Name: Scaling Operations without the Headcount
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T17:16:11.024Z
Duration: 1 h 3 s
Description: Scaling Operations without the Headcount

Transcript for "Scaling Operations without the Headcount": I think we're good to go and go ahead and start here. Welcome, everyone, to scaling operations without the headcount. I'm very excited to, talk about this today. We've got some exciting content for you. We've got a special guest, and, it's gonna be really interesting. So let's go ahead and get started. So what we're gonna go over is just the details of what we're gonna cover today in today's event. I'll give some intros, and, we'll start a conversation with Fireclay Tile, someone who's been successful in expanding and scaling in this dynamic environment. And we'll if there's some time at the end, we'll have a slot for some q and a. So okay. Before we go any further, I wanna introduce our special guest, Annie Acheatel. Welcome, Annie. Thank you so much for joining today. Thank you. You are most welcome. And my name is Eric Phipps. I'm a solution architect here at Front. We're gonna go a little bit more into Annie's background and then Fireclay in a bit. But before we start, I wanted to talk a little bit about Front for those of you that haven't seen Front. And so we'll cover that in a couple slides. Okay. So Front is an AI powered customer operations platform designed for teams that manage complex, high volume customer communication. It brings all your channels, email, chat, SMS, and social into a shared workspace so your team can collaborate behind the scenes while delivering seamless experiences to the customer. One of the biggest challenges teams face today is they try to scale. They are relying on things like distribution lists, Google Groups, where messages go to everyone, but ownership isn't always clear. It often leads to confusion, duplicate replies, or worse, messages slipping through the cracks. Front solves that by turning those shared inboxes into a structured workspace. Every conversation has clear ownership, visibility, and accountability. So your team always knows who's handling, what without losing the collaborative context. On top of that, Front combines the familiarity of an inbox with the structure of a help desk, plus AI to automate the routing, draft responses, and streamline your workflows. So instead of adding more headcount as you grow, Front helps you handle more complexity with the team you already have by improving visibility, collaboration, and efficiency across your entire operation. So now let's take a closer look at, like, what that actually means for those complex scenarios. First, everything starts with bringing your teams into one place. Instead of a conversation living across inboxes or getting forwarded between teams, Front allows support, operations, and even engineering to collaborate directly on the same thread. So you get faster, more accurate responses with all the without all the back and forth. Next, Front gives you complete control over how work gets done. You can build workflows that automatically route conversations based on things like customer type, urgency, or topic, ensuring the right person handles the right issues every time. That removes a lot of the manual triage and guesswork. And finally, you get full visibility into your operation with built in insights and AI powered assistance. Teams can understand what's happening across conversations, respond faster, and continuously improve, performance. So instead of reacting complex to complexity, you embrace complexity, and Front grows with you. So that's a little bit about Front. I wanted to, give that as a grounding moment before we continue on. And now we're gonna talk to Annie about how not only how they use Front, but how they've evolved in this market and scaled themselves. So before we do that, I think it'd be time for a quick intro here. Annie, you, intro yourself, talk a little bit about Fireclay and your role. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Yeah. Eric. Yeah. And thanks for inviting me because I have been drinking the Front Kool Aid for eight years, and I have been trying to push Front onto many people that I know. So, the story that you just told about how Front helps your organization really grow and scale is kind of the story of our partnership. So I'm excited to share. My name is Annie Acheatel, and I lead both client success and the people team at Fire Clay Tiles. So I sit in a little unique of a role, but, ultimately, you know, I am I'm leading strategy around how we approach our stakeholders, and that is both our internal teams as well as our our external stakeholders, our customers. And so a little bit about Fireclay Tile. We are a vertically integrated tile manufacturer. We make and sell our tile. We are US made. We have a factory in California and Washington, and we are the first tile B Corporation. So we care so much about our people, our planet, and our mission is do good by crafting products transparently, collaboratively, and intentionally. So we really approach the business with a little bit different of a mindset. It's not just about sling and tile. It's about helping the client build, you know, either a home, an airport, a hospital, a school that inspires and brings people joy. Although our number one selling tile is white, I am a big color fan. And so it's it's a fun, you know, it's a fun role to be where I'm sitting at a cross