Name: The Four Ways Customer Ops Breaks
Uploaded: 2026-08-27T19:16:10.363Z
Duration: 26 min 32 s
Description: The Four Ways Customer Ops Breaks

Transcript for "The Four Ways Customer Ops Breaks": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Matt, and I'm with the marketing team here at Front. And with me today is Sam, a member of our AI product team. Sam lives day in and day out in our clients' environment, seeing where the hard parts are and where the pain points are really raising day by day. So he's a perfect candidate to join us here today to dig into what the hard parts are in customer operations and the four in the four places where they consistently break. Quick note, logistically before we get going. Today's call is recorded, so that you can watch this on demand later, share it with your colleagues, or just catch up whenever it feels relevant. Before we go in, little, little background on what we're talking about today. We ran a research report a few months ago called built for the hard part, and this involved a diagnostic quiz that dug into the four common fail points we see in customer operations. Over 250, operators took this quiz, and what we're gonna go through today is each of those four archetypes and how they're raising in people's operations and things we've seen amongst our customers that have either alleviated them or just helped you work through them. So before we get into that, Sam, can you share share a little bit about where you're seeing that live today? Yeah. Happy to. And it's great to be here with you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. We we see this all the time with our our customers. One example that comes to mind is, a UK based advertising communications firm. So when we first started talking with them, they run a complicated organization. They've got, you know, 70 people on their team. They're dealing with 30,000 pieces of communication emails, a month, and they're doing this across multiple systems. So for them, they're working on Outlook. They're working partially on, you know, ticketing system. And then their typical flow would be that, you know, all this inbound would come in, and then people would jump into Microsoft Teams, say, okay. Who's running point on this? Yeah. Right? And, like, let the chaos ensue. And it wasn't chaos. Like, they had a process, but, they're working across various systems, and things were super disjointed. And so, for them, they started to see bottlenecks when a request would have to go through multiple teams, and they, you know, found themselves touching three systems back and forth between teams constantly. And for them, just context was, you know, scattered across those. So that's just, like, one example, but I think there's permutations of that that, you know, folks we work with come across all the time. Yeah. Absolutely. And that sort of leans into, a bet we've seen across the industry. As AI has become more prevalent, a lot of people brought on tools that weren't quite built for how work's done today. They're really focused on one owner, one clean run from or from problem straight through the solution, and just anticipating it to work on the path it's it's made for. You know, those things are like password resets, where's my shipment. But in today's world, it doesn't really work that way. Businesses are complex businesses are global, complex, and, unfortunately, that complexity isn't something that can be worked around with one single tool. It is a nature of the beast that we live in today, and it's something that you can't just juke around. You need to be able to play within it and address it head on to be able to really leverage, your leverage your business and move to scale. And none of this is to say anyone's doing anything wrong. It is really just what we've been sold and what we've been told. And so we're gonna dig in this a little bit more and show where those bets have gone wrong. So, you know, before we get into it further, let's jump into our first of our of our pain points. Yeah. Let's do it. We call this one, the missing link, and this was the most prevalent of all of the pain points we saw come up. So with that in mind, let's dive deeper a little bit a little bit of this one, Sam, and start with more detail on the story you just told because I think it's a common one that a lot of people relate to. Mhmm. Yeah. And this one really has to do with just context being scattered across, you know, various systems. Right? So that same firm, a request would come in, and it would first, you know, be handled by someone in the account management function. Right? Maybe this existing customer. They're doing an ad spend with them, and so they want to make a change to the program or campaign that they're running. And so, again, that conversation comes in. And in the world of Outlook that they were operating in, I think, like, we all know death by distro lists, 15 people who are on that DL would also get that same email. And So then in the Teams we go, folks are communicating in Teams to think about, okay, who's running point on this? Is that AM online? You know, are they swamped? Is this gonna be buried in their inbox? So, again, there's kind of this, like, tag your it process that happens in Teams. And then finally, the designated party will then jump in and start to own that communication. They might be creating other artifacts in the ticketing systems that cross functional partners use to track that work, because, you know, for their organization, that request had to go through multiple, departments in order to get fulfilled. And then, you know, as everyone's day goes, you get busy, more things come in in your inbox, you take a break for lunch. And, you know, number