[00:00:28] Maxime Manseau: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Support Lab. I'm very happy to have you here. My name is Max and I'm gonna be your host today, and I'm pleased to welcome Kenji with leading the support team at front. Kenji, thank you so much for

[00:00:43] Kenji Hayward: joining us. How are you today? Yeah, thanks for having me, max. I'm doing great.

[00:00:47] Kenji Hayward: It's Friday at the time of this recording, so Fridays are always my favorite day of the week. It's the end. Yeah.

[00:00:53] Maxime Manseau: I was like, just for the one with the know, I was telling like Kenji, like before we started the [00:01:00] recordings that I had a mixed feeling on Friday where I have to finish my to-do list and at the same time the weekend is coming and I don't care.

[00:01:08] Maxime Manseau: But any, anyway, here we are Kenji. So the idea is I'd like to start, we have a few question, basically about front, so people have a better idea how so support team at front is manage what it looks like and everything. Maybe just before, if you can just introduce yourself in like a, a.

[00:01:31] Maxime Manseau: A few seconds. And tell us a bit more like, when did you arrive to Front and what did you do at Front? And before this.

[00:01:39] Kenji Hayward: Yeah, sure. So I've been working in support for like over 13 years, so I'm aging myself. I've only worked in support, so I don't know, and there's a lot of CX generalists, but I'm a support purist.

[00:01:50] Kenji Hayward: I started out in tier one, worked my way up to management, building and leading teams. Next month is actually my seven year anniversary at front. It's a long congrat. I've stayed at one company. Thank you. Yeah, [00:02:00] it's long for a tech company. Yeah. So I've got to see it from, one or two people to.

[00:02:05] Kenji Hayward: We're 30 today, which I don't think is actually that big compared to our customer size. But yeah, we do a really great brand of support that I think more people should consider, which we can talk about.

[00:02:15] Maxime Manseau: Great. Yeah I have a few questions regarding it's a support head front, but I'd be curious, if it was my first day at front, how would you present support there what it looks like?

[00:02:26] Kenji Hayward: Yeah, it looks like probably what you're used to. So if you've done support before, we use a tiered inbox approach. So there's tier one, tier two there's tier three, but those are the engineers. The difference is with front, it's very collaborative.

[00:02:41] Kenji Hayward: So what I mean by that is. There's no ownership of cases or tickets. And so anybody on the team, whether that's T one, T two, apac, AMEA or the US can jump in and work cases. So it's a different way to work. So a lot of the onboarding is not so much teaching the support [00:03:00] basics, but it's like the how do you interact with customers without having them repeat information using all the tools that you have?

[00:03:07] Kenji Hayward: Because with us, that's how we approach it. It's a team. It's, we look at the queue as one. Big queue that all of us share versus everyone's got their, you've got 10 tickets. Max has got 10 tickets, Kenji's got 10. Our goal is to get the whole thing to zero by the end of the day if we can.

[00:03:23] Maxime Manseau: Richard must never happen. All it does happen every time.

[00:03:26] Kenji Hayward: It used to happen. It used to happen now or, yeah. This is part of the thing is also. It's not gonna happen. And if it does happen, it's for two seconds and then, they all come back. So the cues of living beast.

[00:03:36] Maxime Manseau: So j just to understand correctly, so you have like tier one, tier two, the tier three that you said like that the engineers, is that people. Under your wings? Or is it like, like a totally different

[00:03:48] Kenji Hayward: team? No, totally different. So it's actually interesting. I would say my tier one would be tier two at any other company that gets the very technical product support.

[00:03:56] Kenji Hayward: Okay. My tier two team the first two tier tier two [00:04:00] folks, I. Used, I actually recruited from the engineering team. So these are like entry level ish engineers. They've got some kind of coding background. Tier three, they're on a rotation. So this is how we keep the engineers involved with customers. Depending on the week, we know which engineer to ping on the case.

[00:04:18] Kenji Hayward: It's very rare that we escalate like it's, like maybe one or two out of 10 might make it to tier two, and then maybe one out of a hundred might make it to tier three. But when it does. We get to actually talk to the engineer who could fix the bug. That, that's probably causing it, which is really nice.

[00:04:34] Maxime Manseau: Gotcha. So you mentioned no one is basically owning the ticket, but let's say so the ticket ar arrive to the queue. Who decide to jump on in? Like how

[00:04:43] Kenji Hayward: yeah. So there. Yeah, so there is ownership. Like we when we're really early, we did this free for all model. This is not what we do today.

[00:04:51] Kenji Hayward: So I'll just explain like when you're a smaller team, I think you have to just do whatever you can. And so we would just trust people, like grab whatever you can, please don't skip the [00:05:00] hard ones. Work top down to today, that doesn't work. Like the larger your team gets.

[00:05:05] Kenji Hayward: It's not a trust thing, it's just it doesn't scale well. And so now we do a balance of you get assigned. Automatically, I think up to five cases at a time. And then if you can handle more, please go grab more. What I mean about ownership is say you're working on a ticket right now and it's Friday, right?

[00:05:23] Kenji Hayward: It's the end of your day. The pressure's not on you to close it out. You just put your notes in and then throw it back, and then the next person in an APAC or the US will grab it. So the customer might work with multiple agents. Which could be frustrating if you do it wrong, but that allows us to just get people's answers quicker.

