Technical support and back office for a New Zealand agritech company

The company's product team was small and its support function smaller still, three technical support staff covering a customer base that used the software daily for herd records, feed budgeting and compliance reporting. During the spring calving and planting season, support ticket volume routinely tripled, and the company had no way to flex up without pulling engineers off the product roadmap. Two consecutive spring seasons had seen feature releases slip because the same small team that should have been building the next release was instead answering tier-1 tickets about password resets and data sync errors. Back-office order processing for hardware add-ons and subscription changes was also falling behind during the same peak windows.

The engagement started with three tier-1 support agents and two back-office processing staff, plus a team lead based in Kuala Lumpur who liaised directly with the company's New Zealand operations manager. Staffing is now flexed seasonally: the core team of five scales to eight during the spring peak, with the additional agents cross-trained during the off season so ramp-up does not cost the company response quality when volume spikes. A dedicated tier-1 team handles first-line product queries, troubleshooting and ticket triage, escalating only genuine product defects back to the New Zealand engineering team.

Offshore delivery from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with staffing flexed seasonally around the New Zealand spring peak.

All customer and farm data processed by the offshore team belongs to the New Zealand company's own customers and is handled purely for processing on the company's behalf, which under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020's IPP12 service-provider exception is not treated as an offshore disclosure requiring the same consent steps as a true third-party disclosure. The company still put a written data processing agreement in place covering access controls, data retention and a requirement that the offshore team never use customer data for any purpose beyond delivering the support and back-office service.

Through the first full spring peak under the new model, ticket backlog that had previously taken until early summer to clear was down to zero by mid-season. Average handle time on tier-1 tickets fell by 19 percent as the offshore team built up a playbook of the most common seasonal issues. Back-office order processing turnaround improved from an average of four business days to under one. The company's engineering team logged zero missed sprint commitments during the following spring, compared to slipped releases in each of the two prior years. Cost for this combined support and back-office capacity is around 47 percent less than the cost of hiring an equivalent seasonal-flex team in New Zealand.

Cross-training the team during the quiet season, rather than hiring cold ahead of each spring, is what let the offshore pod scale up without losing quality exactly when the company's farmers needed it most.