Follow the Sun model: principles for 24/7 customer support

In today’s global business climate, it’s important to be everywhere at the same time – what some call the “Follow the Sun” model. Luckily, the digital world and the advent of global ecommerce makes this 24/7 customer support model possible.

To start, you should only consider the Follow the Sun support model if your market and industry has a global or international presence, and if your organization is big enough to make that kind of reach necessary. But, if you’re already there (or if your company is moving in that direction,) you should learn about this useful model, including its pros and cons.

Below, Gladly explains what this 24/7 customer support strategy looks like for customer service teams, and lays out some factors to help you determine if the Follow the Sun model makes sense for you.

What is the Follow the Sun model?

The Follow the Sun model provides 24/7 customer support by having customer service teams across multiple time zones. So, as one team’s work day ends, a CX team in a different time zone could resume the support work as their day begins.

Why ecommerce brands use the Follow the Sun model

Especially if you’re a product-based company, 24/7 customer support is an expectation for a lot of customers. Product malfunctions and issues don’t stop just because it’s late in the night! The Follow the Sun model allows brands to spread customer support over multiple time zones, which provides the necessary support that customers might need at odd hours of the night, or if they themselves are living in a different time zone.

As you can imagine, this leads to more energized and happier employees who aren’t expected to work long, late-night hours. It also means customers can get the support they need regardless of the time of day.

Why to invest in a Follow the Sun support model

As you’ll see in the pros section below, there are a lot of benefits to integrating the Follow the Sun model. You can provide 24/7 customer support across multiple time zones, improve your query resolution times, and have access to simplified knowledge sharing between your various teams across different regions.

Does that mean that all customer support teams should invest in the Follow the Sun model? Not necessarily.

Is the Follow the Sun model right for your team?

Ask yourself four questions before you build out a second or third regional team.

• How many people are on your support team right now, and could you actually staff a rotating shift without stretching everyone thin?

• How complex are your typical conversations? If most can be resolved by self-service or automation, a second time zone may not be the fix you need.

• How spread out are your customers across time zones, and is that spread wide enough that “normal business hours” barely covers them?

• Is your support volume already concentrated outside your team’s current hours, or is most of the demand you see happening during the day?

If you’re answering yes to most of these, the model is probably worth building. If you’re mostly shrugging, extending your current team’s hours with customer experience AI might close the gap without adding a whole new region to manage.

Although not all organizations will need the follow the sun model, there are plenty of varying reasons why a support team could benefit from providing 24/7 support and improving the customer experience through this model.

Follow the Sun model: pros & cons

If you’re still unsure if a 24/7 customer support strategy is right for you, we’ll break down some of the biggest pros and cons below:

Pros of the Follow the Sun model

• Real around-the-clock coverage without asking anyone to work through the night

• Faster resolution times, since conversations get picked up at the start of a fresh shift instead of sitting in a queue until morning

• Support that matches how spread out your customers already are, instead of forcing everyone onto one region's business hours

• Lower turnover on the support team, since nobody is stuck permanently on the graveyard shift

• An edge over competitors still stuck in a single time zone

Cons of the Follow the Sun model

• Handoffs are hard: without a shared customer record, the next region starts from scratch and the customer has to re-explain their issue

• Keeping tone, policy, and training consistent across two or three regional teams takes ongoing effort, not a one-time setup

• Coordinating schedules, coverage gaps, and holidays across regions means more day-to-day management than a single-region team ever deals with

• Standing up a second or third regional team costs more upfront than extending one team's hours, so it only pays off past a certain size

There are plenty of reasons to adopt a Follow the Sun support model to your customer support strategy, but only if it makes sense for your needs and your market. Luckily, a lot of the cons can be mitigated with modern customer support software that fills in the gaps for your workers.

How to roll out a Follow the Sun support model

Define shift windows and handoff points

Start by mapping your customers against the clock: where are they, and when do they actually reach out? Set shift windows that cover those hours with real overlap at the edges, not a hard cutoff at midnight in one region and 9 a.m. in the next. Decide upfront what counts as a clean handoff, whether that’s a status note, a flagged follow-up, or a specific person to loop in, before the first shift change happens. Getting this part wrong is what turns a handoff into a customer having to repeat themselves.

Standardize tools and documentation

Every team needs to work from the same playbook and the same customer record, or the model turns into three separate support desks that happen to share a logo. Put shared macros, escalation paths, and brand voice guidelines somewhere every region can reach. Whatever platform you use should show the full conversation history no matter which region touched it last. If a team member in one region can’t see what happened on the last shift, the standardization step isn’t done yet.

Launch, measure, and refine

Roll out one handoff at a time instead of flipping the whole model on at once, so you can catch gaps before they touch every customer. Watch how conversations perform right at the shift boundary: resolution time, reopened conversations, and CSAT on handed-off conversations tend to show the model’s weak points first. Plan to adjust shift windows and handoff steps for the first few months as real volume patterns show up. Most teams need at least one full quarter before the handoffs stop needing daily attention.

Gladly can make support more seamless across the globe

The biggest problem with the Follow the Sun approach is maintaining quality, communicating, and coordinating handoffs between agents in different regions. Gladly solves these problems by providing:

• Omnichannel support that allows you to change communication lines or transfer calls with ease so you don’t have to end the interaction and make repeated calls or messages

• Lifelong conversation timeline that help to make sure agents know exactly what a customer’s issue is before the point of contact

• Unique customer profiles that gives agents all the context they need to thrive in an interaction

TUMI put it well: "The salesperson on the floor at Rodeo Drive should have the same type of interaction as our Vidalia, Georgia customer service. At the end of the day, we should be able to swap both of them and they should be in that same environment with that same level of confidence, and that same level of precision and empathy for the customer," says Victor Sanz, Creative Director at TUMI.

A three-region rotation looks like this:

Each shift picks up exactly where the last one left off, because every region works from the same customer record instead of starting a new one. That’s the difference between three regional teams and one continuous support operation: efficient coverage and no lost context, not a trade-off between them.

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.

The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, Pacsun, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences.

See a Gladly handoff in action.