[00:05:41] Kenji Hayward: It just keeps tickets moving versus I have to wait till you come back online, during your up times. People can own tickets or cases, but we also really encourage people to jump in and help each other out. Okay.

[00:05:53] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, makes sense. And you mentioned that your frontline agents, [00:06:00] your level one is already pretty technical.

[00:06:03] Maxime Manseau: So I guess you have a, you have some self-service before one way or the others. How do you balance basically self-service with immense support app? Front.

[00:06:15] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. Yeah. So the self-service,

[00:06:18] Maxime Manseau: you know what I'm sorry I'm cutting you. But what will be interesting also for me is because I'm sure this has evolved recently, in the past two years with AI and stuff.

[00:06:27] Maxime Manseau: So I'd be curious to see what it looks like. Like when you arrive basically five plus years ago and the state of today.

[00:06:37] Kenji Hayward: Five plus years ago, we had no self service. Like we had a help center, but we had no, deflection. That's not something we really cared about. We just cared about connecting people with humans as fast as possible.

[00:06:48] Kenji Hayward: Fast forward to today, we definitely leverage, the chat bot. We use AI to suggest answers but we actually don't do as much. AI deflection as people think. Chat [00:07:00] is the only place where we use some kind of automated response. We don't do that for our emails or tickets. And chat only represents about 5%, 10% of our overall volume.

[00:07:11] Kenji Hayward: So yeah, we do it, but we do it thoughtfully. And I think that's how most teams are approaching it. For some teams where chat's your main channel. That's probably a huge, like having a high deflection rate is huge for us since our customers, and I think it's because front started as an email platform.

[00:07:27] Kenji Hayward: People still like to talk to us via email, so that's still the main way that we communicate. We do use ai for self-service in the help center. So that's either suggesting internal articles to the agent before they respond, or when people are writing into the chat bot, it'll feed from the knowledge base.

[00:07:46] Kenji Hayward: Sure.

[00:07:47] Maxime Manseau: And there is a question I'd like to ask. What's automation or the trick you are the most proud? Front basically in support, support related obviously that, that made your life easier for the team. [00:08:00] Anything like, in, in mind, and I'm not talking so much like on the customer facing way more like something yeah.

[00:08:05] Maxime Manseau: Internal for you guys.

[00:08:08] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. Definitely AI tagging's always been a pain in the butt for my team. Over the five course of five years, we've just, it's always something the team can, has complained about. I don't think anybody likes to tag like that. I think it'd be weird if you did. We, so we've tried to make it easier and easier over time, just making the tags clear.

[00:08:27] Kenji Hayward: But that was the best thing that we did because it's just an immediate ROI of you've taken this really tasks that annoys people off of their plate and they don't have to think about it. So we do we do purely AI tagging. We still do manual tagging as well, but we we're trying to automate as

[00:08:43] Maxime Manseau: much as possible.

[00:08:45] Maxime Manseau: Gotcha. Yeah.

[00:08:49] Maxime Manseau: We're gonna talk about work-life violence like later, but do you have a specific example in mind? When the team was, overwhelmed in general. And how did, [00:09:00] how, why I'm curious and how did you fix it? Does that come back to mind?

[00:09:03] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. I think this happens every a few times.

[00:09:06] Kenji Hayward: I don't know, every few months I think the team gets overwhelmed. I think they get overwhelmed when the queue is high. I think that's like just a mental state of even if everything is fine, like there's no SLA breaches. Your case work looks good. The metrics look good. Just seeing a high Q number really even for me, like it, it yeah, just mentally makes you feel overwhelmed.

[00:09:27] Kenji Hayward: And so what the managers and I have been doing is just trying to remind the team of guys we're doing really good. I know the Q'S really high, but like we're not breaching anything. Hitting all of our OKRs. So it's more of a, just a reminder that the team's doing a really good job. Because on those days where the queue's high and you feel really, stressed out and maybe it's a Friday and you're just trying to get home, because we approach it on a, like a shared.

[00:09:51] Kenji Hayward: Level we share. We also share the q guilt when it's, when it gets super high. So it's just like reminding people of, Hey, don't worry about it. It's, the [00:10:00] Q'S always gonna be high some days, like you don't really have control over that. If it's high because of staffing issues that's on me. Like I need to be accountable for that.

[00:10:07] Kenji Hayward: But it's just high because we're just. We're short staffed because people are sick or like we released a not so great feature and we're getting flooded with the requests. That's, that shouldn't, that's not on us. This is just the nature of support. It's very unpredictable sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean.

[00:10:25] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. It may be like to finish with Front. Answer question I'd like to ask is imagine you have unlimited budgets. Which is not the case. I know. But imagine what's one thing you would change about your support team today?

[00:10:39] Kenji Hayward: Oh, that's a good question. It's a double-edged sword working up front.

[00:10:42] Kenji Hayward: I think for this is probably as true for, might be for two max, but for, I think for companies that are in the support space, there's so many tools that I would love to use. I can't or I shouldn't because this is what we do, right? Yeah. So if I had unlimited budget, I would [00:11:00] invest more in, in the AI side.

[00:11:01] Kenji Hayward: Like right now I have access to a couple of tools. But I'm also really limited on access. And so if I didn't have any constraints, I wouldn't use it towards Ted Count. I would probably pay my people more if I had unlimited budget. I think we're all paid really well actually. But if I can get to that point where we're like opening, that's a good reply, right?

