Tickets resolved by agents who learn your product

Plans depend on hours, desks and coverage. Get a staffing plan within 1 business day. To orient you, 2026 cost guides put a managed offshore staff member at $640 to $2,400 a month full time, while a loaded in-house hire in the US runs $4,700 to $9,100 a month (Wishup, Cherry Assistant, Marblism). AssistBPO prices per agent for a block of hours, with the backup, team lead, QA and reporting included rather than billed as extras.

Yes. A dedicated agent works your queue and nobody else's, which is how they learn your product, your customers and your edge cases. Pods of three or more get a team lead who is also dedicated to your account. We do not run a shared floor where one person answers for many brands, because that is where tone slips and product knowledge stays shallow.

Level 1 is triage and known answers: password resets, order status, how-to questions, policy explanations, anything your knowledge base already covers. Level 2 is diagnosis: reproducing a bug, checking account settings, walking a customer through a configuration or deciding which refund policy applies. Agents start on level 1, are certified by the team lead on level 2 after training, and level 3 stays with your engineers or specialists.

Discovery to a named proposal is 72 hours. Onboarding depends on product complexity: a store with clear policies can be live in about a week, while a software product with a deep help center usually needs two to three weeks of training and shadowing. We would rather add a few days of shadow time than let an undertrained agent talk to your customers.

Zendesk, Freshdesk, HubSpot Service Hub, Gorgias, Intercom and Help Scout are the platforms we work in most, and agents can cover email, live chat, social inboxes and phone from the same queue. You keep the accounts and the data; agents use seats you create. If you have no help desk yet, we can recommend one for your volume and set it up during onboarding.

Three habits. The team lead samples tickets every week and scores a bigger random sample on the monthly QA scorecard for accuracy, empathy, policy and resolution. Any correction you send becomes a macro or knowledge base fix the same day. And the weekly review looks at reopens and CSAT comments, so a slipping metric is caught in days rather than at a quarterly business review.

The agent follows the escalation map we build in onboarding: who owns billing disputes, technical bugs, legal threats or press inquiries, and how urgent each is. The customer gets a holding reply with a realistic timeframe, and the ticket is handed over with a summary, account details and steps already tried. Open escalations stay on the end-of-day report until the owner closes them.

Yes. Tell us the dates and the expected multiple of normal volume. Surge agents are trained on the same macros by the same team lead, join the queue for the period you need and roll off afterwards. Because the core agents stay, your customers still meet people who know the product, and the temporary agents take the simpler tickets while the queue is high.

Always. Agents sign as your team, use your email domain and signatures, follow your tone guide and never mention AssistBPO to a customer. Your help desk, your macros and your customer data stay in your accounts. If a customer asks where the agent is based, the agent answers honestly and briefly, then gets back to solving the problem in front of them.

Price a whole desk rather than one seat. A loaded in-house hire in the US runs $4,700 to $9,100 a month (Wishup, Cherry Assistant and Marblism, 2026), and that figure carries none of the hiring round, the training program, or what happens to the queue when one of your two agents takes leave. Outsourcing buys the backup and the team lead alongside the seat. Keep it in-house when the product is specialized enough that training runs for months, or when agents have to sit beside engineering to be useful at all.

Surge agents roll off once the backlog is back to normal, which is how the peak plan is built in the first place. The core desk runs month to month, with thirty days notice to stop or to change the hours, so a 160-hour agent can drop to 80 without a new match or a new training round. The thing worth keeping through a quiet quarter is the weekly review, because that is when knowledge base gaps get closed while there is still time to close them.

Reopen rate before CSAT. A reopened ticket means the first answer was wrong or incomplete, and it moves weeks before a survey score does. After that: backlog age rather than ticket count, because ten week-old tickets are a worse problem than fifty from this morning; escalation rate, which should fall as agents are certified on level 2; and the count of knowledge base articles added, which is the clearest sign the desk is learning your product instead of guessing at it.