Nearshore Customer Support · Bilingual · Time-zone aligned
Nearshore Customer Experience Teams. Not a Vendor.
Bilingual. Embedded. In your time zone.
Your nearshore customer support and CX agents work in your helpdesk, in your CRM, and in your brand voice. Dedicated, not shared. Trained on your product, not on a generic script. From Costa Rica and Colombia, on US working hours.
What embedded customer support means at SMASH
We are not a BPO.
Your CX team.
Most companies that find SMASH have been burned by a BPO. The shared agent pool, the per-interaction billing, the offshore handoff that lost the conversation, the agent that disappeared after a quarter and got replaced by someone who had to learn the product all over again. We built the opposite of that.
We run real contact-center and phone-support operations, and we run combined support across chat, email, and tickets. Voice, chat, email, tickets: your agents cover the channels your customers actually use, in one dedicated, omnichannel team. What we do not do is run a shared pool where your customers are one queue among many.
Embedded nearshore customer support at SMASH means dedicated agents on your team only. They open your helpdesk, attend your team standup, and learn your product the same way a new US hire would. They stay with the account for years, not weeks. Same person handling the angry refund call in March is still handling it in October.
We do not charge per interaction and we do not run shared pools. Pricing is per agent per month, the same way you would budget for an internal hire. The longer they stay on the account, the more value the model produces. We optimize for that.
Your Nearshore Contact Center Team
Support, success,
sales, trust.
We build dedicated, bilingual support teams: customer support, customer success, technical support, sales development, retention, and account management professionals. Voice, chat, email, tickets: one embedded, omnichannel, nearshore contact center team, not a patchwork of vendors. The modern CX function is wider than any single channel. We staff the whole thing.
01
Customer support
- /Tier 1 support agents
- /Tier 2 / escalation specialists
- /Trust & safety reviewers
- /Knowledge-base writers
02
Revenue & retention
- /Sales development reps (SDR)
- /Account management coordinators
- /Onboarding specialists
- /Customer success associates
03
Technical support
- /Technical support L1 / L2
- /API and integration support
- /Implementation specialists
- /Voice-of-customer analysts
Why Bilingual · Why Costa Rica and Colombia
Bilingual is not a translation layer.
Your US customers expect seamless English with cultural fluency. The nearshore customer support and CX agents we place grew up watching the same TV, using the same products, and reading the same internet your customers do. They handle the angry call, the nuanced refund conversation, and the technical edge case in the register your brand uses. Costa Rica and Colombia operate inside the US business day (Central and Eastern overlap), so the queue never goes dark while you sleep. Agents who start on your account tend to stay on your account: years, not quarters. That continuity is a Costa Rica and Colombia advantage as much as a language one.
Who this is for
Three CX teams
we build, repeatedly.
01 / SaaS scaling support
You outgrew shared inboxes.
A growing SaaS company replaces a freelance VA + co-founder triage with three embedded support agents trained on the product. The CSAT goes up, the founder gets out of the inbox, and the operating model survives a 5x interaction-volume jump.
02 / Consumer brand retention
Your retention team needs depth.
A DTC brand adds a CX pod that owns retention and win-back end to end: order issues, returns, loyalty, and high-value account outreach. The team sits in Gorgias, Shopify, and Klaviyo from day one, on your voice and tone guidelines.
03 / Outbound + inbound combined
Sales and support run together.
Most modern revenue orgs do not split sales and support cleanly. We staff blended CX + SDR pods that handle inbound demos, outbound prospecting, and post-sale support without three separate vendor contracts.
Nearshore Customer Support FAQ
The customer support questions
we hear before kickoff.
Full general FAQ at /faq/. Below: the questions specific to this team.
Do your CX agents work only in English?
English is the working language by default. Most agents are functionally bilingual in English and Spanish, and many also support Portuguese (especially in Costa Rica and Colombia). If your customers are English-only, we provide English-only teams. If you serve LATAM customers, the same team can support Spanish interactions as well.
Do your CX agents handle phone support?
Yes. Our teams handle phone calls, chat, email, tickets, and other channels according to what your operation needs. Voice-ready agents are accent-screened during vetting, because a phone queue holds a different bar than a chat window.
How do I hire nearshore customer support agents?
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We map your channels, volume, and tools, then propose a team composition and timeline. Most clients see a first three-to-five-person pod placed within three to four weeks of kickoff, the same team that stays on your account long term.
Is this a BPO, or a dedicated customer support team?
No. SMASH is not a BPO. Every customer support agent on your team is dedicated to your company only. No shared agent pools. No per-interaction billing. They learn your product, your tone, your escalation paths, and they stay with the account long enough to become real subject-matter experts.
Why outsource customer support to Latin America?
We would push back on the word first. Outsourcing means a shared vendor pool and per-ticket billing; what SMASH builds is an embedded team, dedicated to your company only, that happens to sit in Costa Rica and Colombia. The reasons companies look at the region are real: English fluency, US time-zone overlap, and agents who stay on the account for years. We just do not deliver it as outsourcing.
Why Costa Rica and Colombia for customer support?
Time zone and language, mainly. Both countries sit inside the US business day, so a live queue does not go dark overnight. English proficiency is strong and culturally aligned with US customers, not just technically correct. And because SMASH builds long-term embedded teams instead of rotating BPO staff, agents in both countries tend to stay on the same account for years, which is where the real quality gain comes from.
How does training work for a new embedded CX agent?
We run a two-week structured onboarding before the agent handles their first customer interaction: product training, tooling certification (Zendesk, Intercom, Gorgias, Front, Salesforce, HubSpot, and telephony platforms like Five9, NICE InContact, Genesys, and RingCentral), brand voice immersion, and shadowing your existing senior agents. Most clients see the new agent at full interaction volume by week three.
What tools do your agents use?
Yours. They log in to your Zendesk, Intercom, Gorgias, Salesforce, HubSpot, telephony platforms like Five9, NICE InContact, Genesys, and RingCentral, or whatever helpdesk, CRM, and phone system you already run. We do not bring our own tooling and we do not run a parallel system you cannot see into.
How quickly can a CX team scale?
Faster than engineering. We can stand up a three to five person CX pod within three to four weeks of kickoff. Scaling to fifteen or twenty agents during a peak (Black Friday, product launch, churn-recovery sprint) is doable in six to eight weeks with advance notice.
How much does a nearshore customer support team cost?
Pricing is per agent, per month, the same way you would budget an internal hire, not per interaction or per ticket. The exact number depends on role seniority, channel mix (voice costs more to staff than email), and team size. We will walk through real numbers for your situation on a discovery call.
How do you measure CX performance?
On your metrics, in your tools. CSAT, first-response time, resolution time, escalation rate, retention impact. We do not bring opaque vendor scorecards. The numbers your CX leadership already tracks are the numbers that govern the engagement.
Proof
From three agents to twenty, with CSAT up nine points.
A US consumer SaaS company replaced a rotating BPO contract with a dedicated SMASH CX pod. Three months in, CSAT was up nine points and first-response time was cut in half. Twelve months in, the team had grown to twenty agents and the engagement was extended to a full retention pod.
Phase 2 · coming soon
Real client.
Real metrics.
Real names.
We are finalizing client approvals to publish named case studies for this practice. Want a preview now? Ask on a discovery call.
Three teams. One operating model.
Also building another team?
Next step
Tell us what your
queue looks like.
Thirty minutes. No pitch deck. We will sketch the CX team we would build for you, the tooling integration plan, and what it would cost per agent. If your situation does not fit embedded delivery we will say so on the call.