[00:11:19] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. If I, if you told me I had unlimited money, yeah. I would pay people like open AI pays their support team, I think that's they deserve it. And if I had control over that, I would pay them.

[00:11:29] Maxime Manseau: Curious if you don't mind, like also talking about wages because like I received like recently, like a lot of, so first, I don't know where you guys hire, but I receive a lot of dms on LinkedIn of, support reps outside of Europe and the us and they were not complaining, but they were telling me the story of like basically, they were doing the same job that their teammates in San Francisco.

[00:11:56] Maxime Manseau: Paris and pay like much less. What's [00:12:00] like, how do you approach this at front?

[00:12:02] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. At front we have a very transparent pay policy, so we basically work in zones and so depending on which zone you live in, so yeah, like San Francisco's the most expensive place in the world, and so that's, so it's cost of living.

[00:12:16] Kenji Hayward: So I, we have a great finance and people team that takes all these things into account, so it's not something I. Think about, I just validate it. But I would say to the people DMing, you. Where they live. Yes. If you could say that you're doing the same work as folks in San Francisco, but the cost of living might be much less because I could be making, what OpenAI is paying, but I probably still can't afford a house in San Francisco because it's that expensive to live here.

[00:12:41] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. And for Paris, that's like a premium place to live in Europe. And you, if you lived in a different part that was not, an active, like buzzing city like Paris and New York. It's probably gonna be cheaper for you there. So I think you have to look at it as like cost of living versus your, the wage that you're getting and not just compare, oh my gosh, this [00:13:00] person's making so much more money than me.

[00:13:01] Kenji Hayward: Think about their, how much they're paying for their house and their kids, the food. And

[00:13:06] Maxime Manseau: in your team, you never got like issue with that, right?

[00:13:09] Kenji Hayward: No, because we make sure that the, what we're paying is always above the market in their area. Yeah. So we do a lot of research on the different geos.

[00:13:18] Kenji Hayward: So I don't hire in every geography, but the ones that I do, we always do deep research on whatever. Yeah.

[00:13:23] Maxime Manseau: That's, they get a fair price for what they're doing. Oh,

[00:13:26] Kenji Hayward: yeah.

[00:13:26] Maxime Manseau: Oh yeah. And I guess that's a key too. Because yeah. A lot of people sometimes feel f frustrated by the pay.

[00:13:34] Maxime Manseau: But if you look around and it's in the average of, should be fine. The thing is you got and this is like a, a differentiator, but now you've started to have some company where were like, Hey, I'm gonna pay the cents. For everyone doing the same job. I've seen like some companies doing this, right?

[00:13:51] Maxime Manseau: But yeah. Anyway, I think being transparent, because the main issue with a lot of those folks at the end, they don't [00:14:00] really know the salary of the ease of the other, of the teammate rate, because like the company is not very transparent. ZI, this I feel had a lot of, I don't know.

[00:14:11] Maxime Manseau: It's not a clean, a yeah a clean environment, I feel, like just if if you're being transparent and like what everyone in your support team is doing and you have a clear carry project tracks, phases. Yeah.

[00:14:24] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. That's, that's the best thing you can do.

[00:14:26] Kenji Hayward: Just be transparent with your team and we didn't always have that. We didn't always have. Like levels and rubrics, like those are things we built over time. But they're huge. It's such a big help because when someone joins, they'll know clearly, okay, this is what I need to do to get promoted.

[00:14:40] Kenji Hayward: This is how much money I'll potentially make in my band. And it's a much,

[00:14:44] Maxime Manseau: you have this clear at front, like people when they join, they know basically, like if they're doing good in two years, five years, why is that? What am might expect? Yeah. I like that a lot. Okay, cool. Thank you for all this.

[00:14:58] Maxime Manseau: So I know we had a [00:15:00] little chat a few days ago and I remember you told me

[00:15:02] Maxime Manseau: I'm gonna try to frame it this way, but please correct me like you have a hiring philosophy, which is basically hiring the best of the best and keep the team small. Is that correct? That's right. Yeah. Can you just tell me a bit more what's idea behind all this? So I think the best of the best.

[00:15:21] Maxime Manseau: I think, yeah, it's obvious in a sense. You're always trying to hire the best people, but what's really interest in interests me is so small team parts.

[00:15:29] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. I, when I started out, I was really proud that I had a 200 person support team. That was something I would brag about, when I was interviewing and like to other support people oh, my team's bigger than yours.

[00:15:40] Kenji Hayward: It's, I think when you're younger for some reason, like that's important. Over time I've learned that it's really about the impact the team makes and so I'm actually proud when I say my team is smaller than other support teams like at doing a similar scale. It's an essentialism approach, so less but better.

[00:15:57] Kenji Hayward: I try to do this in all parts of my life, so I like, [00:16:00] I'm not a minimalist, but I like to buy things. Less, but that'll last longer. And I, when I think about my team we have a very high bar. And so that like how do you actually have the best of the best? You have to have a really tough interview process.

[00:16:14] Kenji Hayward: So I would say our interview process is one of the toughest at fronts, probably even. The same as an engineer,

[00:16:20] Maxime Manseau: what does it look like to have an idea?

[00:16:22] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. So before we, before you talk to us, we will send an assignment out. The assignment is something anybody can do, but it's based off of our help center and we're really trying to get an idea of your writing style.

