24 Nov 2025 · 3 min
John Jonas admits he's a bad retail customer who returns a lot of purchases. A helpful live chat from Backcountry.com during a rafting trip prep inspired him to overhaul his own customer support by hiring and training online Filipino specialists through OnlineJobs.ph.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 311. I'm a bad retail customer, and it's improving our customer support. So sometimes I'm a really good retail customer, and sometimes I'm a really bad retail customer. One time I went to a doctor because I heard he was a really good doctor. Like, I liked his philosophy and I went to him just to support him. I wasn't sick, I wasn't feeling anything, and I just. I. I just wanted to support someone who was doing amazing things or sometimes. Other times, I bought some bike parts because the marketing pitch on these bike parts was so good, I didn't even necessarily need the parts for my bike. But the company had worked really hard to design and make these things, and I really liked that. And that's me being a good retail customer. But other times, yeah, I'm not so good. I can be a really bad retail customer. Well, like, I'll buy a lot of clothes or gear online and return every bit of it. So recently I was preparing for a rafting trip and I bought a couple of dry bags, I bought a tent, I bought some shirts, I bought multiple down pants, I bought all kinds of stuff. I was really excited about it. When I got it all, I realized I didn't like any of it, and I sent every bit of it back. In fact, sitting on my desk right now, I have this, which I'm sending back. Not that I hated it. I bought it just to see, like, how does this compare to my current one that I really like? It's a backpacking pad. I really like my current one, but everybody says this one's amazing. I bought it just knowing I'm probably not gonna keep this thing, but I wanna see it. So I bought it. And yep, it's what I thought it was. It's basically exactly the same. Heavier, not, not better. So I'm just sending it back. That's me not being such a good retail customer. However, recently, when I was sending a whole bunch of stuff back, I noticed that the live chat popped up and something clicked for me. I usually buy all my stuff from backcountry.com and somehow I've seen their live chat dozens of times. But this time I realized I want more help. And I clicked it, and instantly someone was there. They gave me advice, they gave me recommendations, they gave me cautions, and it was really, really helpful. And I realized when we can do the same thing, like our customer support can be exactly the same. It's not that hard to hire someone in the Philippines to do that for you. So I set the wheels in motion to start hiring more people and better people and having better training on for our customer support team. We already have our customer support covered 24 7. Our response time is usually within 5 minutes and in fact I email our customer support team pretty consistently and they almost always respond to me within five minutes and so despite feeling like oh yeah we're doing pretty well with responding within 5 minutes I still feel like we could do better and so we were putting the wheels in motion to improve because I'm a bad retail customer and someone else showed me a really good experience and I want to create that really good experience for our customers. Just so you know it's super easy to find customer support people at onlinejobs ph really really talented people with perfect English who want to help your customers. It.
