How Independent Talent Helps Power Upwork’s Global, 24/7 Enterprise Support Team

Upwork’s world-class customer support team helps customers troubleshoot the platform, helps users mediate disputes, and provides proactive guidance on Upwork best practices.

“Our support team removes friction from the customer experience and ensures customers are successful, remain on the platform, and succeed for the long term to mutually benefit both parties,” said Brent Pliskow, GM, VP Customer Support at Upwork.

As Upwork grows, and specifically, the Enterprise customer base continues to expand globally, the customer support team needs to scale to keep up with around-the-clock requests. To meet this need, the customer support team engages independent talent sourced directly from Upwork.

The challenge: building a dedicated support solution for Enterprise customers

Upwork’s Enterprise customer base has grown significantly in recent years, including some of the world’s largest organizations. In the past, when Enterprise customers needed support, they typically reached out directly to their original contact—usually a member of the sales team. While this worked at the time, the process wasn’t the curated experience customers deserved.

“Customer support is critical for Enterprise customers because there's an expectation that when you purchase a [full-service] solution, you expect a certain level of support,” said Pliskow. “Providing the most optimal support possible ensures each customer feels valued.”

Another challenge with the previous Enterprise support process was that the sales team often spent time troubleshooting customer issues, which took time and focus away from driving new business.

“The account managers and internal partners who work with Enterprise clients are meant to improve the experience on the platform,” said Stephanie Babot, Customer Support Manager on the Enterprise support team at Upwork. “When technical support issues arise, it takes time on their end to reach out to us and drive the issue to resolution. The need [for dedicated Enterprise support] was freeing up the sales team’s time to focus on client relationships, growth, and retention, and allow our team to provide support and resolve issues.”

The solution: accessing diverse independent talent for around-the-clock support

Customer support has engaged talent from Upwork since the team’s inception. Independent professionals are located around the world, enabling the customer support team to access diverse talent and provide around-the-clock coverage.

When the time came to launch an Enterprise support offering, the team had the opportunity to engage some of the most valued, skilled, and respected talent to support Enterprise clients. Leveraging trusted, established talent enabled customer support to ensure they had the technical skills and Upwork platform knowledge needed to launch an Enterprise support offering in less than six months.

“Working in this model, what surprised me as a leader was our ability to quickly tap into an endless pool of talent—including both existing and new talent—who cover all regions of the world and have the skills and aptitude to deliver against our business goals,” said Pliskow.

Accessing diverse perspectives is another advantage of engaging independent professionals from a global talent pool. “It's not just the diversity from multiple cultures but also from multiple experiences,” added Pliskow. “Each perspective increases our value and collaboration across the team. Independent professionals each bring their own point of view and are eager to support Upwork and the output of the business.”

As part of the offering, the team also launched an Enterprise support homepage, where clients can directly engage with customer support team members. Customer support partnered closely with the product and UX design teams to create a user-friendly interface so customers can easily contact support and self-serve when possible.

The team tracks engagement to understand how much volume is coming from the Enterprise support homepage versus through internal partners—such as customers reaching out to the sales team. The interface also enables the team to track and identify trends and collaborate with the product and engineering team to improve the platform based on customer feedback.

Trusting proven talent to take the lead

When the Enterprise support offering launched, the team needed assistance with optimizing day-to-day operations, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), and providing training modules for support agents. The team engaged Gabe, a Dominican Republic-based independent professional sourced from Upwork to take on this new project.

“Gabe is a fearless and thoughtful contributor and after seeing the results he could deliver through previous engagements, it made sense that he'd be the perfect fit to help us deliver support to the highest-valued accounts,” shared Pliskow. “Within customer service [and support], we really care about and value customers’ needs. Gabe brings that to the table tenfold. He’s passionate about what the customer's outcomes are and brings that forward to the business to raise their needs and ensure customers are cared for.”

The results: scaling the customer support team helped speed up response time

Launching a dedicated Enterprise support solution powered by independent talent from Upwork has helped the team quickly address customer requests, drive Enterprise customer satisfaction, grow Enterprise accounts, and increase revenue.

“Our Enterprise support offering underscores our commitment to responding to customer needs no matter the time of the day or day of the year,” said Pliskow. “The Enterprise support model guarantees customers will hear from us quickly and that we’ll maintain the communication rhythm after our initial response. This helps ensure customer issues are resolved in a timely manner so they can be successful.”

Dedicated Enterprise support also frees up the sales team’s time to focus less on technical issues and more on strategic efforts to build relationships and identify revenue opportunities.

“The biggest feedback that we've received from our Enterprise customers and from our sales team—whom we also value as stakeholders—is that they’re seeing a difference in terms of the speed at which we respond and the lengths we go to with solving customer problems and improving our product moving forward,” shared Pliskow.

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Upwork engages with freelancers as both independent contractors and through third-party employers of record, depending on the worker's classification and applicable law.