[00:16:33] Kenji Hayward: Like we can tell if you use chat GPT, we can tell if you actually wrote it. And that's because we're a written team. We don't do any phone support. We do sometimes video calls, when the customer needs it, but most of the time it's just chats and emails and tickets. So the writing style is really important and that's something off right off the bat, the actual interview process itself.

[00:16:51] Kenji Hayward: The first person you talk to is the hiring manager. So if that was me, we would talk first. I think it's great for the candidate, but also. Right away I can start screening out [00:17:00] people pretty early 'cause I know what I'm looking for. If they make it through that phase they'll make it to the onsite, which is you're talking to about four people.

[00:17:08] Kenji Hayward: Three from the team, from maybe one from tier two, tier one, maybe somebody from ops and then somebody who's not on our team to get an idea of how you might collaborate with other folks in the company. Then if you pass that, then you talk to the hiring manager again. And that's really the final stage. But the thing I tell my team is it's hell yes or no.

[00:17:28] Kenji Hayward: Meaning we score on a one to four when we grade candidates. I gotta see all fours. And if I see a lot of threes, that means good, but that's not good enough for me. They've gotta be great and they've gotta surpass the last person that we hired. And so it takes longer I'm not gonna lie, like it's harder, but if you think about it, if you hire the right person, they'll onboard faster.

[00:17:51] Kenji Hayward: So even if you feel like, I think a lot of the times as support folks we're like, oh, we're drowning in tickets. So I just I gotta get people in here. And I think you let that pressure just you just hire [00:18:00] somebody like they're good enough. Yeah. That'll do. But for me, the most critical thing in my team is the talent.

[00:18:04] Kenji Hayward: And so I won't sacrifice that.

[00:18:06] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, and I feel this is my personal take, but with what's going on in support

[00:18:14] Maxime Manseau: you just can't afford to have average people anymore. In a sense that it's not just, because the human supports is gonna be more and more focused for, IFR tickets, complex tickets, and a lot of the support jobs is gonna be more on the operation side, the processes and all this.

[00:18:33] Maxime Manseau: I feel like you really need talentful people. That being said, this is also, I will send opportunity. There is a real opportunity here because super career. Starts to be very interesting. Like before, like a lot of people resign in seaport, I might want to jump in I don't know, a product or whatever.

[00:18:53] Maxime Manseau: And this is because a lot of the day-to-day job was sometimes a bit boring. And I feel now if [00:19:00] you're a real problem solver and you're really made for support, you can build a real career here. And not mentioning you can also like. Get a great salary from working in support, which wasn't always true years ago.

[00:19:12] Kenji Hayward: That's a good point. 'cause I am hiring for the potential, so everyone on my, like I have a support operations team and I have support managers. That's all been built from people who started out, in support. So I'm not just looking at, this is a question that I actually asked during the interview is.

[00:19:26] Kenji Hayward: I talk about the career, like where do you see yourself? What are your interests and gauging could this person be a support ops person, and could, or could they be at another part of the company if they graduate from support? And so I'm really trying to look at them and see they're not just here to do just like traditional customer support, but can they actually grow?

[00:19:44] Kenji Hayward: Do they wanna grow and stay here? Because most people actually stay here for a pretty long time when they do join.

[00:19:49] Maxime Manseau: Seven years for you. I can see that seven years. I'm not even the, I'm not even the oldest here, but there's the thing, seven years in San Francisco in the valley, because I feel like the turnover over there is way [00:20:00] higher than anywhere else.

[00:20:01] Kenji Hayward: So people think I'm, people think I'm crazy 'cause it's, all my peers they hop every two years, which is normal. It's really weird to work at a company for over four years. And so yeah, maybe I'll make it a decade and just freak people out.

[00:20:16] Maxime Manseau: You mentioned like support operations.

[00:20:18] Maxime Manseau: Do you have a small team of support hubs or everyone is like, how.

[00:20:23] Kenji Hayward: I've got my support operations teams is just three people today. So I've got three folks. Hubs I have. Are you asking about like regionally where we are, or just the

[00:20:32] Maxime Manseau: ops team? No, j yeah, the ops team. Just if it was one people, three people, that answer,

[00:20:36] Kenji Hayward: Yeah it's three. And I actually think that's the right ratio. I think 10 to one. So for every 10 reps, you should think about having one support ops person to just help with the workflow. So I'll break it down if you are thinking about building an ops team.

[00:20:49] Kenji Hayward: The first person I hired was a support operations documentation specialist. So somebody to manage the help center, to create the internal documentations, which is perfect because it now feeds into all the [00:21:00] AI and all the self-serve stuff. The next person I hired was a support operations analyst.

[00:21:04] Kenji Hayward: So this is the person running all the reports, like sending all the data to the product team. It was just basically like my right hand person, anytime I have questions and then. The most recent hire is a support operations developer. So I took somebody from my tier two team who's like actually an engineer, and they're building all the cool stuff that I want.

[00:21:22] Kenji Hayward: So they're building the AI automation, they're building the workflows. So they take all the ideas that, the analysts and I come up with, and they actually make it a reality. So we're a small but mighty team, but very high impact. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:35] Maxime Manseau: I feel a lot of teams are waiting a bit too long to add like operation people.

[00:21:40] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. I was like, recently I was talking to a few teams, like 20, 25 person and they still didn't have really have an ops person or someone wasn't responsible for it. They were like grabbing like few half day here and there or when something was broken. But I think if you can really have one person or like two, three person.