section of something really creative, and I get to help people. So today, Fireclay Tile has about 300, almost yeah, 300 teammates. Our support team has actually shrunk, and that's part of the story, to about seven. We have a 150 people in manufacturing who we work very closely with to bring tile to the to the masses. So that's a little bit about me and Fireclay Tile. That's so awesome. Thank you so much for sharing. And as someone who's actually gotten a personal tour from Annie herself, seeing the the showroom here in San Francisco, it's very beautiful. So if you're ever, in the market for it or just wanna see some beautifully made trial, you should check them out. It's really wonderful. So, we've talked a little bit about you and, Fireclay Tile as well. So for people less familiar with your world, what does day to day look like across sales, support, and operations? And what makes it so complex? Yeah. It's hard to describe some days. It's always something different. But we do say that client success is the glue of our organization because we we really do sit at the center of manufacturing, sales, and our customer base. And, as Eric mentioned, he's visited our showroom in San Francisco, but we have a multitude of sales channels. So we're helping residential customers who may be working on a home project in their bathroom. We're working with architects and designers in the trade. We're working with general contractors and tile installers. We are working with strategic accounts, the Starbucks, the Salesforce. And so there's a lot of stuff flying around at the regular. And it could be everything as small as I want a sample to where's my order to I need to change everything to what's my lead time to I received my order. I hate it. So there's there's a lot going on there. And the client success team really is that connective tissue to be able to solve conversations and bridge those those gaps and and make magic happen for our customers. So, Yeah. we're constantly collaborating and coordinating across teams, and that's not just answering questions. You know, that's what that's what a FAQ is for and a and a help center. But, you know, hopefully, that that kind of self-service is available for people to do at when they want. But we we make everything to order, and it's all custom made. And so this is, not really just a off the shelf, get your order tomorrow business. And so we're really kind of in this customer journey with folks for potentially ten to twelve weeks. And, you know, that could be the lifespan of an order while it's in production, and we're collaborating constantly with our sales team, you know, our innovation lab, our warehouse. So we need, you know, means to collaborate with them and tools that kinda support all of those conversations that are coming in from all directions. Yeah. Thank you for sharing. That's that's quite a lot of coordination amongst so many different teams. I think that's really cool that, what you do is building from the start to finish, both from the product standpoint and to the support experience there. It's really cool that you support all that. I can imagine there's a lot of things that could get hung up in that process, and that's not easy to do. And so I'm actually kinda curious. So, like, before Front, at what point did you realize your existing way of working, especially across all these different teams and inboxes wasn't going to scale? Yeah. So we the first obvious realization was our staffing model. We originally had a team that was built based off of just a ratio of how many salespeople do we have, what does their book of business look like, and we're gonna have a ratio of people to people. So as we grew, we knew that that wasn't gonna work because we weren't just gonna keep on hiring our client success team as our sales team grew. We had a really ambitious bump in sales where we decided to just go into the commercial market. I think a lot of people, you know, about ten years ago, knew of Fireclay Tile. We're a forty year old business. We kind of had a a reset, like, seventeen years ago where we changed the way we did our business, where we decided to go direct to consumer. So, you know, we realized that just with the scaling of sales, we weren't gonna be able to manage it all by just hiring people to support those customers. So that was one. And then as we started to grow grow the sales of Fireclay Tile, we realized we wanted to take off some of that, like, presale work from the sales team and give it to the client success team so that they could support the customer early on in that funnel, allowing the sales team to do more revenue generating activities. Because we really work as a partnership. Like, we are we're connected at the hip with the sales team. So to to be able to, like, kind of find something that could allow us to have this handoff from the sales team where they're working with a client to a certain point, and then they can clearly introduce the support team to be able to take it over from that point, the baton is passed. We, you know, we wanted to do that. We wanted to allow that team. And then I think another thing that we realized wasn't gonna help us scale was, you know, we think we're pretty smart, and we are making decisions based off of experience and instinct. But we really had gotten to the level where we we we needed, like, factual insights to be able to make strategy decisions. And so, you know, we would get feedback from people saying, well, it