Frequently asked questions about nearshore staffing.

02 / Getting started

Timeline, pricing, contracts.

How a partnership begins, what it costs, what the first ninety days look like.

• How long does it take to get started?

  Most clients have their first embedded team member starting within two to four weeks of the discovery call. We run sourcing and vetting in parallel with contract setup so there is no dead time. A full pod of three to five people typically takes four to six weeks.

• How does pricing work?

  Monthly per-seat pricing, USD, no per-interaction or per-hour billing for the standard model. The number depends on the role (senior backend engineer is different from a CX agent), the location (Costa Rica, Colombia, and Pakistan have different cost bases), and the seniority bar you set. We share a transparent rate card on the discovery call.

• What does the first ninety days look like?

  Week one to four: sourcing, vetting, your final-round interviews, offer. Week four to six: onboarding into your tools, shadowing your team, first commits or first tickets. Day thirty: full integration into your standup and sprint cadence. Day ninety: the ramp-up is complete and the person is operating as a full member of your team. We do a structured ninety-day check-in with you and the team member to confirm the fit.

• What is the difference between embedded and BPO?

  A BPO sells you a process. You hand over a workflow (customer support tickets, back-office transactions) and they run it with their people, their tools, their managers, and their service-level agreement. Embedded is the opposite. We hire the person, but you manage them, they use your tools, they sit on your team, and they stay long-term. The accountability is yours, not the vendor's.

• What is the minimum engagement?

  One person, no minimum team size. Most clients start with one or two roles and grow from there. We do ask for a minimum twelve-month commitment per seat because we are hiring full-time employees on your behalf and the model only works if both sides invest in retention.

• Can we start small and expand later?

  Yes. That is the pattern. Most SMASH clients start with one or two people in one function and grow to an eight-to-twelve person team across multiple functions within twelve to eighteen months. Same operating model, same engagement, same point of contact.

04 / Customer experience

Bilingual support, embedded model, no BPO.

Specific to embedded CX hires: how we are different from a call center, how training works.

• Is this a BPO contract?

  No. SMASH is not a BPO. We do not run shared agent pools and we do not charge per interaction. Your embedded CX agents are dedicated to your company only, managed by you, and integrated into your systems. They show up on your support team roster, not on an SMASH org chart you never see.

• 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.

• What tools do your CX agents use?

  Yours. Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce Service Cloud, Front, Help Scout, Gorgias, custom internal tools, plus telephony platforms like Five9, NICE InContact, Genesys, and RingCentral, and whatever chat or phone platform your team already runs. We do not impose tooling. The agent learns your stack in onboarding.

• How does training work for a new embedded CX agent?

  We pair the structured onboarding you would run for any new hire with our pre-training on customer service fundamentals, English fluency calibration, and your industry vertical. By the time the agent starts on live customer interactions, they have already shadowed your team, watched recorded support calls, and walked through your knowledge base.

• How quickly can a CX team scale?

  Faster than engineering. Most CX teams scale from one or two agents to a ten-to-fifteen person team in six to twelve months. The hiring pipeline in Costa Rica and Colombia for bilingual support talent is deep, and the ramp time per agent is shorter than for a senior engineer.

06 / Compliance, contracts, and control

Who employs the person, who manages the work.

How payroll, contracts, IP, and day-to-day management actually work.

• Who employs the person?

  SMASH does. We handle the employment contract, payroll, benefits, taxes, and labor compliance in Costa Rica, Colombia, Pakistan, or the United States depending on where the person is based. You do not need to set up an entity, hire a PEO, or manage international payroll. That is our entire job on the back end.

• Do I retain control over my team?

  Yes. You manage day-to-day work, priorities, roadmap, performance, and team rituals. SMASH handles the employment side: payroll, benefits, contract administration, performance escalation if needed, and the relationship with the person as their employer of record.

• Who owns the intellectual property?

  You do. Every SMASH placement signs an IP assignment as part of their employment contract that transfers all work product, code, designs, and documents to the client. We handle this on day one so there is no ambiguity later.

• How does SMASH handle compliance?

  We handle labor law compliance in every country where we employ people. Costa Rica payroll, social security (CCSS), Colombia payroll and prestaciones sociales, Pakistan payroll and tax, and US payroll for our Salt Lake City team. You receive one monthly invoice in USD. We absorb the compliance complexity.

• Is the work remote or in-office?

  It depends on what you want and what the role calls for. Most engineering roles are remote with optional access to our offices in San José or Medellín for collaboration days. CX roles are often hybrid because team cohesion and on-the-floor coaching help quality. Business support is usually remote. We will recommend a setup in the discovery call.

• What happens to data security?

  Your security policies apply to every embedded team member as if they were a US hire. NDAs, background checks where applicable, hardware provisioning your way (we can ship company laptops or use a managed device program), access controls in your systems, and standard data handling training. We do not have a separate "contractor" tier.