[00:21:58] Maxime Manseau: Working on this. That's great [00:22:00] definitively. Yeah. I wanted to ask you, did you add to do any trade off to make sorry to keep your team small the fact they're smaller. Is there any, yeah I think the trade off is,

[00:22:18] Kenji Hayward: Yes, the team is smaller in size, the trade off is also going remote.

[00:22:23] Kenji Hayward: I think that's the one cost savings you can do if you wanna keep a higher salary team, but smaller. But no, I don't I feel like we haven't really had to make a lot of. Trade offs because if you think about it from the business side's, something like support folks are not the best at, but it's great for business.

[00:22:39] Kenji Hayward: Like it's great for the CO, the C to show that you're being efficient. And yeah, like my whole thing is not, don't pay people less, just hire less people, pay them more, have a better team. And it's also really healthy for the company because the last thing you wanna do is you overstaff and then you have to do a layoff down the road.

[00:22:56] Kenji Hayward: You know what I mean? Yeah, definitely.

[00:22:59] Maxime Manseau: To [00:23:00] finish about hiring, like what would you say is the one quality every support hire at front must have, and what is the red flag, that will immediately scarify someone? Yeah,

[00:23:14] Kenji Hayward: the everyone, so the low ego, they have to have a low ego yeah, because of the way that we work together of, whether you're in T one or T two, or and then you've gotta collaborate and work.

[00:23:24] Kenji Hayward: So we're very heavy on collaboration. So you can't think you're just the, you're too good to do something. I think the red flag that I've found is people who don't ask questions not just in the interview, but like in general, they don't ask questions. There have been folks who haven't worked out at front.

[00:23:39] Kenji Hayward: Not everyone, it's not always been a perfect, we hire the perfect person every time. The ones who didn't work out, and the ones that I typically flag in the interviews, they're the ones who, and maybe it's a high ego thing, they just, they don't ask questions and they will never get better because they're afraid to ask questions or they think they know everything.

[00:23:59] Kenji Hayward: But I've worked the [00:24:00] queue. This is, I didn't just, yeah. Come out of the womb and become, it was like a director of support. I actually had to work my way up to leading support teams and I was a top performing agent, for a while at the company that I worked at first.

[00:24:11] Kenji Hayward: And that's because I asked questions. I was like, I don't know this. I gotta find out who has the answer. So those are the people who do best, like if they just started and they're just not afraid to ask the team in Slack and just say, Hey, I don't know this. Raise their hand, they're gonna be really good because they're gonna find a way to get the answer.

[00:24:29] Maxime Manseau: So if some of you guys are planning to, yeah. To join Ford and you make, and you meet Kenji, just ask him a bunch of question, please.

[00:24:40] Kenji Hayward: Just ask me so many questions and I'll be like, oh, this guy's amazing. This person's amazing. I gotta hire this.

[00:24:45] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. So I was gonna ask you if you if you had made any exception to your hiring rules and you regret it, but I guess.

[00:24:52] Kenji Hayward: Actually, I have so this, but we've rebounded so. I am not perfect. My team is not perfect. We [00:25:00] have these, I forgive you, really strict. Thank you. Thank you. We have these really strict policies, and the one time that we broke, this was one of my, my, my rules is never say yes to a two.

[00:25:11] Kenji Hayward: If the, from the six people that we've interviewed, two means no, it's like a soft no. But if there's any doubt we just pass. Even if everybody else loved the person, but we just, I think it was the desperation of we needed somebody, like they, everyone else felt really strongly and we just pushed them through.

[00:25:30] Kenji Hayward: It ultimate ultimately didn't work out. So that was a time where I regretted I should have just stuck to my. Guns and said no. I think as the, I dunno if I was the hiring manager, but even for me, like in my position, I should have stepped in and said, no, we shouldn't do this. I know everyone else loves this person, but we know it works and we just have to trust the process.

[00:25:50] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Cool. Thanks for also insights. Another topic I wanted to talk about with you. This one is [00:26:00] really dear to me is public metrics. I know you and I have been like a fervent

[00:26:06] Maxime Manseau: I can't find my word, but just fervent about publishing like support metrics out there. There is basically, I feel no. Reason to keep them, eaten from the customer. So can you tell me a bit more how did it start? Just

[00:26:23] Kenji Hayward: tell me the story.

[00:26:24] Maxime Manseau: Yeah.

[00:26:25] Kenji Hayward: I don't know if you heard it the first time as well, but the first time I heard about public metrics was when rippling posted on Twitter and their CEO EO was doing I

[00:26:34] Maxime Manseau: They've been the first ones.

[00:26:35] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. 'Cause the CEO

[00:26:36] Maxime Manseau: is just support focused yeah.

[00:26:38] Kenji Hayward: Crazy. I got to talk to him, I got to interview him because we're like, I was so interested in that. The thing is we, I read the tweet and then I started a discussion with our CEO at the time, Matilde. And we thought it was a great idea, but we just, I dunno why it just fizzled out and we didn't really do it.

[00:26:54] Kenji Hayward: But the more I thought about it, I was like, why don't we do this? And. The crazy thing was like nobody else was doing [00:27:00] it. Even after, Parker Conrad, like the CEO of rippling posted it, it just fell flat. But I decided I think this is a great thing to do because something that I always run into is support teams aren't valued enough.