of times that this has come up with folks is just like, you come back from lunch, you have a thousand emails in your inbox. Again, it's death by distro list. And whether it's distro list or something else, like, noise is something that I think we all deal with. And so, again, for this organization, you know, the directly responsible individual, you know, that was clarified in Teams, has that much more noise to sift through before they can continue to follow the thread of this request. These requests typically needed multiple teams sign off in order to, you know, get a response back to the client. Yeah. And so what seems really easy, like, hey. Just, like, respond to my email and let me know that this, like, campaign change has been approved. Really, there's a lot of hidden work, that it requires a lot of context to actually do that. And so that organization found that every time, like, you know, the request needed to move to another department, they kinda had to re dig through all that context to find, okay, what's the key information we need in order to process this request. And that that was just really cumbersome. Yeah. I can imagine. Now is there an actual real cost we can identify or call out that's tied to this? Yeah. For sure. I mean, we we could, like, get into the weeds of, like, an ROI calculator and how do you value your time, but I think and I think everybody knows that. But what we often miss too is just, like, the relational impact that that takes. Right? Like, the the time it takes for you to get back to someone, the time you have to repeat information, like, the the real cost is the the the relationship with your customer. Yeah. And that's there's a compounding effect there too. You know, one time's forgivable, but as that repeats, trust is lost. Mhmm. Yeah. Absolutely. I think one assumption that that leads to this is that point where you're handing off the ticket, handing off the the issue from one person to the next. There's this belief that just forwarding across, you know, within your Outlook will bring everyone up to speed. But in reality, that forward is just moving the message, not really moving the context or the ownership. And what that leads to, and it's we've seen this unfortunately a few times, is, the customer having to repeat themselves and restate their problem and, frankly, relive that problem over and over again. And that has a very detrimental effect to your, one, time to close issues, your business reputation for a second, and there's many more compounding effects off of that. And so the program the the processes were never really built to carry that context through is the real issue there. So one exercise I wanna throw to everyone, try it out later today or sometime this week, is go look at your 10 your last 10 ex escalation, sorry, and take a look at how many times a customer had to repeat themselves. Low lift away to just look at this is something you're living today. So that's the context moving between people. That's our first case. The second one is more about the pattern what happens when context never leaves a single operator. And I'm not gonna get into a specific, example with a customer here today because I think a lot of people on this webinar, when you and I were talking about this one as an idea, it was instantly understandable. This is the one person that holds on to all the knowledge, that is the go to person whenever something bubbles up. And that person in many cases might be yourself, might be me. You know, it's something that we don't realize is is happening and building up, but it's very detrimental to the overall operation of the business. We all know that person who, you know, skips their lunch break, has to build a seven page out of office document enabled you know, in order to take a week off. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of those, just ask Sarah. You know, Sarah handles this, and I think every company has one of those persons. So I'd love to hear, Sam. I know when we're talking earlier, you have a pretty real life example of this one. We Love to hear how you've kind of experienced this yourself. Yeah. I mean, this definitely hits home. I think for everyone, like, if you're doing your job well. Right? Like, you gotta do a little bit of planning before you go out of office, and and that's that's normal. But, again, just like the, yeah, just being that load bearing person, because, again, systems that we commonly are using aren't, you know, built to handle the complexity that our organizations deal with. There's an immense amount of documentation that goes into prepping for your your time away, which should be peaceful. Yeah. And so, yeah, for me, like, I know when we're talking about this, I'm getting married in two weeks. And so, like, I especially feel this right now, but, what's great is, you know, my last company prior to front, this would have been a seven page document because so much context lives in a system built for complexity. Now it's just like a one page Notion doc, which is, like, really great. But, again, it's it's, yeah, it's a I think for the people who are in this bow, again, it's a little bit of everyone, but it kinda manifests in two ways. For some, it could be a point of pride. Like, you are a workhorse. Like, you get stuff done, and people can rely on you and count on you, and those are all really good things. But for an organization, you know, that is trying to run smoothly, and for you who's, you know, trying to figure out what work life harmony integration balance, whatever you wanna call it, means for you, like, you should be able to step away and things shouldn't come crumbling down. So I think there's kinda, again, two types of people. Some people know that this is them, and so they they take that, you know, load upon themselves and build the seven page handoff doc, and other people actually don't know that they are this person at work. Yeah. They're just doing their job. This is probably the the larger share of people. It's like, oh, yeah. I just like I do my job. And it's like, oh, no. Like, you have an amazing amount of context and, like, importance to this process running well. And so that's almost the the sneakier one, that can be more detrimental to organizations is, you know, the people that don't recognize that they have load bearing. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think one of the one of the assumptions people make or the things we feel is that it's either on the manager or on the load bearing person themselves for kind of hoarding that context. But in reality, it's those individuals haven't been given the ability to use a tool or a process that shares that context out more broadly. So it's not necessarily a person problem as much as it is a process and tool problem, I believe. Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. I think one way, you know, very similar to the exercise we gave you in the first one, go take a look and find who on your team hasn't taken five consecutive days off in the last year. And then think real quickly. What would happen if tomorrow, they started that five days off and you got a request forty eight hours from now? Would there be the infrastructure in place to pick that up, run with it without wait making the client wait, you know, week or so till that person's back in office? And that's something I think a lot of us feel very, very much. Mhmm. Yeah. So that is the load bearing person, our second, most popular or second most fallen upon, pain point. So that one and the one before were all about where knowledge sits. The next one we're gonna go into, called the overloaded lead is a little bit different. And this one is one I think a lot of people, either are living right now or anticipate themselves running into. And the idea here is that headcount alone can solve a volume problem. You know, as companies scale, our problems scale with it. And that's usually something that sounds terrible, but it's something we're working towards. Scale is you know, the growth and scale is the goal we're all going for. And a lot of us will look at that problem and say, hey. You know, we've got x amount growth in in tickets coming in. Why don't we just go to the CFO and ask for five more headcount to, to solve this issue? And while that may seem like the simple fix, just bringing new people into a process isn't necessarily gonna fix it. In a lot of cases, actually, the process works. It is set up well. But as ticket volume grows, time spent on those tickets, goes down and starts dwindling. And the time and care that's gone into your, you know, your customer support starts really, really suffering. Is this one you've seen in clients recently and that has bubbled up more as the AI growth phase is is, you know, really hit its steam? Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And I think there's an element of, like, the complexity that organizations have to deal with on a day to day day to day basis that makes this, like, a more interesting problem than just, like, add more people. I think, like, you can certainly add more people. And, I think, like, you know, with, like I mean, we live in San Francisco. Right? Like, we've all you know, for those of you in around the city or wherever you are, hopefully, you haven't been as barraged by the AI billboards as us, but, like, it's everywhere you go. Right? Everyone's like, okay. Don't add headcount. Like, just throw an agent at the problem. And so I think that's, like, the knee jerk reaction nowadays. But, again, you know, I think a lot of people that I talk to on a day to day basis are a little bit disenchanted with, just slap AI on your problem. Because I think, you know, on the surface, it sounds great, but where the rubber meets the road, a lot of those systems are just built for a single turn resolutions, right, or just one reply, like password reset example. We've all had that demo. But in in reality, like, a lot of the businesses we work with, like, their complexity isn't where's my order. It's my order is three shipping pods on two, you know, cross oceanic, you know, ships, with, like, tons of inventory of different product skews in each. And so it's not always as simple as just, you know, slap AI on something to solve a headcount problem. And, you know, there is a tension too that we can get into a little bit about, like, is it headcount? Is it AI? But, yeah, at a service level, I think that's some of the reactions that I'm seeing. Yeah. That makes sense. And let's let's actually dive into that. I'd love to talk about that tension between headcount and AI, and then separately, how you're seeing people use AI in a way that is actually helping. So kind of a two part question for you here. Yeah. So I think, like, it is a tension. Right? Like, between, like, should I hire more people or should I use AI to augment my workforce? And I think it really just depends on the context of your business and, like, context is another big buzzword that you'll see on billboards if you're driving through San Francisco. Yeah. For some of the folks we talked to, like, you know, offshoring or having a international talent pool strategy is a great way to figure out a solution for their business. But, again, just depends on, like, what is the context of what you're working on. The other thing that could be contextual is, again, based on your business. Some businesses have seasonality. Yeah. And so when we start to think about