that we have. We do a lot of trade shows and look at different areas that may need our help and can. And the number one thing for everybody, whether you be a small company to a really large company, is referrals and word of mouth. So by nature, we're a high volume, low margin business. That means that I need to make the relationship work really well. When the relationship works very well, you're a lot happier than to refer other people.

11:02And that's how we continue to grow and do a good job for people. Mm-hmm. And so how does someone know that it makes sense that they might want to partner with an outsourced BPO? Have a chat to the BPO. Don't listen to the full sales pitch, but understand that BPO is very similar to AI. It's not going to solve your issues in terms of your processes and things. You have to have them nailed down before you start looking at either offshore and outsourcing, using AI. They're just amplifiers for what you already have. So if your customer service team isn't working because you don't have your standard operating practices documented properly and things like that, taking that to a BPO or taking that to AI to help you isn't going to actually solve the problem.

11:52It's going to amplify the issues that you already have. Make sure that you have everything set out. Make sure that you are ready to do it. And also make sure that you're ready to commit to it to make sure that it works along with your provider. Do you have, Adam, do you have resources for a friend that's listening to our conversation right now? Like where do they go from here? Maybe they may or may not be ready for a conversation at this point. But, you know, where could they learn more about this world? And maybe they could start planning for when they want to, you know, again, maybe bring in some backup, bring in some muscle.

12:30Sure. For a start, I'm always happy to talk to people, not in a sales environment, but just if they need some advice and help. Otherwise, they can go to the website, have a look at some of the use cases we've got there and the case studies and work through that. And understand, just try and formulate in their own heads what is possible and what isn't possible. So some roles, and you'll find providers that are quite honest, and some roles are very difficult to outsource and are better kept in-house. And others, it makes much more sense to use a BPO and get that out there at a low cost and reap the benefits of that for your internal team and for yourself.

13:11Your website, gearinc.com. Adam O 'Connor, proud papa to be. And again, you are the chief commercial officer. But again, the website, gearinc.com. There's an orange button that says contact us. Also, you are on the LinkedIn, so we've got that link as well. But wonderful to have you. Adam, congratulations. And thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.

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