feels like conversations have been, like, heavier this week. Or, you know, well, it feels like we're getting back to clients fast, And we really wanted to be able to know for sure, like, what is what are we where are we? Where are we measuring? Fireclay Tile I'll back it up a minute. Fireclay Tile is a very, like, data driven company. So we we have we have realized the only way to bring this artisan handmade product to the masses is to be supported by technology. So we were really kind of, like, looking for a tool that would do all of that. We, you know, we had this idea, like, of a shared email, basically, but didn't really know what that would entail. You know? And that was important because, actually, at that time, I had a kid. So I was about to, like, leave the role and all of these people that we had been supporting, like, well, who's who's gonna help Caitlin with her big project? Because Annie's gonna be out of the office. So there was there were kind of a lot of things we were we were realizing weren't gonna just support longevity of of sales and the growth of of the team as it became more complex. Yeah. That's it's really amazing to talk about that because I think it's a common scenario that many people start to run into at some point. When you start growing at a certain rate, you will notice that, like, working out of maybe in your case, Gmail or working out of Outlook, whatever the case, when you need to start doing that coordination, it's hard. It's hard to know who's working on what. It's hard to, like, even get that visibility you're talking about from, like, the data standpoint. Like, are we actually underwater right now? How do we even know that's happening? And worst case scenario, you don't wanna find that out because a customer is reaching back out and telling you, like, hey, things are not like how they used to be. Like, it's so slow now. I'm not even sure what's going on. So that's a it's really interesting to hear about how that all started. And especially when someone's leaving, especially when they're having a child, even harder because now you're losing, like, a core keystone of the team, and you have to figure out how to fill that gap. Yeah. We were just like, there was no way email forwarding or someone babysitting someone's else's inbox was going going to work effectively. Yeah. So, yeah, that was that was the Front moment when we we just abandoned what we had been doing, and it it took a little bit of open mindedness, honestly, from the team. It's true. I think everyone in this industry has familiar with email. We all know email. So you get comfortable with it. You get used to working that way. And so sometimes it it can be a little bit diff more different when you do a new model, but I think the benefits long term really outweigh that initial discomfort as most people find out. So it's really cool to see that journey. And that's something I do a lot upfront is to try to help alleviate that as best I can with that transition phase, but. it's usually worth it. Yeah. Though, we talked about this pre thing, and so, like, there was a shift here. And you you came over in the Front, and you you really focused on improving your systems. I think you also brought up a really interesting point that you're data driven, and I think you're underselling it. I I've worked with a lot of people in my time, and you guys are awesome with what you're integrating from a technology standpoint. And so in that post Front world, once you implemented it, like, what were the things you changed in your workflows, and what were the things that Front changed, and, like, what happened in that after state? Yeah. So we we came to Front for this idea of a shared inbox, and that, I think, Mhmm. is, like, the gateway to really what we unlocked. You know, people just had to get comfortable first with the idea that, like, every email was kind of, like, shared and public essentially. But, oh my gosh, that just allowed the team to collaborate and to improve and to get, like, get things done, honestly. So, you know, beyond the shared email inbox, we started utilizing things like tags. You know, like I mentioned, we really wanted to know, like, what are most of our conversations spent doing, or what is you know, where is the work being broken out? So, you know, conversations are tagged with with topics, and then rules are built. So depending on conversation type, it can be routed to a specific team. We also you know, our business has just become a lot more complex since we started Front. We have over 13,000 products that we make and sell, and we have all these different customer types. So, like, I have this powerhouse team of two that works with our VIP customers. And so that is like anybody with this domain and their email address, it's going straight to those people, and they're being able to get that visibility. Another, like, change, I'm just gonna give some small examples that just had a really big impact. for for our team was, like, customer sentiments. So if there was something escalating, you know, a tag would immediately tag, like, upset customer. It would flag a manager. It would move over to the right eyeballs and allow teammates to collaborate. In the email inbox environment upfront, there's this awesome functionality that you can you can talk to each other without sending emails back and forth, and you can, you know, work on a draft together, which is also now you can work on a draft with AI. But there's there's all