Scaling up the Support Team: How Did We Do It?

Having joined Hevo in June’20, I became one of the first 100 employees to join this rocketship. It’s safe to say that being around from the initial days has allowed me to see Hevo rise and grow from a Small-scale Startup to now a Medium-sized Organization. When I joined, the Customer Support team was starting up and taking shape. I was the 3rd member to be a part of this dynamic team. Today, we have 14 Permanent Employees and over 30+ Interns collaborating with us. Hevo is now a trusted name for many customers who use our product on a day-to-day basis.

Hevo does not feel like an organization to me; instead, it feels like a big circle of friends and colleagues who all work together. Working remotely has not affected this relationship in any way. Like all other organizations, we also have a hierarchy of job roles, but that does not hinder our communication; rather, it enhances it.

Throughout this journey, no matter how quickly we’ve grown to become a large and diverse team, we have always kept our culture & motivations constant and worked with them as our backbone and support. According to me, the Customer Experience team at Hevo has an environment that fosters growth and mutual respect, which is why we have been able to grow so rapidly and so well. Here are a few specific qualities that we all hope to exemplify:

Trust

When I joined, the company was very new. The central value that helped us sustain during the pandemic was Trust. Everybody had immense faith & confidence in each other and the work that they could do. If someone was assigned a particular task, we knew (or assumed) that he or she would be able to complete it without any interference, and this is a perspective we maintain to this day.

It is this sense of Faith & Trust that helps instil the actual ownership & belongingness that each Hevoite has towards the organization today. Rather than a hierarchy, we view every member of the team as an equal who contributes something unique to the company. It motivates everyone and makes them eager to strive harder and prove themselves worthy.

Passion

My work truly inspires me, as it does every Support team member. We work on many things that are crucial to the organization. On a daily basis, we interact with customers to assist them with onboarding, discuss & understand their use cases. We help them implement the same & receive their feature requests, and check feasibility. Besides this, we also debug any issue or bug faced by customers while using our application, learn new implementations & technologies and perform POC on the same. Furthermore, we also document all these learnings for the future! Support can be considered a crucial bridge between Hevo and our customers, a fact we all take pride in.

The Support team is often working on the latest technologies, and gaining a lot of knowledge through this. We regularly work with the latest Cloud Technologies, Data Warehouses (like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift), SQL, Python and most of the REST API and Webhook endpoints in the SaaS world.

Yet we do not let this work hinder our sense of fun, as we often meet for long chats and video calls, play Skribbl & other online games, have talent shows and professional concerts. We also plan team meetings at cool places like Goa!

Honesty and Transparency

Before joining Hevo, I was unsure whether joining a Startup in such turbulent times would be a good idea. However, after conversing with the founders, Sourabh Agarwal and Manish Jethani, I found that they were very candid and transparent with me. This was something that gave me the confidence to give Hevo a chance.

Even after I joined the Support team, I found that the same attitude transferred over. Everyone is very honest and collaborative. Feedback is greatly welcomed and taken seriously. People were always ready to help with anything, no matter the magnitude of the task; and if it was not possible for them for some reason, they are candid about it and we brainstorm together to come up with an alternate solution to avoid any delays.

The same attitude has been translated into the Culture within the Customer Support team towards our customers; we are always direct and transparent with our customers, which helps build trust and reduce miscommunication.

Being Data-Driven

Support at Hevo follows a truly data-driven approach. For example, our Training Program involves getting hands-on experience on specific case studies carefully drawn from the data about the most commonly occurring issues our customers face. Similarly, Product Development at Hevo is backed by a data-driven thought process that carefully analyses customer feature requests. Here, we try to grow and develop our Product in alignment with our customer’s inputs and the market’s changing needs. We further try to extract insights from the feedback we receive on each ticket to improve our work constantly.

This approach of sticking to the data and driving all activities from in-depth analyses means that our work is always structured, meaningful, and thought out.

Flexibility and Independence

Throughout my previous working experience with MNCs, all workflows and processes I’ve been a part of were set in stone and pre-designed. As a result, it was always a gargantuan effort to make a significant change to any of them. It would require a great number of approvals and discussions. However, at Hevo, we are all growing together. Whenever we come across a hurdle, we brainstorm innovative and new solutions to it. Some of these solutions may fail, but we always learn from them. Often, we discover optimum and inexpensive ways to approach our problems.

The independence offered here is also unparalleled. If we feel that some measure needs to be taken for our team or some process needs to be improved, it is encouraged with no question. Every team has such a feeling of belonging that any step we take is always a well thought out and positive one, and the independence to discover this on our own is afforded to us. Hence, working at Hevo is an entirely different experience from my experience in other companies.

Working with Hevo for the past 18 months has been an adventure like none other. It has introduced me to a whole new perspective of approaching challenges. A perspective powered by a mindset that encourages every individual to think out of the box, go beyond the traditional route, and take calculated risks. One of the key highlights of my journey here has been the Respect, Trust and Encouragement I’ve received. Looking back, I believe the successful transfer of these values is what has helped us start a Customer Support team and scale it to the next level. The trust in each other’s capability & thought process has helped structure our operations from the ground up, and the transparency at each level has helped us refine ourselves every day. It’s safe to say that my time at Hevo has helped me evolve better and contribute to my team’s success and growth in a fruitful way.

Building a great product takes hard work and determination. With each of us at Hevo sharing the same passion, everyone in the team takes the effort to go the extra mile. If you’d like to be a part of our journey and work on some of these unique challenges, please do check Hevo’s careers page.”