[00:27:11] Kenji Hayward: They don't get enough exposure, to the, from the rest of the company. And so I'm. Is a perfect way to highlight the work that we do. Yeah, maybe if your metrics suck, you're probably less inclined to publish them. But I think that even if that's the case, that's a forcing function to do better, yeah.

[00:27:28] Maxime Manseau: And you know what, if you take like the customer side, I feel if you look at at the public site and you want to read about suport tech, every super team's gonna tell. They're the best. They're great, right? Blah, blah, blah. So I feel it's always a same bullshit. Yes. And I feel just like showing, even if they're bad, just okay, it build trust,

[00:27:49] Kenji Hayward: so I think it's, yeah, go ahead. No, and I'm just saying like the way that this has actually helped us get more sales up front is it's a sales tactic too. So you [00:28:00] can go and say okay, what's, what are intercoms metrics? What are zendesk's metrics? And then the salesperson can just send them a link to our site and show like, this is what you're gonna get.

[00:28:08] Kenji Hayward: And I think that I'm, yeah I love transparency in all parts, and I trust, companies that are transparent with me. And I think that's, you're right, like for customers. They should know what they're getting into. Because what's gonna happen is if you tell them you have great support and then you don't, they're just gonna be disappointed.

[00:28:24] Kenji Hayward: So why even lie to them, in the first place?

[00:28:26] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. And I'm thinking, I feel like take products are becoming more and more commoditized. So eventually like what's gonna separate them from the other is gonna be like the brand. Like they've been able to build. But ultimately support is the only team that talks every day to customer, right?

[00:28:45] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. So if you're picking like, I don't know calendar scheduling tool, now you have hundreds of them. I'll be glad to know that, those, this specific product has, like those metrics. Like it build trust and I know, like I, I can trust [00:29:00] like the support to work Great.

[00:29:01] Maxime Manseau: Just by the fact that publishing the metrics, it's a good side that to have a great support.

[00:29:07] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. Why do you think people don't do it? Because we've both posted about it. I've literally talked about it at conferences, so I think

[00:29:13] Maxime Manseau: you guys built it now at front, right? So Correct.

[00:29:17] Maxime Manseau: Your customer are using it because it's prebuilt I think like the biggest, yeah, I think the bigger thing, just being able to build it they can't do it by themself. That's the thing is like they want to have a proper nice thing. So is the need, like help. So obviously they don't find the developer send the ux ui team for just doing a great job.

[00:29:38] Maxime Manseau: But I think they should even like grab we talked about it like a few days ago, like this team who had a notion page and just throw their metrics here and you can just manually change them like every amount, this is a metric of the mount. And even having the backlog of like, all the farmers, anyway, just a start.

[00:29:55] Maxime Manseau: But I think it's like they don't have the resource to do it. And they're afraid. They're [00:30:00] afraid to do something crappy. Yeah. This is my guess, but I'm, yeah. I feel this is maybe the easiest, if I can give a tip to every support leader listening to us today, this is an easier thing.

[00:30:15] Maxime Manseau: That's gonna help you have a seat at the table at your company, right? Because it looks good on the customer side. As you say, it's encourage your team to just be better and better. And also it usually probably not that front, but in a lot of team, a lot of company like support is.

[00:30:37] Maxime Manseau: Not as much visible as the other teams. Yeah. Internally. So this is a way basically to just, show the job you are, you're doing, and remind people you're here, right?

[00:30:46] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I, everyone should do it. So if you're watching this, no excuse. You should definitely think about it.

[00:30:54] Maxime Manseau: And maybe, yeah, I had a question if you are, if you ever regretted being so [00:31:00] transparent, but I think I have your answer already, so Yeah, I do not, no, the only regret I have is not doing it sooner. And the last question about metrics. Which support metrics do you think is the most overhyped, is there something that's yeah, that's a good man.

[00:31:16] Maxime Manseau: That's a spicy question.

[00:31:20] Kenji Hayward: I'm not gonna say csat 'cause I know that one's a lot of people have very strong feelings. I don't think CS a's as bad as people think. I think if you're only using csat. Yes. If you're only using any metric. For your whole performance. It's not good. I will say bsat, I don't know if, do you know what bsat is?

[00:31:38] Kenji Hayward: The bot sat? No. So bot sat is, I think it's, so I, what I've been saying is bot sat is bullshit. Like it just doesn't make any sense to me because like the way that we talk about csat, it's a vanity metric, right? The, it's just not built. It's a metric built for measuring humans that we've just thrown onto chatbots, which have already have this kind of, [00:32:00] inherently built in humans are not gonna like it.

[00:32:02] Kenji Hayward: So I, I think that's a metric that I don't believe in. I don't use Bsat.

[00:32:06] Maxime Manseau: Gotcha.

[00:32:08] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. Makes sense.

[00:32:09] Maxime Manseau: And I'm going I just realized hopefully it's gonna be fine that my mic, that recording is like. Very far from me.

[00:32:18] Kenji Hayward: So I hear you fine though.

[00:32:20] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. You hear me fine. Okay. Yeah. So I'm not gonna move it this way it's gonna be like the same level for the entire episode anyway.

[00:32:27] Maxime Manseau: One of the last topic I wanted to talk about with you is if I understand correctly, you are the only, one in the office within your support team. What's a story? I know there's something with COVID. Yes. Yeah.

[00:32:44] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. Before COVID we were all in the office, like a lot of people.