this collaboration, so so that was really big. On the data. side, you know, we we work in Salesforce and Asana. And at Fireclay Tile, we have the client success team. We have a creative services team, and we have the sales team in front. But the rest of our org, you know, they're working in Gmail and and their work spaces, but we could not do our job without a tight sync of Salesforce and Asana. So we have you know, there are conversations linked based off maybe an order number in an email address. So that automatically creates a hot top hot button at the top where you can direct go and look at that order, or you can kinda hover over and see important details. If it's. something like a customer claim, we you know, it's linked to something in Asana, we can kind of connect that there, really track the collaboration with those outside teams. So that's a little bit about what we started doing and changed in terms of the actual conversation level. We we have gone crazy, like, you know, Eric. I do know. You've got you've you've built so many cool things. Like, Yes. we could talk all day about it. So but I'd love to hear what you're what you're. gonna share. I mean, we we have. And so I think so I'll just say one of the other changes we did was, like, I just wanted to go all in in Front. And so we moved our knowledge base from an outside platform into Front. We moved our website chat into Front. And so it was just this, like, very intentional purpose of, like, we saw what was working with the shared email inbox, and we knew, like, by layering on our other channels and our other resources that we were gonna be able to just They they all work together. Like, we we don't need to go here, here, here, here, here for all these different things. Yeah. So because we brought that all into one space, then we've really been able to, like, utilize Front to the max. We we'll get into some of the AI stuff later, but we, you know, Yeah. we really kinda, like, pushed pushed it. We use some native tools, and then we've we've pushed it and done some things that we've created ourselves, but that's cool. Mhmm. Front allows us to bring our. own our own apps. Yeah. It I think that extensibility is extremely powerful with what you can do. And you covered so many cool features in front. Like, I mean, at the base level, for those in the call that haven't seen this, you can leave internal comments that are only visible from the team in between your email messages. So say, like, a customer messages in and you're not quite sure to do, you can at mention someone else from your team and collaborate about that email live in the thread together. And so now you're not forwarding messages, you're not slacking or sending a Microsoft Teams message, and it's all living in this single pane of glass that makes it just easier to maintain context of things. Oh, I even from oh, what were you gonna say? gonna mention just another kind of like like another hack that has really helped is I mean, anybody met. a customer who just every time they reach out, they send a new email in a new conversation? And I'm like, just. reply in the same one. So the ability to kind of, like, have the visibility and then merge them into one so that you have the whole chain there, then it's so easy to to kind of see the history. And Yeah. it's just one of the one of the quick lifesavers. The the merging feature is it's one of those, like, smaller things. So, like, it's not flashy, but it just makes your day easier. And we even we support that both ways. You may have also had the case where someone resurrects a thread for eternity. So you have this one long email chain that's been going on for months and months and months, and they might be talking about totally different things. You can also split those off into new conversations in Front. So you can kinda keep track of, like, okay. We're talking about something new now. That old thing is solved and finished. And so, like, if new people need to come in, they don't get confused by all that original context. Oh my gosh. So there's it. a lot of flexibility something. today. That's great. There we go. Yeah. It goes both ways. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing all that. I think we've talked about a lot about, like, this collaboration aspect, and it's especially important to you. So, like, just for our viewers now, it's like, where do things typically break down between Teams and sales support operations that you've noticed? And and how did you fix that in Front, like, with changes? Yeah. I mean, I think that, there's there's always the risk of, like, breakdown of process, Mhmm. especially when you're growing and adding new people. So, you know, a lot of the really, like, enablement that we've been able to add in to, like, someone's onboarding training has been utilizing things like templated messages and and giving them tools that allow them to, like, work from day one. We've seen things break, you know, definitely where you're like, oh, did did you respond, or or did they respond? And so one of the biggest, I think, parts about the breakage is really just visibility, like, being able to see where the conversations are, where the bottlenecks are, and who's performing and who's not. You know? So, Yeah. this is a little tangential to the breakdown, but I do feel like one of the most important parts of being able to, like, fix those breaks are having managers that have the visibility to where where are things broken, you