The problem
On opening the North American market, the company found incidents being reported in the middle of the Spanish night. The product team ended up covering night duty informally, with the predictable wear and no formal service commitment to the customer.
Hiring a night shift in Spain for the real volume of overnight incidents was expensive and hard to justify: most nights nothing happens, and when it does you have to respond in minutes.
What we did
The design splits the day across three time zones: Spain covers the European working day, the Latin America corridor extends into the European evening and night, and the Philippines covers the remaining window. No team works nights in its own time zone.
Support engineers work inside the client's tools and knowledge base, escalating to the product team only for what genuinely needs a code change.
The service level agreement could be formalised for the first time, because it stopped depending on someone checking their phone at 4am.
Team shape
Three support engineers in Spain, four in the Latin America corridor and three in the Philippines, with a documented handover at every shift change.
Timeline
A 30-day pilot covering only the extended European window, night coverage added in month three, and the full model in month five.
Data handling and compliance
Customer data processed outside the European Economic Area rests on standard contractual clauses, with a transfer impact assessment. Access to production environments is role-restricted and logged, and the teams work on incident data rather than end-customer databases.
Results
- 18 min
- Overnight first response time
- -100 %
- Night duty for the product team
- -46 %
- Incidents escalated to product
- -52 %
- Cost against a night shift in Spain
Against a previous average of more than six hours.
Eliminated entirely after month three.
Support resolves without a code change what previously escalated.
Compared with staffing the night shift internally.
Figures relate to the period stated in each case and depend on each client's starting point.
We could sign a real service level agreement because it stopped depending on someone checking their phone at four in the morning.