Support.com’s COVID Response: Staying Connected in the Era of Distance
“Organizations built on a physical location model suddenly have a massive increase in demand and may need to provide that support from their own home offices, where they may lack tools, policy, and procedure to be effective. These problems are not new, but they did quickly become a lot more relevant. Support.com has been working on solving them since the previous century, and they are hiring.”
– Matthew Heusser, TechRepublic
Campaign Highlights
Legacy customer and technical support brand Support.com sought a refreshing, multi-faceted thought leadership program: The brand needed to spread awareness of its new TechSolutions subscriptions to consumers and small businesses, while also solidifying its position as the leading employer and provider in the homesourcing business model.
In response to the onset of COVID-19, Caster pivoted Support.com’s PR program to benefit the masses, leveraging an integrated social media and thought leadership program to support a plethora of audiences in navigating a new home-based, technologically connected lifestyle.
In just three months, Support.com experienced a boom of unique coverage across tier one and industry publications alike, enabling the brand to grow its position as a thought leader while simultaneously establishing a supportive foundation for a brand-new global community of tech learners, job hunters, and remote workers.
The Client
For over two decades, Support.com has been a leading provider of customer and technical support solutions. Boasting years of success for global enterprise clients and top-tier businesses, the company specializes in secure, proprietary, cloud-based platforms amply supported by a highly scalable, fully remote (home-based) network of Experts and. The company’s omnichannel solutions are optimized for the homesourcing environment, resulting in industry leading NPS scores and first call resolutions.
Support.com’s TechSolutions, a full spectrum, omnichannel tech support platform that combines free, online DIY self-support tools with remote expert tech support agents online or on the phone who will work with the consumer until their problem is solved. TechSolutions is unique in that individual consumers can use it to solve any device issue, no matter the brand of where they bought it, with 24/7 access to experts.
After joining forces with Caster in August 2019, Support.com had established rich PR program goals to guide its business objectives in 2020. The program, which consisted of an integrated PR, social media, and content strategy, had three overarching goals:
Position Support.com as a leader in remote work and homesourcing
Demonstrate Support.com’s expertise in BPO, customer support, remote IT helpdesk support, and security software for enterprises and consumers
Promote the recently soft-launched TechSolutions offering – a subscription-based, 24/7 tech support service for any connected device.
While Support.com’s fully remote, global workforce had 20 years of experience providing technical support services through its homesourced workforce and providing services for over 20 years, the brand awareness of its homesourcing benefits and services was relatively low. The company wanted to share its remote work opportunities with a broader target of talent, while also encouraging consumers and brands to take advantage of its BPO offerings.
In March 2020, shortly after introducing TechSolutions, the onset of COVID-19 rocked consumers and businesses alike. Paired with widespread uncertainty about the pandemic and a news cycle closely observing the latest trends and numbers in public health, economic impact, and unemployment, a newborn ambiguity about the home-based lifestyle swept the globe. As international communities attempted to flatten the COVID case curve by working from home, distance learning, and finding new ways to get connected, the learning curve for technology grew intensely.
“‘You have these big rooms with 1,000 people sitting a foot and a half from each other, and the moment something like [Covid-19] pops out, you’ve got to thin them out,’ said Rick Bloom, CEO of Support.com, a Sunnyvale, Calif., firm that provides customer-service software and staff for companies who outsource and is hiring hundreds of workers to keep up with demand.”
— Sharon Terlep and Sarah Krouse, Wall Street Journal
The Strategy
Support.com was uniquely positioned to help here: Its team well-versed in both the remote work and customer support experiences that the world was seeking answers about.
The team’s unique experience and leadership in the work-from-home space gave Caster Communications a solid pivot point as Support.com’s executive team refined its internal strategy to help others.
Caster revised the PR approach for client Support.com to offer the CEO as an expert on working from home, hiring during COVID, and managing remote tech support. Caster pivoted to quickly position Support.com and its CEO as resources to a global community within the first two weeks of US stay-at-home orders, using a three-phase approach:
First, in response to COVID and the rapid shift to digital for learners, teachers, families, and workers alike, Caster distributed the news that Support.com would offer free tech support via TechSolutions to anyone who needed it, whether for remote work, distance learning, or staying connected socially.