know, where are things where are balls getting dropped? When, you. know, when there is, like, a really heated customer conversation or even an obscure one that's like, I don't this is some we get asked this question every, like, five years. Who knows what the answer to this is? We. need we wanna see all of that. And so the the the real the opportunity of, like, fixing things has been the visibility to conversations. You know, I think there's the breakdown of process, but it's the process is only gonna work if you have a high performing team. And, Yeah. you know, they the cool thing for us about Front is, like, everybody can see their own metrics. Like, there's no secret about how am I doing. They could go in and look at their own analytics of how they're doing for the week. And our managers really rely on that for, like, a daily stand up to be able to call out leaders on, you know, who had the most conversations, who has the best response time for the day. And so it's allowed us to kind of coach and bring up maybe lower performers and recognize mates. who have a lot of potential to take on more. So Yeah. so, yeah, I think that it's like the breakdown really starts from the the maybe dysfunction of how some conversation is handled, but the the fix for us has just been truly the visibility for managers to be able to take action, see where the problems. lie, and, you know, build solutions for for the support. Mhmm. Yeah. I think that makes total sense. And I think this really comes back to the fact that, like you said, you're a data driven company. And so when you have access to that data live, you can take action on it immediately and make changes whatever you need. Mhmm. Yeah. And look I mean, Awesome. also, just the ability. to go in and build a rule like myself or a manager or. a lead to do that. I'm not I don't have to call Eric or an account manager, technical account manager, and say, this is what I wanna do, and it takes two weeks to build something, like, talk. play around. Find out. You know? Make a role. Turn it on. See how it works. Turn it off. Apply it to one inbox. See how it works. Turn it off. So I think that's an incredible part is that there's there is a lot that can be just done from the user perspective to improve their own workflow. Yeah. It it it's really powerful when you have, like and what Annie talking about here is our rules engine that allows you to do all these different types of automations. It's kinda like the sky's the limit, and you can make so many different types of rules. And I think what's cool about this is we try our best to enable anyone to handle this, but not only are there rules that happen, like, at the company level and at the workspace where shared work is happening, But you can also do this even for your own personal inbox. And so if you wanna set up an automation or a certain type of thing for your own personal email, that's available to you as well. And so it kinda lets anyone get, like, stakeholdership into how things are managed and run their own personal space and when working as a team. Yeah. And just to kind of close on that for for me, Yeah. know, we we have service level goals. And so whether it's you know, we have some based off of customer type, You know, like I had mentioned, let's just say Starbucks and Salesforce again. You. know, Yeah. we have service level expect expectations that we're trying to meet. And so both in the shared inbox and in your own personal inbox, there's, you know, the ability for a conversation to be resurfaced with a red flag. This customer needs to be heard from ASAP or, you know and to also tag a manager into that being like, this is not being resolved. Oh, it's gonna be it's not being answered. We're gonna now assign it to somebody else who's available because, Yeah. you know, as I mentioned at the visibility perspective, like, being able to look and see all of the in email conversations that are assigned to each of my client success reps to be able to see who has bandwidth Yeah. and and meet those service levels. Yeah. It it's a super important part of that process. And, hey, sometimes you get extra busy or maybe you get a difficult question and your bandwidth starts to shrink. That's what's nice about this. You can see that your time is almost out. You can completely reroute that and assign it to a different person. They have complete context. They can jump right in and help that out. I think even for me sometimes, like, on those days where you get a lot of emails coming in, sometimes it can feel a little overwhelming. You're like, what do I work on? What should I hit first? And so, like, understanding, like, when you have those clear tags added with urgency, what things are gonna expire can help you prioritize and work on each message in a way that makes sense. And then you can almost kinda treat your inbox like a to do list in a way instead of just a bunch of random emails that you're not sure. Is this for me? Am I working on this? Is someone else doing this? It makes it a little bit easier. Yeah. So we we kind of briefly talked a little bit about AI, and there's a lot of amazing things coming out in the industry right now. And so you've also talked about how, like, you're creating your tile from scratch. You're supporting your customers from start to finish, sometimes even with the installation process. I think it's really interesting to hear from you, like, how do you decide what to automate and what to handle with your