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How This Company Made Its Customer Support 'More Human' Fitocracy needed customer support for its 1.5 million users, so it took to the cloud, and business took off.

By Jonathan Blum

This story appears in the January 2015 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Andrew Herthington
Listening to customers: Brian Wang of Fitocracy.

Fitocracy, a New York-based online fitness platform, had to solve a tough business problem: how to provide "more human" customer support when its community of 1.5 million users were interested in working with one of its roughly 100 personal fitness trainers.

Aiming to drive participation and growth, co-founder and CEO Brian Wang initially tried to meet this challenge via email and social media. "But about a year ago, we realized there was a large gap in what we were offering," he says. "We needed to start reaching out directly over the phone to engage our customers. And we certainly were not going to outsource something like this to an offshore call center."

The fix