Customer Support Update — Our 90 Day Plan

It’s been a month since I joined Coinbase to lead Support. I wanted to share some observations and my plan over the next 90 days to help scale our support — specifically on increasing capacity, upgrading tools, adding social support and bringing on experienced hires.

Increase Capacity

My first, and most obvious observation was that we needed more people to handle the inbound volume of support requests and a solid plan to handle any spikes in volume.

We will be onboarding approximately 500 agents over the next three months to handle the inbound call volume. Our first group of 90 new agents will start on March 5th and we will be adding a group of agents every week until we hit our goal of 500 in late May. I have personally met each new team member, we have set up new facilities, upgraded our security standards and have all the technology in place so this group of 90 can hit the ground running. Additionally, we have built triggers that alert us of spikes in volume and now have safeguards in place to add additional team members.

Better tools

After a deep dive into our current tool set, we realized that these tools were not intended for companies operating at significant scale. We’ve begun the process of migrating to a new set of tools that will enable smart case routing and more efficient workflows for our team, which ultimately will lead to faster response times for customers and fewer escalations.

Social Support

After evaluating all the channels in which Customers contact us, we were missing Social Support. We’ve begun the development of tooling for a formal Social Media Support Program. To date, our social media support has been ad hoc and inconsistent. With our new tools and a dedicated social media support team, we will make this a primary support channel. In the next 90 days, we will begin to offer social media support via Twitter and Facebook.

Experienced hires

Finally, We have hired experienced Support Leaders to help with everything from operations and metrics to quality and content. They will help me scale our organization and ensure we maintain quality while doing so. They all come from companies that were operating support organizations at significant scale and each will add immediate value.

I want to assure you that we are moving with an extreme sense of urgency and are committed to solving these long standing problems. Thank you for your patience and expect to hear more as we continue to make progress.

Tina Bhatnagar

VP, Operations and Technology