team, especially when you're dealing with, like, a smaller team to handle this? Yeah. So I will start by saying that there there's an expectation that every teammate who works in client success is using AI daily. And it's it's going to be the way that we work. But we have this premium product and a customer who has premium luxuries type expectations about how they're gonna be serviced. And so that, I think, Yeah. was there was a moment where it was like, how do we bridge these together? And so we are using AI, like I said, regularly, and we're using it as a support mechanism in a lot of different functions. We, first of all, are huge fans of the smart QA in Front. Yeah. And so for people who don't know what that is, essentially, AI is going in and rating conversations based off of a bunch of categories that you can select. So it can be just clarity, grammar, you know, you name it, And it's going to give that conversation a rating. And so that's allowed us to see and coach people, through difficult conversations, kinda find out what went wrong or what went right. But that's taken off a huge lift from, like, a manager perspective and scaling and adding new people to a team, just being able to see how they interact and how their conversations are being handled. I. mentioned that we brought our previous knowledge base into Front. And so now, you know, the compose function, the the copilot function, which, you know, Front will kind of tee up a customer response for us based off of information in our knowledge base. I believe it's also based off of past conversations. It it. works. It was not authorization. Okay. So so we're definitely using that. And we haven't gotten to the point yet where we found the right topic to, like, autopilot, which is auto responding to a customer. I think because we've had all this visibility to the different types of topics and conversations, and we've now seen generated copy by AI, we're starting to identify what what types of customer conversations we could let fly through through. through something that's that's seamlessly responded to. But right now, we still we still stand in the middle because we feel confident that, like, we want that Fireclay service level. But we're we're getting really close, and it's it's something that I'm excited. about with different types of flows and things we can implement in in the inbox. We, you know, we another thing that's, like, really cool for us, I think I mentioned, is in front, we have a fully, like, customizable sidebar that pops out. And so we've been able to use AI in that sidebar to help kind of track how conversations are moving and update different systems that are outside of Front. So if a conversation with a client moves from, let's just say, like, a sample to a quote or, you know, a shipped order to a customer claim, AI is kind of, like, tagging and pushing that out to our other systems. So we've like I said, it is it is on the regular. I think that it's cool because every day, I kinda feel like we discover something new in the platform. Yeah. But I think because we've decided to just bring everything together under Front, we're gonna be able to harness the AI functionality to the max. I think these are all really great points. And I think you're you're talking about how, like, you're going through these stages of, like, you're adding more data, you're giving more knowledge sources. And right now, you're having, like, suggested, replies generated for you. And, eventually, like, you're moving into possibility, like, maybe for these certain scenarios, these can be handled without an agent. And I think that's a common thing that's happening across the industry, and everyone is figuring out what is automatable and what is, like, more let's just help out our team and help them get to that response a little bit faster. So, like, it's ingrained at different levels, and I think it's kinda like a you start with, a a crawl, walk, and then a run. And we're all figuring that along the way. But I've seen the plug in that you've created, and it's really cool, the type of integration of data that you're bringing in the Front and sending out. So that's it's really interesting to hear, especially, like, I agree with you. AI is changing everything, and it's it can be a huge help. And it lets you know that, like, it doesn't matter, like, what business you are. You can still have this integrated into your workflows to help your team out. Yeah. Ultimately, it's just helping us do our job better and faster. It's not Yeah. for for Fireclay Tile, it's it's not gonna take away a position because it's you know, we still have contractors, customers who call they just want a human voice to be on the phone with them, to talk them through what's happening in a job site, to talk them through, Yeah. you know, details that that do matter. And some of it, like I said, like, we are a creative industry. So it's it can be you know, people could be calling Fireclay Tile for our design advice, and that's not gonna necessarily. come from replacing us with AI. So Of course. I mean, it it excels in those moments. Like, okay. Maybe we wanna look at our catalog or a database of of how we handle certain situations. But, like, when you're actually giving, like, design advice, like, that requires that spark of human ingenuity. And so, like, that makes total sense that you're combining both sides of that because sometimes it's just it's up to the person's taste. Yeah. Yeah. It's really a