What the year of "Ikigai" means for my team in 2025

This article was originally published in Top-Tier Support, Front’s Head of Support Kenji Hayward’s LinkedIn newsletter for customer service leaders. For more frontline advice and actionable insights, subscribe today to get them delivered to your inbox every other week.

As 2024 comes to an end, I can’t help but think about the beginning of the year. I centered my team around a clear vision: "Ikigai" (生き甲斐), which is the sweet spot of doing what we love and are good at in a job that helps our customers and the business. 

If we look back at the start of our fiscal year in April, we had just won two silver Stevie Awards for Best Customer Satisfaction Strategy and Customer Service Department of the Year. On cloud nine, we wanted to keep aiming higher by setting ambitious goals around response times, quality, and mission-critical support delivery. So we chose to focus on:

• World-class response times across all of our channels (email and chat)

• 99% Internal Quality Score (IQS)

• 97% CSAT

• 40% chatbot deflection rate

• 0% gross churn

2024 progress

We successfully hit our response times across all channels and were able to maintain 98% CSAT consistently — even hitting 100% CSAT in July and September. Our IQS landed at 98%, just shy of our internal benchmark but still higher than the 88% industry average. We were able to push our AI deflection rate to 53% in Q2. And no customers churned due to the support they received at any time of the year. We’re able to achieve this because of our strong support culture and established workflows and processes that have been refined over the years (and the iterations keep coming as we keep learning). 

Some of the challenges we’re continuing to work through include our internal knowledge base migration. I underestimated the time and effort required for this project and it was taking longer than expected. While we’re very lucky to have our Senior Support Programs Specialist, Karen Nguyen, lead the effort, she’s only one person juggling this big project alongside her other knowledge management duties — it became clear that we needed more help from the team to audit articles.

Another eyeopener was seeing the compounding payoffs after doubling down on AI. I’ve seen the most ROI come out of support operations when they lean into AI assistants like Dust to cut down time spent on data analysis. We reached a 58% deflection rate with Front’s AI features and hit our team AI adoption goal (visualizing the team’s usage every week helped keep us on track). But it also became clear that AI opened up a growing need for more specialized roles, so I created new positions like Support Operations Developer to futureproof for process automation across our tools, data, and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, as with any growing team — we’re looking into expanding global support in APAC and LATAM — I’m always faced with the constant challenge of balancing rapid team growth with our incredibly high-quality standards. This is where clear goals, robust training, and a solid QA process play key roles in building a high-performing team.

2025 outlook

Heading into the new year, bigger won’t necessarily mean better for support. The rise of agentic AI will mean those who focus on upskilling their teams to maximize their impact will have a competitive advantage.

Here’s how I think this will affect support in 2025:

• There will be an increased need to invest in support operations. I see several current support roles evolving into support ops roles in the future, making operations the heartbeat of a streamlined support function.  

• As more complex customer inquiries get handed off to humans, email remains a strong channel to have more thoughtful and detailed conversations. Customer expectations are rising, so empowering support agents during escalations is critical. Agents need the autonomy, tools, and cross-functional support to resolve problems effectively and create positive customer experiences.

For me, I’m most excited to experiment and redefine what’s best-in-class support as it evolves in the age of AI. There’s a big opportunity for AI to unlock voice of customer from customer conversations and improve service quality now that Idiomatic joined Front. I’ve also been working on a new metric that helps measure how effective AI is in serving customers and a framework for operationalizing those insights for better customer experiences. Stay tuned!  

More tools for your support team

• Learn how we instill a customer-first mindset across the org through our “Hop in the Support Queue” program. Senior Customer Support Specialist Phoebe Killick goes through the five-step process of getting non-support teammates in the shoes of a support agent.