In today’s world of AI chatbots, wikis and hard-to-reach customer care departments, we feel for you. It’s frustrating to have unanswered questions, especially when it comes to your team and your money. 

At EasyStaff Payroll, we turned quality customer support into a strategic asset. And don’t take our word for it! 90% of our clients list the quality of our Customer Support among the reasons why they chose the platform as their payroll processing provider. Our client Geomotiv Holdings says: “You have a live chat where you can reach out and solve the issue with actual people, not AI bots”. The HR platform Tribune saw its processing time decreased from 30 minutes per transaction to just 10 minutes for all operations at once, thanks to an intuitive personal account and efficient customer support via chat.

Our team

The Chief Customer Support officer in EasyStaff is Arina Kozlova. It all started with her back in 2021 when Arina joined the startup. She was the first customer support agent in EasyStaff, and her career track took off from there. As the platform grew, and more clients came, the one-person department expanded and was later diversified into EasyStaff Invoice and Connect Customer Support and EasyStaff Payroll Customer Support. 

As the team lead, Arina is responsible for the overall quality of Customer Support. Her role is to oversee metrics that measure effectiveness of her team’s work: SLA, customer churn rate, retention rate, and more. Arina also expands and organizes the team so that every client has a dedicated personal manager. 

Today, the team handles inquiries from the online chat in user accounts and email from 9am to 6pm GMT+3. Primarily, Customer Support responds to messages, although they may reach out to the client in case there is an error in their profile, for example. 

The SLA in the department is one of the fastest in the industry — response time of no more than 2 minutes. Thanks to fast processing times and efficient trouble shooting, the average rating is above 4.6 out of 5 points, with a target of 4.8 points. Any client can leave a rating that reflects their experience with the customer support agent right in the online chat. 

Customer Support works closely with account managers: any account manager is also a customer success manager. The account manager analyzes retention rates and conversion rates of potential clients into active ones as well as churn rate (the percentage of clients who stop using the platform). That data informs upcoming product improvements, and it is handed over to the product manager and Operations.

What’s our secret? 

Customer Support in the EasyStaff ecosystem has been recognized not only by our clients, but also by G2! Small Business and Mid-Market Companies ranked us Best Customer Support in Winter, Spring and Summer 2025. 

How did we get there? The best person to ask is Arina Kozlova. 

Q: The volume of messages your team handles on a daily basis is truly impressive. How do you manage to analyze all of them and come to actionable conclusions?

Arina: We hold meetings once a month where we analyze ratings of “poor” or “fair”. The “excellent” rating accounts for an average of 97% of our feedback. We focus specifically on analyzing that 3%, dedicating special attention to the specifics of each case where issues were noted.

We invest serious time and effort into discussing our work. I firmly believe that the most valuable feedback a business and a product can receive comes directly from its clients. That’s why we always keep our ears open, so to speak, to both complaints and praise.

Q: Can you share an example of a feature that was added based on the feedback you and your team worked through?

Arina: We implemented automatic currency conversion in EasyStaff Payroll. We were able to recognize the necessity and improve the product thanks to the client feedback. 

We also saw an interesting insight. After the UI in EasyStaff Invoice changed, the amount of client messages dropped. We invested lots of effort into that personal account, indeed, and it paid off. For EasyStaff Payroll, it’s different — since the product is seeing loads of leads now, we see more clients asking us about features of EasyStaff Payroll. 

Q: You must be seeing dozens of comments on what to add to EasyStaff. How are requests evaluated and considered? 

Arina: It depends on how complex the integration is. If the feature is frequently requested and doesn’t take long to develop, it is implemented immediately, assuming it will be useful to other users as well.

Of course, the percentage of users requesting this or that feature matters. If the request comes from a small number of users, it is added to the backlog. If the request comes from a significant number of clients, it is passed to the product manager, founders, and developers for detailed consideration.

Q: Is there a system in place for properly collecting client requests?

Arina: Customer support operates through CarrotQuest and email. Account managers use the CRM system and can also view statistics in Looker Studio.

We are in no rush to use more complex systems. You see, if another system is required, it indicates the need for multiple support lines. But every customer support agent and every account manager are onboarded and walked through everything in EasyStaff. In other words, everyone knows everything. 

But we do get questions that require someone else’s input. In that case, we get in touch with the rest of the team right away. As a startup still, we’re fast and always online. We operate in real-time — that’s our secret. 

Q: What is the customer support strategy for EasyStaff Payroll?

Arina: At the moment, we are seeing an increase in client messages, which is natural, given how the EasyStaff ecosystem is getting new clients daily. That calls for automation. We need to have our customer support team available to all, yet not spending extra time on simple questions.  

Q: But no AI bots or chatbots still, right?

Arina: Absolutely — at least for now. We believe in the power of human support. It’s our core belief that only live interaction can provide truly high-quality service. Modern bots, however AI they are, tend to simply shuffle around standard responses. What a client needs instead is a quick and competent response right here and now, not a formal reply or automated message. Although we will never abandon the human approach in support because we consider it a key factor in quality service delivery, we are open to implementing a chat bot powered by AI. once its capacity is efficient enough.