Second, Caster leveraged Support’s unique 20-year tenure in a fully remote model to offer the CEO as an expert with advice for working from home. With so many companies struggling to transition to remote work, Support.com’s CEO and CTO began sharing tips on security, tools, processes and ways of engaging remote employees, which were resources for businesses trying to make the transition with the least amount of friction. Leveraging key press and trade relationships and intensive news cycle monitoring, Caster used the expert position of the brand to secure several tier one interviews and media opportunities.
Third, during a time when people were being laid off in droves, Support.com was hiring for an unlimited amount of remote tech support roles. Caster helped the company capitalize on this and share the news through various channels to encourage the public to apply, including business, mainstream, tech, HR and retail publications. A range of editorial features offered listicles and roundups for job seekers, which Caster proactively monitored, pitched, and tracked daily.
In all three phases, Caster enabled the executive team to showcase their expertise and share their advice through media opportunities, bylined contributed articles, corporate blog posts, interviews and very importantly, social media.
Using strategic social listening and continuous engagement, Caster captured a significant share-of-voice on LinkedIn by mobilizing deliberately curated content and hashtags to capture the attention of LinkedIn editors, who aggregate and recommend trending posts based on interactions and performance. Support.com’s grandfather position in the remote work vertical allowed Caster to guide conversations in #remotework and #workfromhome threads, while its ability to hire workers from anywhere in the world due to its homebased model enabled the brand to get a head start on the fast-growing, wide-reaching #nowhiring and #unemployment trends that boomed in early April.
Meanwhile, across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, Caster leveraged robust social media campaigns to echo the CEO’s sentiment, informing consumers about free tech solutions offerings on Facebook and Twitter and driving conversations on LinkedIn around Support.com’s unlimited number of available remote work positions.
The Results
Caster’s revamped integrated PR strategy led to a boom of attention from the media, in the form of video interviews, contributed articles, soundbites and social media conversations. The strategy drove coverage in Forbes, SF Chronicle, Silicon Valley Business Journal, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Diginomica, and more, while positioning both the company and CEO as thought leaders and beacons amid the crisis. Simultaneously, Caster leveraged media relationships to help the brand secure its footing as a leading company in tech support and remote work with contributed content, interviews, and mentions in key target markets.
The momentum from March and April continued throughout the duration of 2020 and into 2021, with additional opportunities to support communities globally percolating. Additional campaigns to offer half-off subscriptions to educators and teachers came as discussions around the return to school surfaced, and throughout the remainder of the year Support.com maintained its position as a leader in customer support and tech expertise alike. The wave of positive sentiment from the company also translated into several award-wins, including two Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service in the COVID-19 Response and Transformational Leadership categories, a 2020 Business Intelligent Group Award for Customer Service Excellence, and a 2021 TMC Customer Magazine Award for Best COVID-19 Response.
On social media, Caster’s approach created significant buzz and drove record-high engagement: On LinkedIn, the combination of hashtags, mentions, key words and commentary employed for the CEO secured blog placements on numerous trending content lists and news compilations throughout the duration of Support.com’s COVID response period. These recommendations have a significant ripple effect in the LinkedIn algorithm: Once content makes it into the LinkedIn News queue, it receives more eyes and continues to drive additional engagement. While the CEO maintained a strong following and shepherded a community of business leaders through the new workplace dynamic, Support.com’s company social also soared in performance, with nearly 16.5 million impressions in just two months and a nearly 200% increase in followers.
Learn more about other Caster projects here.
70
Unique Stories
19
Tier One Stories, including placements in WSJ, Forbes, SVBJ, TechRepublic, Entrepreneur, Boston Globe and more
90%
positive Sentiment, 10% neutral during March and April 2020; continued positive and neutral throughout 2020.
4
Award Wins for TechSolutions and COVID Response
199%
Net Audience Growth across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn during March and April of 2020, compared to the previous two months