Kenji Hayward- Empowering Support Teams: Practical AI Tips for Today's Challenges
Meet Kenji Hayward, the Head of Customer Support at Front, leading the highly praised worldwide strategy and team dedicated to customer support, technical support engineering, and support operations. With his guidance, Front has attained outstanding achievements, securing consecutive Stevie Awards, attaining a top-tier global customer satisfaction rating, and amassing a series of honors that underscore his unwavering dedication to delivering exceptional customer service.
Check out this video featuring Kenji Hayward our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo, where he discovers how his 12-year journey in support, including managing teams at various scales, drives his mission to foster excitement and curiosity about AI's positive impact on support roles. This video provides a glimpse into the captivating insights that Kenji will soon be presenting on the stage in Las Vegas, NV.
Kenji Hayward:
I feel like AI is such a hot topic, and it fills my LinkedIn feed every single day, morning and night. But what I found was there's a lot of theory about what AI will become eventually, and there's not a lot of practical advice of, “Okay, what can I do today as a support team?” So that was really the motivation for me. To create some actionable things that you could do today instead of thinking about it, six months or a year from now. That was the whole goal.
I’ve been in support for a little over 12 years. I started out in tier one doing phone support, then email support at a tech company. I fell in love with it and just grew naturally, and eventually managed teams. And then head up support orgs today, and I think the biggest one that I ever helped to lead was about 200, and the smallest ones about 10 to 15. If it's support related I've probably done it
Around the time that I joined the support driven conference, about six years ago. I had a chance to do a talk at Dreamforce, I think a little over five years ago now with another member of the support driven community, and we talked about the future of AI and support and I think we were pretty on target. Now, we like you and so many other great ones, it's an interesting time to be in support.
Front is a customer operations platform that enables teams to streamline communication and deliver exceptional customer service at scale. We're really looking to help build out this new customer operations platform for support teams. we're also looking into how we can, as a company build AI features to help customer support teams. I think that's really where the conversation started was even in engineering, like in the early stages of thinking about how do we build these features.
Deniz Kuran:
Any resistance from the team about using AI or any I don't know what's the right word, hesitancy?
Kenji Hayward:
Fortunately, no. I think because, I think this is the benefit for both of us, like working at companies where we're really pro AI and we're trying to even get more to use it. Very pro let's use everything that we can to make the support team better, especially with the AI features.
The thing with, when you're a support team working with a bunch of different customers and, different folks can own that case or ticket, the summarize feature really helps just to give you like a quick snapshot so that you can hop right in.
So I think like a lot of other teams they use the chatgpt powered or different open AI powered summarized responses. So that's been really helpful as well. But everything that we use today is built within front. So I would highly recommend front, but I recommend people in general be open to using AI to help augment your support team stack.
Deniz Kuran:
To keep up with the latest in news related to an ai. Do you have any sources that you follow specifically for ai?
Kenji Hayward:
Mostly in my LinkedIn network. So I think, I've got a nice network of other heads of support, so hearing what they're posting and like what they're reading about, I think that's where I get my more like real time updates is really from LinkedIn.
Deniz Kuran:
For sure. If people wanna reach out to you, what's the best way?
Kenji Hayward:
I would say LinkedIn. If you look me up, Kenji Hayward should be able to find me pretty easy. But also you can DM me directly on the support driven Slack channel. My handle is just Kenji. I'm happy to answer any questions anytime and just chat be awesome.
Deniz Kuran:
Who do you think should listen to your talk?
Kenji Hayward:
Definitely support leaders, I think would be really beneficial. My goal is to provide real, actionable tips that you can apply to your teams today. If you're within the support industry and you're curious about AI in general, I think you could benefit from joining the talk and hopefully walk away with something you can apply today.
Deniz Kuran:
How would you like people to feel after they leave your talk?
Kenji Hayward:
I think curious and excited. I think hopefully curious in the sense that you're more open to and less resistant to AI tools. And I think excited in that, it's a change and change can be scary sometimes, especially for the support teams that AI might impact. So I think being excited about the positive changes, the role changes, the freeing up of time and like the things that, can make your job even better."
Deniz Kuran:
We'll be seeing you at Support Driven Expo in October, early October.
Kenji Hayward:
No, that's it. I'm really excited to do my first talk at Support Driven again, full circle, from six years ago. Hopefully, you can make it and if you can't hopefully you can catch the recording.
Check out this video now featuring Kenji Hayward our upcoming speaker for October’s Expo. Be sure to watch and get a taste of what's to come!
