24/7 Application Support Outsourcing for North American and European Businesses

A week has 168 hours, and a support team on a standard schedule is present for only 40.

Your office may close at 5 p.m., but your app doesn’t. Users can still log in overnight or on weekends, and you can’t put urgent problems on hold because your support staff is offline.

That alone is enough reason to consider 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses. With this setup, an outsourced technical support team can help your users around the clock in their native language.

Keep reading to learn how the model works and which factors to prioritize whether your business operates in North America or Europe.

Different Ways to Get 24/7 Coverage

You generally have four options for providing support around the clock, and the table below breaks down each one. If you’re comparing an in-house setup with 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses, this can help you decide which model is better.

Support Model	How It Works	Best for	Potential Drawbacks
Follow-the-sun support	Each team resolves requests during its local daylight hours and hands off outstanding tickets to the next one	Businesses with customers across different time zones	Context can get lost when a ticket is passed from one team to another
One outsourced team on rotational shifts	A single team in one location covers the full 24 hours through three shifts	Companies serving one region	Night shifts are harder to fill
An external partner covering nights and weekends	Your in-house team covers standard business hours, while a provider takes over on nights, weekends, and holidays	Businesses that have strong daytime teams and low after-hours ticket volume	Customers may get inconsistent support depending on who handles the issue
An in-house team working extra hours	Your own agents work extra hours to cover nights, weekends, and holidays	Companies with large support teams	You have to plan and manage every shift yourself

The third model is commonly known as “after-hours support,” and it’s the easiest one to implement, since your in-house team doesn’t need to change its schedule.

You might think that the fourth option is the most cost-efficient, since you already have the staff you need. But covering night shifts means hiring extra agents for every language you offer. Plus, late shifts can end up putting too much pressure on your most experienced technicians.

When your team is stretched too thin, your customers have to wait longer to get the help they need. Hitting that bottleneck is usually what pushes companies to look into 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses.

Who Is Available After-Hours?

Having a support team available at 3 a.m. is a good start. But you still need to figure out what kinds of support tickets they can resolve.

If you’re currently vetting providers that offer 24/7 support outsourcing for global businesses, ask two questions: Which support levels are covered at night, and which channels are available?

Support Tiers

Tech support teams typically operate on a tiered system. L1 agents receive calls and manage basic requests like password resets. L2 technicians resolve more complex problems, such as software bugs, while L3 specialists are responsible for cases that require rewriting parts of the system.

If you only have L1 staff at night, they may only be able to log and triage the issue. So, the ticket sits there until the L2 team signs in the next morning, leaving the customer waiting alongside it.

To avoid this, you should ask the vendor how many L1 and L2 specialists cover each shift and how fast an L3 engineer responds when a ticket is escalated. In fact, if more complex cases pile up during nights and weekends, that’s a sign you need a dedicated tier 2 team.

Make sure these details are included in your contract. If you don’t, your users may end up waiting until the next day for a resolution even though you’re paying for round-the-clock application support.

Available Channels

After that, you’ll need to find out which communication channels remain open at night. Plenty of providers offering 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses keep phone lines and live chat running during regular hours, then switch to email-only overnight.

So, any user who loses access to their account at midnight will have to send an email and sit around for a response. If your customers can pick up the phone or reach out via chat during business hours, there’s no good reason they can’t do the same at 2 a.m.

You should also clarify what counts as an urgent ticket and which team it should be escalated to.

Ticket Handoffs Between Teams

With follow-the-sun support, teams take turns to help your users. As one group wraps up their shift, they transfer any unresolved tickets to the team in the next time zone.

This transition is called “a handoff,” and if your provider doesn’t have clear rules for it, important information can easily get lost.

A single issue might bounce between two or three different teams before getting resolved. If the first agent fails to document the case clearly, the next person will have to start from scratch. This forces your customers to repeat themselves, which can be incredibly frustrating.

To stop that from happening, the technician should leave a brief note on every open ticket before logging off. It should cover the following:

• The issue exactly as the user described it
• The app version they’re using and their account setup
• Any troubleshooting steps the agent has already tried
• Potential fixes the technician has ruled out
• Any promises made to the customer, along with the deadline
• The next steps and who’s responsible for carrying them out

Before signing, ask your global application support outsourcing partner to share an example of a handoff note. It’ll give you a clear picture of how thorough their teams are.

All teams should also use the same ticketing systems and knowledge base to make sure the ticket’s full history is visible to everyone.

Finally, internal notes must be written in one shared language, usually English. If an agent assists a user in French and then logs the ticket updates in the same language, the next team may not be able to read them. 

You should expect any vendor providing 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses to walk you through how their staff manages this process. In another article, we’ve covered the time-zone challenges of working with an offshore technical support partner.

What to Prioritize If Your Business Is Based in North America

If your company operates in North America, distance is your biggest challenge. You might only be serving one market, but your customers are scattered across an entire continent.

Here are the areas you should focus on when considering 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses:

Coverage Across Time Zones

Since the US spans four time zones and Canada stretches across six, you can’t expect all your users to be active at the same time. For example, when your New York Office closes at 5 p.m., it’s only 2 p.m. in Los Angeles.

If you have only one team working standard East Coast hours, your West Coast customers will be left without support for the rest of the day. That’s why you should ask your global application support outsourcing partner how much coverage they can provide and how many agents they have on each shift.

You need to account for holidays, too. Thanksgiving, for instance, falls in October in Canada and in November in the US. So, your Canadian customers will still need assistance while your US team is off.

