About– Rick Sanchez, Customer Support Division Leader at Kajabi“Our partnership with Forethought and the data it provides us with has really enabled us to hone in on what our customers are asking for. Their platform gives us the ability to take apart every single ticket, look for trends, and find new ways to help our customers succeed. This insight into what our customers are asking for is a huge benefit.”
Helping People Turn Knowledge and Creativity into Income
Kajabi was founded in 2010 to help people around the world leverage their skills and knowledge to create marketable services. The company was doing well—and then the pandemic struck. With businesses and employers shuttered, thousands of people began reassessing their skills and their dreams, looking for new ways to support themselves and their families, and business started pouring in.
Through its offices in the U.S., the Philippines, and Trinidad Tobago, the company enables these new “knowledge entrepreneurs” to build websites, create training or coaching courses, manage new customers, and collect online payments. In short, it provides them with all the marketing tools and templates they need to turn their knowledge into income. The challenge they faced was that Kajabi’s ability to deliver top-notch services was exceeded by the number of new customers asking for them.
ChallengesMeet Increased Service Demand While Improving Staff Morale
Kajabi knew within months of the onset of the pandemic that it had to scale quickly and strategically. It explored various customer support AI products and, after much research, chose Forethought. At the time, Kajabi had a support staff of about 150 and was determined to maintain a very high level of service even as it grew. Little did it imagine that even as it scaled to meet its growing business, Forethought would enable it to maintain its high level of customer support, reduce its ticket backlog, and keep its agents motivated and enthusiastic as they managed increased customer demand.
“Our long-range strategy is to equip our customers with very smart self-help tools,” says Rick Sanchez, who leads Kajabi’s customer support division. “We knew we wanted to use AI to make the process of answering customer queries seamless and intuitive for both end users and our support team.” But as requests for trials, questions from subscribers—and customer wait times—ballooned, both customers and staff grew increasingly frustrated. “It really hit our support folks hard,” Sanchez recalls.
SolutionHuman-Centered, AI-Enabled Customer Support
Soon after implementing Forethought, Kajabi began to see results. With Triage, Kajabi began tagging support tickets by their Category and SubCategory fields. This decreased the amount of manual work needed from agents. Forethought Solve, an AI-powered virtual agent, began deflecting customer inquiries directly to existing knowledge base articles so they could answer their questions without the need for Kajabi support staff assistance. Solve also began developing workflows to help Kajabi tailor support experiences for specific customer segments.
With Solve in place, the company soon saw a jump of more than 10% in its deflection rate. This year, Kajabi has used Solve to deflect 18-20% of the nearly 80,000 queries it has received. It is also using Solve Email, enabling customers to self-serve via the Kajabi email channel. This year, Kajabi has achieved a self-serve rate of 8.4% across more than 100,000 emails.
– Rick Sanchez, Customer Support Division Leader at Kajabi“We average about a thousand tickets per day. So right off the bat Forethought took 100 tickets each day out of the queue. That was a very big deal for us, and a big relief for our staff.”
Forethought has also helped Kajabi address the larger issue of scaled growth. Most customer support departments, unlike marketing and sales, are not money makers. Typically, they end up on the expensive side of the ledger. Kajabi needed a way to meet rapidly increasing demand without requesting more and more resources. Rather than simply throwing more headcount at the problem, Sanchez and his team found ways to increase the number of self-service tickets, thereby enabling Kajabi to allocate resources to other projects.
Another major benefit is that, in order to increase its ability to enable customers to perform self-service, Forethought has increased Kajabi’s ability to understand its customer base.
Testimonial Video– Rick Sanchez, Customer Support Division Leader at Kajabi“Our partnership with Forethought and the data it provides us with has really enabled us to hone in on what our customers are asking for. Their platform gives us the ability to take apart every single ticket, look for trends, and find new ways to help our customers succeed. This insight into what our customers are asking for is a huge benefit.”
Wait Times Shrink and Customer Knowledge Grows
With Solve deflecting 18-20% of the nearly 80,000 queries Kajabi receives, customers can get answers to their inquiries faster without having to wait for an agent to manually respond back to their inquiry. Kajabi’s 8.4% self-serve rate across over 100,000 emails enables customers to self-serve with Solve Email.
– Jared Loman, Vice President of Customer Experience at Kajabi.“Our contact rate is the lowest it’s been in history, it’s never been lower, even pre-pandemic. There are a few different factors that play into this, and Forethought is one of the major components of this. The reality is this is all based on a broad self service strategy.”
At a higher level, Sanchez sees one of the greater benefits of working with Forethought is that he feels like he’s found a thought partner. “If we’d gone with a provider that had been around for a decade or two, we would have been dealing with almost a different mindset. Like us, Forethought is a SaaS company, so it just kind of understands how our brains work. We get to bounce ideas off each other and, honestly, this is the only way we would have it. We didn’t want a provider to respond with, ‘Send something over, we’ll review it, and get back to you in a month or so.’ That wouldn’t have worked.” Loman agrees that he “loves the idea of partnering with a business who I could actually have a true partnership with. If we were going to do this as a customer-centric company, we needed to do this right”.
FutureWorking with Like-minded Partners
For Kajabi, it’s very important to work with partners that have a vision of how AI can optimize its business, and that has the creativity and flexibility to see what Kajabi is trying to do. While reflecting back on why Loman chose Forethought, he recalls “it was the partnership that Forethought offers. Above all, that was the most compelling. I wanted to work with people that I liked.” Sanchez agrees that, “as a customer-service company ourselves, it’s just been very rewarding to find a company like Forethought, a company that aligns with us on customer centricity, and that treats us the way we treat our own customers.”
– Jared Loman, Vice President of Customer Experience at Kajabi.“I am overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the capabilities of what Forethought, AI, and machine learning can do for our customers. I want to empower our customers in every way we possibly can with this technology to make their experience better. By utilizing technology to our advantage, we actually craft a much better customer experience.”