onboarding or offboarding contractors, there's obviously cost, and time associated with that. And so that's where people, are also thinking about AI, to help smooth that demand. Right? Like, if they have big seasonal peaks of inbound, how can we leverage an AI system to help kind of smooth those peaks so that my workforce can stay more, more even across those time periods. But even then, I think just to drill into context a little bit more, when I talk with folks, something that we're all all thinking about all the time is, like, what's the what's the customer life cycle? Like, what's the customer journey and experience you wanna provide to your customers? Yeah. And so I think being thoughtful about where you're leveraging AI along the different points of your customer journey is, like, really important. Which are the pieces that you as an organization really wanna own? And how can you, again, thoughtfully work with AI, to provide a seamless experience for your customers? And so beyond just like the, hey, here's how you reset your password, How are there handoffs that are appropriate and contextually rich? Right? And how can you deploy AI in a way that helps you focus on again, I think the tagline is to focus on the work that really matters. Yeah. But there is a reality to that. Like, we I did some work with, an education company, and they work with college students, and they offer, you know, educational enrichment programs. And they were looking to leverage AI to help with elements of their peak enrollment cycles. They get tons of volume around, like, you know, when it's time to enroll for classes. And I don't know if you can remember being in college, but it's a time of great ambiguity. Right? Like Yes. Overwhelming opportunity. Right? You can go anywhere, and then overwhelming decision making. You're trying to figure out, like, oh, like, I take this course, I gotta do this job or whatever. And so their organization, they love being able to spend time with their students, but they're so bogged down in a lot of this, like, the process and, like, the the hygiene of running a good business that came with these peak cycles that they, you know, they they couldn't get to all of their their students in the way that they so for them, they were able to, like, look at their life cycle, look at the journey that a student went on. They're able to deploy AI, you know, intentionally, and thoughtfully to handle some of this peak, volume. And, you know, with AI handling, you know, over two thirds of that volume, they were able to spend more time on the phone with students having these really, like, meaningful conversations about, you know, majors, about internship and career opportunities. I think that's a really great example of what it looks like to be thoughtful about how do you deploy AI within your organization. You know, and it's not just throwing more heads at a problem, but it's, you know, thinking about, like, what are the touch points most to you? Like, how can you, again, figure out the balance of hiring versus, like, leveraging AI in those those moments, if that makes sense. Yeah. Absolutely. I think one thing I get for that is there's no cut and dry, you know, right ratio to it. It really is your company dependent and, you know, you just gotta work within your flow to find the right mix. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And one thing I took from that that I I love, and I think I heard this from a client, a couple months ago, just that we especially in speed we're expected to work today Mhmm. You have so many precious few minutes. And you wanna allow your your, your reps and your and your employees to spend those precious minutes where it matters most as you were saying. Mhmm. And that really resonated. I thought it was a very cool way to look at it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's a joy. It's one of the best parts of my job is, like, partnering with, like, awesome organizations to figure out how do you really drive a value and, like, a great experience for them. It's like it's, it's really energizing to work on stuff like that. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, very cool. So that last one is about the present being more than a company can carry than your group of employees can can handle and really do well. This next one, our last of our four archetypes, is more about the past not being to us and how that really affects your operations. This one's called the rebuilder, and it's the idea that close tickets should be able to give an outcome. But that's not really the path that things are going on right now. With how fast we're moving, tickets closed and you move on. If you don't have a way to contextualize and bring out the findings, the learnings, you're gonna honestly curse yourself to repeat that over and over again. I think we've all worked in a place this is one that resonated extremely well with me. When I took the quiz, this was mine Yeah. All three times I practiced it. But the idea is that when you have a customer come to you with a problem, you work it end to end, find a solution, and that's never shared with your team. So, you know, your your colleague next quarter is running into the same issue and has no idea unless they sit right next to you, that you've actually solved the same thing in a creative, beautiful, efficient way. And so it's a way of getting around that, sharing the mistakes that are made, the solutions that were found, and allowing it to become part of your operating principle rather than a one time solution that's, thrown out right after. Mhmm. You know, to continue with our theme, I'd love to just hear where where you've run into some of this. And are there fixes people