🔒 Private — prepared for Briana and Cindi (RCB principals). Not for staff.
Overview / Session Notes / Offshore Team Transition and Antera API

Session Notes: Offshore Team Transition and Antera API

2026-06-01 · Briana Riordan + Nate St. Pierre

Overview

This session covered the offshore team that RCB Awards has been using for order processing and customer service, why they're ending that relationship, and what's coming back in-house when the contract ends on June 10. The conversation also touched on a specific question Nate had about the Antera API — what it exposes, whether it's been investigated, and what repeatable manual tasks it might eventually automate. The session was conversational and relatively short; several threads were introduced and noted for follow-up rather than resolved.

The Offshore Team: What They Do

The India-based offshore team operates as a three-person unit with distinct roles inside the shared Outlook inbox. One person handles order entry into Antera Advance. One person handles the artwork side — setting up proofs and preparing production files. The third handles customer service and inbox triage: monitoring the inbox throughout the day, categorizing incoming emails, assigning them to the right queue, and escalating urgent items.

The triage person also uses a shared Microsoft Teams channel to flag things for in-house staff — particularly rush orders or anything that falls outside the offshore team's scope (such as situations that need to be routed to an on-site salesperson). The offshore team also has authority to send certain types of responses directly to customers using the shared template library, without routing those emails through in-house staff first.

Why They're Bringing It Back In-House

The relationship started reasonably well. The offshore company is well-regarded in the promotional products industry — Briana mentioned they process around 20,000 orders a day across all their clients, and they work with the largest companies in the space. RCB's account, however, is not large enough to get dedicated workers. Instead, their work is handled by a shared pool of agents, with account managers who QC a percentage of the pool's output but don't catch everything.

For a while this worked acceptably. Briana estimated that 95% of orders go through without issue. But over the last six months, quality has noticeably declined. The root cause turned out to be staff rotation: the more experienced people familiar with the RCB account were cycled out and replaced by less experienced agents, without any notification to RCB. The result was a sudden increase in errors — described as "rookie level mistakes" — with no explanation until RCB started asking questions. Briana found the lack of transparency frustrating: they were left wondering what changed, and had to figure it out themselves.

The less experienced staff also struggle with the complexity of the work. Orders in this industry have a lot of specific details — materials, component breakdowns, event dates, proof timelines — and getting those details wrong has real consequences for the end customer. A name badge that arrives wrong or late is embarrassing for the distributor who sold it. English language comprehension for newer agents compounds the risk of missing nuance in order notes or customer communications.

The time zone situation also degraded over time. The offshore company originally committed to Central Time hours, but in practice, activity has shifted to a 6–9 PM window. RCB's in-house team is largely done by 3 or 4 PM, so by the time the offshore team produces work or flags issues, the in-house team is gone for the day. The mismatch creates delays and forces in-house staff to start their next morning catching up on what the overnight team flagged.

The combination of quality issues, transparency failures, and time zone drift led to the decision to end the contract and absorb the work in-house.

What Comes Back In-House on June 10

All three functions return in-house when the contract ends: order entry, art processing, and inbox triage. Briana's plan is to move a team member from the production floor into order entry — no new headcount needed. With the key account loss reducing production volume, there's capacity on the floor to support that shift. The transition is relatively clean; this is a scheduled handoff, not an emergency scramble.

Order Volume

Both RCB Awards and Exquisite Images run through the same Antera Advance instance. Volume across both brands is roughly 15 to 30 orders per day, depending on how busy the day is.

Antera API and Automation Potential

Nate asked whether anyone had looked at what the Antera API actually exposes. Briana said she has a meeting scheduled with the Antera account rep the following day and plans to ask specifically about API capabilities, depth of connectivity, and documentation. She doesn't yet know what's accessible.

The question matters because several manual steps in the current workflow could potentially be automated if the API allows it. The ones named in this conversation:

  • Entering a new customer into Antera — when a first-time distributor places an order, their company name, contact information, and shipping address have to be entered manually. All of that information is typically present in the incoming PO or email. Nate noted that a tool to extract that information automatically could pre-fill most of the new customer form.
  • Entering a new contact or shipping address for an existing customer — same idea; the information exists in the document, and manual re-entry is the current step.
  • Freight charges — calculated outside Antera and entered manually, as discussed in the freight tool session.

Briana agreed to ask her Antera rep specifically about the depth of connectivity — whether what's visible in the Antera UI is also accessible through the API, and if there are restrictions on which fields can be written programmatically.

Session Notes as a Client Deliverable

Toward the end of the session, Nate mentioned that the notes and summaries being created during the engagement could be shared with Briana directly — not just as internal working documents but as something she could share with others in her business. Briana responded positively, noting that having a detailed record of these conversations would be useful: she could give it to a new vendor, a new employee, or anyone else who needed context about how the business works, without having to have the same conversation from scratch.

She raised the format question — suggesting that something she could turn into an HTML file or PDF would be useful for people who aren't working in AI tools, while a markdown or text format works well for more technical contexts. Nate flagged this as something to think through.

Follow-Ups

  • Get the Antera API documentation from the rep meeting scheduled for the following day — specifically: what fields are accessible for order creation, customer creation, contact creation, and shipping address creation.
  • ~~Identify who in-house will be absorbing the offshore team's three roles~~ — resolved: a production floor team member is moving to order entry.
  • Document the inbox triage categories currently used (what constitutes "order entry," "rush," "escalate to sales," etc.) — this is the rule set the customer service triage role operates on.
  • Ask Briana to identify the most common errors the offshore team made — the "rookie mistakes" — so they can inform any validation or checklist work.