English, French, and Spanish Support

English-language support may not meet every North American customer’s needs. You also need French-speaking teams to accommodate your user base in Quebec, plus Spanish support for customers in Mexico and across the US.

Because of this, you should confirm whether your international application support staff includes specialists fluent in all three languages.

Privacy Rules in the US and Canada

The regulations governing how you manage user information also vary from one country to another. Medical records in the States, for example, fall under HIPAA rules, while Canada has its own privacy framework known as PIPEDA.

On top of that, major enterprise clients may request that their data remain in one region, which is a requirement commonly referred to as “data residency.”

So, before you commit to 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses, find out where the vendor’s agents are located and who has access to customer accounts. Our guide on technical support data security lists the certifications you should look for.

What to Focus on If You Operate in Europe

If your company operates in Europe, your users are scattered across multiple countries and speak a variety of languages. You also have to factor in the region’s compliance standards. Here’s how those factors affect 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses:

A Wide Range of Languages

The EU alone has 24 official languages. Based on the European Commission’s survey, 47% of Europeans speak English as a second language. That means you can’t assume that every customer will feel comfortable explaining a technical glitch in English.

Naturally, that pushes multilingual support to the top of your priority list. As you weigh different options for 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses, ask for a schedule detailing which languages are covered during every shift. For example, a provider may have German-speaking teams during the day and English-only ones at night.

Native Speakers vs. Translation Tools

Some vendors rely on using translation tools instead of hiring staff who speak the target language. These tools can help you offer sufficient international application support, provided that the requests are simple and text-based (emails about known bugs, for example).

Voice calls and urgent tickets are a completely different story, though. A frustrated user needs to feel heard, and a fluent speaker is better equipped to deliver that.

Fluent agents also pick up on regional nuances that those tools often miss. They know the local format for writing dates and when national holidays fall. This is referred to as “localization,” and it’s become the standard in this industry.

Night Shifts and EU Rest Rules

Thinking about relying on your in-house team to cover after-hours? The EU’s labor laws can make this challenging.

Every employee must get an 11-hour block of uninterrupted downtime each day. That means if a technician clocks out at 11 p.m., they legally can’t be back at their desk by 7 a.m.

On top of that, you need agents on that late shift for every language you support. So, you’ll want to weigh those extra hiring costs against the price of 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses.

GDPR and Your Customers’ Data

Finally, there’s GDPR, the EU’s overarching data protection law. This framework governs how personal information is processed outside Europe, and those restrictions apply at night the same way they do during the day.

If your outsourced night team is based in a different region, find out where those agents are located and whether there are safeguards that control their access to user profiles. Once you have those details, share them with the person responsible for data protection at your company.

SLA Terms to Include in Your 24/7 Technical Support Agreement

A service level agreement (SLA) is the section of your contract that sets out how quickly the vendor must respond to and resolve an incoming ticket. However, because tickets can come in at any time, your contract for 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses should include a few additional rules:

• Count every hour: Some SLAs only apply during business hours. To offer true 24/7 support, your provider’s response and resolution times should include nights and weekends.
• Keep the timer running during handoffs: The response time shouldn’t reset to zero when an issue is transferred to another team. If it does, your vendor can keep cases open for days without breaking the SLA.
• Apply the targets to every language: If strict deadlines only cover English requests, your other users might end up waiting longer to get the help they need.
• Request metrics broken down by shift: Any reputable provider of 24/7 application outsourcing for global businesses should be willing to share their performance data for every language and shift.

The last point is particularly important. A monthly average might look perfectly acceptable even when the night team is slow. Your 24/7 outsourced application support setup will be effective only if you have reliable coverage throughout the day.

While you’re at it, set targets for how fast tickets should move between different support tiers to reduce MTTR. For more information on how to track performance, check our full technical support services guide.

24/7 Application Support Outsourcing for Global Businesses: FlairsTech’s Model

Every customer should receive the same level of service, no matter the time of day. That’s what 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses looks like at FlairsTech.

We keep our tech support centers open around the clock, all year, across every time zone, giving your users seamless access via phone, email, and chat.

Your customers can get help in their own language as well. To offer true multilingual support, our roster includes experts fluent in six languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Arabic.

Structurally, we divide our teams into dedicated pods, from L1 agents to L5 managers. So, when an issue is too complex, an experienced specialist can step in immediately.

To retrieve accurate information, our teams leverage AIMY, FlairsTech’s own AI tool. AIMY helps team leads improve service quality, too, by analyzing customer interactions in real time and flagging any SLA or compliance issues.

We have more than 15 years of experience in technical support outsourcing. Currently, we have a 98% CSAT score, a 97% SLA success rate, and a 95% quality score. We’re also ISO-certified and GDPR-compliant.

Ready to see how 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses can meet your users’ needs? Schedule a consultation to discuss your setup with one of our experts.

Key Takeaways

• Around-the-clock coverage can be set up in four different ways. Unless you have the required internal headcount, 24/7 application support outsourcing for global businesses is the easiest way to achieve this.
• For the best results, check which support tiers and channels are available during every shift.
• Make sure to ask your global application support outsourcing partner how tickets are handed off from one team to the next.
• North American businesses should prioritize time-zone coverage in addition to multilingual support in English, French, and Spanish.
• European companies should focus on language coverage and regulatory compliance.
• The same SLAs should apply to your entire tech support operation, regardless of the language or shift.

Frequently Asked Questions