have run into that, you know, without a heavy lift or, you know, more daily meetings that have allowed allowed them to work around that? Yeah. It's I mean, I think if I could sum it up, it's like, it's not that there's not capable people in your organization. Yes. It's that your tools need to be just as capable as your people. You know? And there's a couple threads we could pull on here. One that maybe we can come back to another time is, like, building organizational memory. And how does how does your platform help you do that? And how can that get its own webinar? Yeah. We can we can add that to the list. But another one is just, you know, businesses, your business is dynamic and complex. Like people launch new products, people acquire new businesses, people, you know, change and, you know, mix up the different offerings that they have. And so it's it's not like the folks that I work with. It's not that they are in it's not like they're unable to automate that process. It's that they end up having to enumerate every single way that they need to automate that process. And so it's a it's a matter of, like, their tools not being, flexible or capable enough to handle the complexity that is their business. So an example of this was, yeah, just a a talent organization, or, yeah, multi multi brand organization. And they had, you know, different teams that worked in similar but slightly different ways. And their system at the time made them just enumerate every single permutation. So if you could think of, like, one parent company, like, five or six sub brands, okay, each of those have different teams. We're talking two customer segments, which customer types. Right? Like, you're starting to do, like, the the math in your head. You're like, that's a lot that's a lot of rules. So you got my head spinning. Right? And so they had, like, a rat's nest of 10,000 triggers and rules. And so, you know, part of exploring front for them was seeing the workflow, capabilities that we presented them and just, like, logical something as simple as workspaces, and smart and dynamic rules that can, you know, keep the same framework, but then almost just like, yeah, keep that same framework, but apply that logic cross brand. Allow them to encode their process in a smart way and not have to keep rebuilding the same thing over and over and over again Yeah. Because they need to tweak one little thing. Yeah. I think there's, you know, one, we all hope to eliminate that phrase of let me find that history for you. Yeah. But more than just the ROI of the time it takes, I think there's a morale effect to this one as well. Mhmm. You know, we burn out something that everyone worries about for themselves and for their organization. And I think this is one that we've all seen be, you know, big leader to that problem because you feel like everything you're doing just needs to be repeated, and you're gonna, frankly, relive that pain over and over again. It's like Groundhog Day. Exactly. An unfunny version of it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Alright. Cool. So I really appreciate all those examples that we've gone through today. I think it really helps bring to life where these four pain points really live. And one thing I'd like to add is that these pain points don't live independently. You may experience multiple yourselves. You may experience multiple within your teams. And I think one thing that we we heard from some of the feedback was they also aren't a permanent state. You know, as you evolve as a company, as you go through seasonality, as you mentioned, all of them can shift and change, and you just need to be cognizant of that and have the tools available to operate within that, you know, within those pain points. And one thing I'd also like to add is it may sound like these are four separate problems, but they really are all symptoms of that problem we we described upfront. The anticipation or the expectation that all contacts can be carried through one tool workflow. And that really is just not how we've seen things work for our clients, our customers, and even for ourselves. And so we're hoping today just to have people realize that they're not alone in these pain points and that there are tools, services, and processes available to help, to help work around that. So for everyone today that's on the webinar that hasn't gone through and done the diagnostic, I highly suggest you go take a quick look at it. It takes about five minutes. It's all situate situational based questions. And once you take that, if you find any anything interesting, if you really resonate or even are surprised by the results you get, highly suggest you reach out to our team. Everyone here lives this day in, day out. You know, none of that was scripted. That's Sam's real life experiences we're discussing today. And so I really want people to have the opportunity to discuss with our team and figure out where they may be able to, to alleviate some of these pains. In today's world, complexity isn't gonna go away. So there's no holding on for, I think, another tool that will just be the silver bullet to fix all of this. But it's something we're just trying to help people be aware and and work around and get them to a better place where they can scale and serve their customers best. So thank you guys all for joining us today. I think this is a really fun discussion. We'll have some follow ups for you with additional materials. But, yeah, again, thank you, Sam. This is a very fun discussion. My pleasure. Look forward to doing it again. Yeah. We've got quite a list of things to talk about from here, so I'm excited to jump in. Alright. Well, thank you, everyone. Have a great rest of your day. Take care.