Today’s podcast is with Kenji Hayward, the Senior Director of Customer Support at Front, the all-in-one, AI-powered customer service platform built for collaboration. Kenji joins me today to talk about why email isn’t dead and why Front takes an email-first approach, getting everyone involved in the support queue, including the CEO, and why they made their customer support metrics public. You can check them out here.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Data ontology and Rethinking Customer Support Metrics – Interview with Marcel Barrera of serviceMob Inc – and is number 528 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Kenji:

• We were one of the first companies that evolved email. We added collaboration to the mix, which unlocked a lot of stuff.
• The reason that email is never gonna die is it’s still the preferred way for businesses to communicate.
• A ticket is just an email with a dedicated number associated with it.
• Everybody should hop in the support queue.
• It collapses the distance between what’s happening in the service environment and the problems that customers have with people across the business.
• To do that, you have to think about how the person who’s taking time out of their extremely busy day to shadow us is going to do that. How are you going to make it easy?
• Partnering with our leadership team and HR, we have made this part of our company onboarding.
• We got a new CEO in the last few months, Dan, and within his first two weeks, he had signed up for a support session, which helped sell out our tickets for help support sessions.
• Something we did really early on to help with awareness and growth was that we conducted an exit survey, where we were able to gather feedback and quotes from the folks who joined the sessions and then we would share these at company meetings.
• This is a really organic way of smashing down those organizational silos/walls so people understand what’s going on.
• The support team never shuts down so at a whole company off-site everybody got a ticket to solve to help the whole support team participate fully in the event.
• We made our support metrics public.
• Whilst initially scary it has become a great way to show how great our support team is and to build trust with customers.
• There are maybe 5 to 10 companies worldwide that do this in our space, so it’s a very radical and punk thing to do.
• The biggest impact has been that it has become a lead generator.
• Talking through our public support metrics has also become part of every salesperson’s demo call and it’s a part of our board deck.
• We have now created a feature where any Front customer can publish their metrics in three clicks.
• Kenji’s best advice: Be transparent.
• Kenji’s Punk CX brand: Scott Tran of Support Driven.

About Kenji

Kenji is the Senior Director of Customer Support at Front, the all-in-one, AI-powered customer service platform built for collaboration. More than 9,000 businesses rely on Front, which has raised $204 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital, Threshold Ventures and Uncork Capital, as well as executives from Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics, and Zoom.

Kenji has been in the customer support space for more than a decade starting as a Technical Support Engineer. At Front, Kenji has spearheaded the development of Front’s award-winning global customer support and strategy from inception to implementation, led a team of customer support, technical support engineering, and support operations professionals, and achieved a 100% Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) rate.

Check out Front and their support metrics here. Feel free to connect with Kenji on LinkedIn and follow his newsletter, Top-Tier Support.

Image credit: Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash