Why autonomy matters (and why we made this piece)

Customer operations teams are under constant pressure to move fast, stay lean, and adapt. They can't afford to wait on engineering for every change. And yet, too many Ops teams are still stuck opening tickets for simple things—views, workflows, refunds.

We believe Ops teams can (and should) own much more of their tooling. So we went and asked the people doing it.

This article brings together real-world insights from podcast conversations with four companies (Belvo, Givebutter, Motto, and Swan) which have found ways to make their Ops teams more autonomous.

The tools, of course, help. But it’s also about mindset, collaboration, and a bit of trial and error.

What Ops autonomy looks like in practice

Owning workflows without bugging engineering

"To be able to go in and set up workspaces and set up inboxes without having to submit a single ticket to engineering (...) is amazing and so so appreciated."
—Mark Rummel, VP Customer Experience at Givebutter

Givebutter’s team can build their own inboxes, segments, and workspaces. No dev time needed. For a growing team fighting for engineering resources, that’s a big deal.

At Swan, Ops has a similar setup. They build queues, filters, and workflows directly in their back office tools:

"We very rarely ask for additional stuff from our product and dev team. (...) The way we will propose it to the analyst, we'll put it in a workflow, is gonna be on our side."

One back office to rule them all

Several teams talked about how powerful it is to have a single internal tool as the hub.

"Forest Admin has been the hub and the back office of Givebutter for many many years. (...) Our support team and our Trust and Safety team (...) have access to the customer information they need to take the actions that they need."
—Mark Rummel, Givebutter

"We are now managing 100% of our bikes on Forest, 100% of our users on Forest, and we even connected Forest to Stripe (...) So it's really like it became our main dashboard."
—Antoine Bouttier, CEO at Motto

Instead of hopping between tools, support and Ops teams stay in one place. That’s where autonomy becomes speed.

Automating the boring stuff

"With our CTO, if a task represents 30% of the day of our customer service, we ask: how can we automate? (...) After three years (...) you realize that you have automatized 75% of the tasks that at first you were thinking that were gonna need a human."
—Antoine Bouttier, Motto

Motto made automation part of the culture early on. If something repeats, they ask: can we automate this? It’s not magic—it’s iteration, and willingness to invest time up front.

"You need to invest a lot of time in educating your own team so they can later on free you from time by not needing you. (...) It's been something we put into practice specifically in the beginning of the product where we have to try to put all the pieces together. (...) And that took of course quite some time. But now we are there. And you can definitely see how it paid off. "
—Jonathan Araujo, Belvo

Building with flexibility

"On operations, we have processes that have a lot of variation depending on the country, depending on the partner, depending on the type of end users. (...) So we try to do everything in Ops now."
—Maxime de Juniac, Chief Service Officer at Swan

Flexible tools are critical when your team is handling exceptions, edge cases, and fast-changing rules. Swan built their stack around three tools: Zendesk, a workflow mapping tool, and Forest Admin.

"The beauty of it is that everything in this tool chain can be configured and controlled by the Ops team. So we can be very flexible on Ops side to build things and to enhance our performance."

Key takeaways

1. Choose tools your Ops team can actually use

• No-code isn’t just a buzzword—when done right, it means Ops can move without devs.
• A flexible back office is the foundation of autonomy.

2. Automate with intent

• Identify high-volume tasks and ask how to reduce them.
• Build a culture where automation is everyone’s job.

3. Ops and Tech should build together (especially early on)

"When you put the tech team and the ops team very close, basically in the same room (...) you create this synergy that is very healthy."
—Antoine Bouttier, Motto

Some of the most autonomous teams we spoke to started that way: Tech focused on Ops needs first. That early investment usually frees up tech teams later on and it pays off.

4. Autonomy enables scale

"When we started Motto, we reached our 450 bikes in the street and that was the ratio that we established for our customer service. (...) Today, (...) we have 2,500 bikes and we still have one person at the customer service."
—Antoine Bouttier, Motto

The more you can do without needing to ask someone else, the faster you can grow.

Thanks to the teams who shared their story

Big thanks to the people who joined us on the podcast:

• Mark Rummel, VP Customer Experience at Givebutter, an all-in-one fundraising platform for non-profits. (see podcast episode)
• Jonathan Araujo, Senior Engineering Manager at Belvo, the leading Open Finance and payments platform in Latin America (see podcast episode)
• Antoine Bouttier, CEO & Co-founder at Motto, a hassle-free e-bike subscription service. (see podcast episode)
• Maxime de Juniac, Chief Service Officer at Swan, a European Banking-as-a-Service Fintech. (see podcast episode)
  
  We learned a lot from them. Hope you did too.

Want to hear the full conversations? Check out the Ops on a Mission podcast.