The #1 Digital Tipping Software for Hospitality
Kickfin is the nation’s largest provider of instant, cashless tip payments. Restaurants, bars, and hotels use Kickfin to digitally accept, calculate and distribute tips to their employees in real time. By removing cash from the tip payment process, businesses can focus on delighting their customers — while maximizing the earning potential of their people.
Spearheading Kickfin’s customer support operations is Larisa Thomas, VP of Operations at Kickfin. Since Larisa joined Kickfin two years ago, she’s built the company’s customer operations function from the ground up. The team is responsible for the full implementation of Kickfin’s platform and continued support throughout the customer lifecycle.
Challenges– Larisa Thomas, VP of OperationsAs a startup, obviously we want to balance scaling with managing our expenses and preserving our runway as much as possible so that we can really focus on growing in a healthy and sustainable way.
Scaling without Extra Headcount
With Kickfin serving the restaurant and hospitality industries, many of their customers work very late hours. Many support inquiries often come in after restaurants or bars close, which is well past typical working hours. Kickfin’s customers expect a quick resolution to any issue they may have so they can leave their shift with their tips in their bank accounts.
Providing After Hours Support
Before Forethought, Kickfin didn’t have automation tools to help its customers self-serve. This meant that a customer support representative had to work an overnight shift to be sure customer inquiries were handled in a timely manner. Not only was it very difficult to find representatives to staff the overnight shifts, but if they canceled at the last minute due to illness, it was almost impossible to find someone to cover their shift.
– Larisa Thomas, VP of OperationsWe’ve got folks trying to use Kickfin at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning to pay out their employees. I wanted to be able to find a way to provide 24-hour customer service without needing to have an agent on 24 hours a day. Part of my goal of being able to scale customer support and provide support to a non-traditional customer base was looking for tools like Forethought that would help me provide a high level of support regardless of the time of day.
Training New Team Members
As the support team at Kickfin grew, it became difficult to ensure new reps were equipped with the right resources to resolve customer inquiries quickly and accurately. Onboarding new reps to know where to find answers within support documentation was a significant lift for support leadership and more senior agents responsible for training new reps.
SolutionNow, Kickfin uses Forethought, the leading generative AI for customer support automation, to delight its customers and agents. With Solve, Assist, and Triage, Forethought helps Kickfin provide best-in-class customer and agent experiences at scale.
Self-Service with Empathetic Responses
With Forethought Solve, powered by SupportGPT™, Kickfin now provides self-service customer support to its customers 24/7.
By building intricate workflows with ease, Kickfin has given its Solve widget a name and ensures its responses match the tone of the Kickfin brand. Analytics within Solve have allowed the support team to track the effectiveness of individual workflows and easily adjust them based on performance.
Kickfin’s widget is both on its public website and password-protected customer support portal. Depending on where a customer interacts with the widget, it will serve up the appropriate level of information from Kickfin’s knowledge base.
With Solve powered by SupportGPT, Forethought’s generative AI engine, Kickfin creates self-serve, human-like support experiences. SupportGPT trains on Large Language Models, as well as data from Kickfin’s own support team to provide more accurate responses to its customers’ inquiries. The chat widget automatically picks up on customer intent and responds to inquiries with empathetic responses, creating a better experience for customers.
– Larisa Thomas, VP of OperationsWith Solve powered by SupportGPT, we can address the needs of our customers in a way that is authentic and makes them feel heard—without needing to staff agents at 3 in the morning. The responses are realistic, human, and delightful, which has resulted in a deeper level of satisfaction and engagement from our customers.
Assisting Agents
With Assist, agents are empowered to search any knowledge base or website right within Salesforce (Kickfin’s help desk), and get relevant, AI-powered answers. Agents resolve cases faster and more accurately with relevant macros, past tickets, and knowledge articles at their fingertips.
– Larisa Thomas, VP of OperationsAssist helps put more information in agents’ hands, which has been incredibly time-saving, useful, and a big morale booster for the support team. Assist allows agents to work more effectively by putting the right information in their hands.
Accurately Detecting Sentiment
Triage determines the sentiment of the support inquiries received by Kickfin, empowering agents with personalized classifiers to understand these inquiries at scale. When reviewing case history, Kickfin’s support leadership team easily understands which customers are happiest and which are most unhappy overall with accurate sentiment tags.
ResultsWith Solve powered by SupportGPT, Assist, and Triage, Kickfin provides self-serve options to its customers at scale.
Kickfin has achieved a 72% self-serve rate since implementing Solve. Kickfin’s customers receive empathetic and human-like responses to their support inquiries 24/7—without human intervention. This has delighted customers and alleviated the burden of trying to staff an overnight shift for the support leadership team.
Assist helps new agents ramp up faster by equipping them with the right resources to resolve customer inquiries faster and more accurately by serving up the correct information into their help desk.
With Triage, customer sentiment has been predicted with 96% accuracy, allowing for confidence in decision making when evaluating customer happiness.
- 72% self-serve rate
- +2,000 chat deflections
- 96% accuracy in sentiment predictions
Looking Ahead
Looking ahead, Kickfin is excited about the future of generative AI in customer support. The team has been impressed with SupportGPT’s capabilities in powering Solve, and is looking forward to future innovations with SupportGPT in the support organization.
– Larisa Thomas, VP of OperationsIt’s not just that generative AI is the trendy thing to do, it’s the actual functionality and value it provides that has me so excited. I can’t wait to see what future product innovations can do for our business.