[00:32:48] Kenji Hayward: So the sport team wasn't remote before we were all in either the Paris office or the San Francisco office. And then when COVID happened, we went remote. The team did amazing. Like better than even when we worked in the office. But [00:33:00] then like a lot of companies, we had this, callback to the office of, Hey, we're gonna give you time, but we're gonna need you all to come back to the office a couple days a week.

[00:33:09] Kenji Hayward: And by then a lot of my team had already relocated, and you gotten used to working this way in love working remotely, and initially I did not like the idea about it. If I'm completely honest did I want to come to the office myself? No, I loved working at home. I just had kids, during COVID I had two, two kids.

[00:33:28] Kenji Hayward: And I loved what I had, I loved the setup, but the more I thought about it I knew that it's something I had to do for my team so that they could stay remote. Initially it was something I had to do, but I've actually learned to love it because you and I have talked about this. The, my work-life balance means me not bringing work home.

[00:33:45] Kenji Hayward: And to do that, I need to go to the office. Sometimes I need to, this is not my home. This is a coworking space that I work at on the other days. So that's how it all transpired. The, they, I negotiated with leadership that if I come to the office and I represent support, [00:34:00] my support team stays remote. And that's a deal that we've made two years ago or three years ago, and it's still going.

[00:34:07] Maxime Manseau: That's good.

[00:34:08] Kenji Hayward: That's good. Yeah, I

[00:34:09] Maxime Manseau: guess not every will accept that, obviously. But if it works, I would challenge,

[00:34:13] Kenji Hayward: yeah, I would challenge them though. I would like yeah, they didn't accept it at first, but what I would tell another support leader is challenge them on like, why? Like why do you need.

[00:34:21] Kenji Hayward: If my team is performing better, why do you need them Here? I'm here so I can be the, this is why I'm here. I'm the voice of support. I am attending all the executive meetings. If you've got a question, you ask me. If you need me to attend a meeting, I'll be there. And so when I'm actually in the office, like I'm never at my desk, I'm.

[00:34:38] Kenji Hayward: In a meeting, I'm just meet, talking to people in person. I'm really utilizing my time so that they notice that I'm there because I want them to know the support team is involved with the company. And the cool thing is for my support team, like they're remote, but I'm like there their go-to if they need me to unblock something.

[00:34:56] Kenji Hayward: Like yesterday, somebody was like, Hey, like what's going on with this like [00:35:00] billing policy? And so I just walk over to the billing team and I figure it out and then I just send it to them on Slack. So it's been really helpful. Like I think it's good to have, I welcome the team to come visit me. They don't visit me enough, but if they wanna, they can.

[00:35:12] Kenji Hayward: But I respect their working style. Like I think everyone needs to work their way.

[00:35:17] Maxime Manseau: And so what's, because there is obviously a challenge of leading a remote first super team. So is there, what's the main challenge for you?

[00:35:25] Kenji Hayward: I think the main challenge is just staying connected, and making sure that we are like if you met my team you probably wouldn't guess that we're remote.

[00:35:34] Kenji Hayward: Like we're our, we're so tight and connected. Maybe it's because a lot of us have worked together for seven, some of us eight years. But also even for the newer hires, I think that we do a really good job of. Keeping folks connected. One thing that we do, so what I would say, the tip is you, if you're a remote team, the challenge is you have to actually be intentional about building connections.

[00:35:54] Kenji Hayward: So you can't just go sign on Zoom, go to whatever help desk you're using and crunch out [00:36:00] tickets. You have to build the time to make the connections with the rest of the team.

[00:36:04] Maxime Manseau: So how do you do that? Do you have like in the calendars every week moment, like what's.

[00:36:11] Kenji Hayward: We've got, yes. I'll tell you the secret.

[00:36:13] Kenji Hayward: So daily we have Q Crush. And Q Crush is one hour a day, depending on your time zone that you can just, you optionally hop into Zoom and work together on the queue. So everyone's got the, you can ask questions live. Biweekly. I host a support standup, which is me giving the bigger updates to the team.

[00:36:31] Kenji Hayward: Once a month we do mandatory fun and mandatory fun is hosted by one of my other managers. And it's literally, you have to have fun. We plan games, we play video games with each other. We will do some kind of make virtual puzzles. We wrote like we have this whole of. That we've together so that other teams can do it too.

[00:36:50] Kenji Hayward: And then once a quarter we do a cooking class together, a virtual cooking class. And then we had our offsite, which we do once a year. And that's a way that we can make sure that we're connecting. [00:37:00] And then for managers we've tried to visit the offices once a quarter, so I try to, I was just in Europe, I missed you, but I was in Europe and Paris and Ireland.

[00:37:08] Kenji Hayward: And that way, even though we're remote, we're. Connecting at least once a day and then making time to actually hang out and not do work stuff at the same time.

[00:37:20] Maxime Manseau: Sounds great. Good advice here. And you mentioned like you have two kids, I have two kids too. Yeah, a lot of people working in support have young kids too.

[00:37:32] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanted to talk a bit about like work-life balance. I know that for example, you start very early to work. So if you have I'm just curious if you can share transparently, like how do you deal with all this?

[00:37:46] Kenji Hayward: Yeah, it's, oh my God, it's tough. The, it's, isn't it crazy like everyone I know, so all of my support managers also have.

