I didn’t like the idea of outsourcing support

Outsourced support always felt like poor quality to me.

That’s not a very generous thing for someone who now runs a support company to admit, but it’s true, and I think most people who’ve bought outsourced support have felt some version of it. People working to a target rather than to a customer. On a product they’ve never used, for a brand they’ve got no real reason to care about. Cheaper, yes. Better, never.

So when I was asked to find us a support provider, I wasn’t especially hopeful. But I went and looked properly.

I didn’t want to buy resources or time

That was the first thing I worked out.

Resources and hours are easy to buy. Every provider I spoke to could sell me those, at slightly different day rates, with slightly different logos on the deck. But buying people and time is just staffing. You’ve handed over the work and kept all of the risk. When something goes wrong, and it will, the supplier has still delivered exactly what you paid for. Bodies were in seats. That was the deal.

What I wanted was a supplier who took responsibility for the service they delivered.

A KPI in a contract isn’t ownership

Every proposal had service levels in it. That’s not the same thing.

A target only ever gets you to the target. Once a team is at 96 per cent and 96 per cent is what the contract asks for, there’s no reason for anyone to go further, and after a while nobody remembers why the number was chosen in the first place. The reviews stop being about customers and start being about whether the number was hit.

The penalties don’t fix it either. They’re usually small enough to be treated as a cost of doing business, and they land months after the thing that caused them.

So the supplier doesn’t really feel it when they underperform, and they get nothing when they do well. That’s not a problem with the people doing the work. It’s what the contract was built to produce.

What I actually wanted

Real ownership. Which to me meant consequence going both ways.

If they failed to deliver, they should feel the pain. If they over delivered, they should be rewarded for it. Not as a gesture. Properly, in the commercial terms, so that the team doing the work has something at stake in how well it goes.

I wanted a partner by my side rather than across the table. Someone who’d tell me when my own product was causing the tickets instead of quietly billing me for the volume.

I wanted a supplier who’d invest in getting better, rather than keep everything exactly as it was because it was profitable that way.

And I wanted people who wanted to drive improvements. Not people measured on how quickly they could finish a conversation and open the next one.

I couldn’t find it

There were good companies in that process and good people inside them. The problem wasn’t effort. It was that they were all built on the same model, and the model was the thing I had a problem with.

You can’t really buy ownership from a supplier whose whole business is designed around selling you capacity.

So I built it. Mostly for myself at first, because I needed it to exist and it didn’t. It grew from there, and over time it became FIXATE.

Which is why we’re difficult about certain things

We don’t sell headcount. We take on the operation and we stand behind how it goes.

We’d rather have a commercial structure with real consequence in it, both directions, than a comfortable one where we hit a target while your customers stay unhappy.

We hire people who want to improve things.

And we’ll tell you when the problem is upstream, because a support partner who only ever reports symptoms is an expensive way to stay where you are.

None of that came later as positioning. It’s the list I wrote when I was the one trying to buy this and couldn’t.

Outsourcing has a bad reputation. I had it too. Changing it is what FIXATE is here to do.