[00:37:53] Kenji Hayward: Two kids around the same age. So we have this shared experience. My biggest tip is to wake up early. Like even if you're not a [00:38:00] morning person, like I'm not naturally a morning person, but I get to work by five in the morning. That's because I have kids, because I need to, if I was, if I had to work at home, I would need to get work done before they wake up because you know how it is.

[00:38:13] Kenji Hayward: That's my time to focus. Deep work. Transparently. I also need to sneak out the house to get to the office. So before they wake up Yeah. I need to get out before they wake up because it becomes this whole oh daddy don't leave, kind of thing. Yeah. So I, I try to avoid that and so that's my biggest tip is biggest tip.

[00:38:30] Kenji Hayward: Avoid your kids. Your kids at all costs. That's terrible advice. I really though make time for yourself because if you like the worst thing that I did was during COVID when I had to work at home was I was doing both things. Okay. Like I was being an okay dad because I was like thinking about work, doing work while, and I was never fully present with them.

[00:38:52] Kenji Hayward: And then at work I was like distracted by, like with my family stuff. So by separating the two, that was the biggest game [00:39:00] changer because I give a hundred percent of myself to my work balance and I give a hundred percent of myself to my family. And what I mean by that is actually have three laptops.

[00:39:08] Kenji Hayward: So I have the one I'm talking to you now, which I keep at this workspace. I have one in my office. Which is for work in the San Francisco office. And then I have a personal one at home, which is there's no work. So my policy is no work when I get home. And I have to force myself to do that.

[00:39:22] Maxime Manseau: You basically when you work from home, you never really work from your home, you work from,

[00:39:27] Kenji Hayward: okay, gotcha. A space like this is like a coworking space, but there are, there are just times when that's unavoidable. The kids are sick and I have to, but when I do that, I just, I just, you make, do I don't schedule calls in those days. I just tell my team like, Hey, like it's, I'm at home.

[00:39:41] Kenji Hayward: It's rough. So I could talk to you via chat, but I'm not gonna do a, like a Zoom meeting today. For sure. Yeah. And I think it builds trust with the team. Again, being transparent and it lets them get to know you of this is my home life. I also have the same struggles that you guys go through.

[00:39:56] Kenji Hayward: And it just helps us be a better team. [00:40:00] Yeah.

[00:40:00] Maxime Manseau: I had maybe a last question for you. What's the best thing you can do to keep your team from burning out? Good question. You

[00:40:11] Kenji Hayward: have to really think about their growth. And what I mean by that is support can be such a grind. Like s doesn't matter what you're doing in support, if you're working with customer, it's a very, the issues are always different, but it can be a very repetitive job.

[00:40:25] Kenji Hayward: And for some people that's great. They like the, to, they know what they're doing every day. But I think for, because I hire such high caliber people. I need to keep them from burning out, I have to keep them interested. And so that means finding projects for them to work on, like reminding them about the Q guilt, Hey, don't worry about the Q is the Q.

[00:40:44] Kenji Hayward: Just handle what you can, what's in your control. But that's my biggest tip is to make sure you're nurturing your team. Having the clear paths is really helpful, like knowing that they have a way to grow because otherwise we don't. The queue is just their, that's their whole work life. [00:41:00] And I've done that.

[00:41:00] Kenji Hayward: And that's not the best, there's, there needs to be more than just the queue. I love queue crushers, like we cannot do our job without them. But for other folks, you just have to, think about what will keep them here, what will keep them interested. Because if you have a goal, it's less likely that you're burnout, you'll burn out if you go, this isn't what I'm gonna be doing every single day for the rest of my life.

[00:41:20] Kenji Hayward: Yeah. You're probably more likely to burn out. Also, give your team time off when you can.

[00:41:24] Maxime Manseau: You mentioned like giving them project, do you have just an example of what you call a project?

[00:41:29] Kenji Hayward: Yeah, so yeah, I Sure. A project that I, oh, go ahead. Go ahead. No. Go. So projects that we have are we've got this, basically it's just a spreadsheet, so a Google doc, and it's a project tracker.

[00:41:43] Kenji Hayward: It's called a support roadmap. And anybody can suggest a project. So it's not just me saying, here are the things I need to be done. I want people to put things on here we need to update our rules, or we need to, do X, Y, and Z. There's just all these things that we never get to doing that,

[00:41:59] Maxime Manseau: And they just end up being [00:42:00] projects.

[00:42:02] Maxime Manseau: Yeah. Yeah. I think we've been talking for you. Here we are, the four, five minutes. I don't know if you want to add anything that cross your mind. Yeah,

[00:42:20] Kenji Hayward: Lastly just that. Really think about making your metrics transparent and max and I have no skin in this game. We don't gain anything from other teams doing this. I just think it's something like every support team should do. So if you take away one thing from this talk, really think about making your metrics public.

[00:42:36] Kenji Hayward: You can DM me, if you wanna find me on LinkedIn or wherever. If you're in support driven or elevate I wanna help more teams do this because I've seen how great it's been for us. I just. Think about that. Think about it. I like that.

[00:42:49] Maxime Manseau: Thank you so much, Kenji. If you guys want to reach out to Kenji, you can find him on LinkedIn.

[00:42:54] Maxime Manseau: Do you have him? I'm sure he is gonna answer. And yeah. Thank you so much for your [00:43:00] time. Really appreciate, thanks everyone for listening us or watching us and yeah. See you soon. Bye-bye.