conversation super great. you come to Fireclay Tile. So we are we. we listen to kind of the the desires, the needs of a customer similar to any kind of process, but we have this whole engine that that helps bring it to life. But it it takes it takes a lot of collaboration. So It sure does. And I I think there's a lot of trial and error there too. And so it's like that's why it's so special that you're here kinda sharing your experiences to everyone that's watching. It's a it's a big help for those that haven't tried this yet, and maybe you can help others avoid some of those stumbles along the way. And so that I think that's a great transition here. I think if you were advising an operations leader trying to scale today, what would you focus on first? So I feel like I've said this word probably 50 times in this last forty five minutes, but it starts. with it starts with visibility. So, Yeah. like, if you don't know where you've been, what what the people are of your team are doing, what the customers are saying, you're you can be lost, and you could be making decisions that are actually going against what's good for you. So, you know, we I encourage other leaders, like, get that visibility so you can make an informed choice. Get that visibility so that you can really identify from a people perspective who are your strong performers. From a client perspective, you know, where where are there process improvements that can be made? Because a customer keeps experiencing x y z. And so. if you have the visibility to all of your customer insights and you don't have to read every single email or rely on, well, this is what people think the customers are, like, saying commonly. You don't have to rely on on that either. So I think just get get the data. Find out, you. know, where where the numbers are, what's affecting them. And if you can't really see that, then you can't really fix fix the work. So that that would be my biggest push is just, you know, get the visibility, get the transparency. It's going to greatly benefit the team and the customer. If. that I mentioned before that there was, like, a little hesitation or a little, like, learning curve when we got into the shared email inbox. And that's been, Yep. like I think by human nature, we we all take, like, pride and ownership in our own work. And some of that comes with maybe a little protectionism around, like, I don't want someone watching me what I'm doing. But the benefit of having just these transparent conversations far outweighs you know, it's been really cool to see, you know, like, teammates help each other through customer issues. It's been really neat to see us make changes for the organization. Like, this product keeps breaking and shipping. But like I said, we make 13,000 products. So to be able to know it's that one product, I have to have data. for that. So, you know, we'll be like, this support team made a suggest suggestion that we need to pack this differently because they're seeing the same thing over and over again. That's a huge impact. And it's really, like, it's come full circle now. So the client success team has so much ownership over the process that, you know, as a leader, my my role is just about supporting people and the customer. And now they're able to fix and solve problems because they have that visibility too. I think that's that's super cool to, one, see how your team is now helping drive certain changes because they're seeing it happen, and those trends are being generated. And I think you brought up a really interesting point about, like, that initial switch to, like, a shared space. We do kinda get used to using private inboxes, and there's pride in that. And I always tell people, think about it this way. You can still have pride in your work, but now, like, your team can see you shine. alongside themselves. And so, like, you're, like, in it together. And I know it's, like, on an online tech platform, but, like, I tell people, this is your team. This is your group. You're working together for that common goal. So if they're in the conversation with you, just think of it like you're in a room together around the table working through everything that's hitting you and, like, you're in it and you're solving it together. And so there's still pride there. It's just a little different. Yeah. Totally. I mean, it's created tons of opportunities for people to celebrate each other where because you can like Eric mentioned, there can be multiple people in a conversation now. It's not just one on one. So if somebody's at mentioned, they're gonna see that conversation unless they opt out of it. But, know, we've had times where we have one rep working on it, and then it moves to another rep. And then, you know, some raving about the support. And then that other rep who originally was on it but not as active anymore, they're they saw that whole thing. So then they take that conversation, and they share it in Slack, and they shout out their teammate who did this amazing job resolving, you know, a tile emergency. And, Yeah. you know, it's been cool to because it's given that the the users up front the ability to, you know, shout out each other and celebrate the wins and share what's. working when. it's working. That's that's yeah. That's super cool. I'm gonna challenge you with a question now. I know you talked about, like, the biggest impact you can make is a change with visibility and collaboration. But, like, let's say someone on this call doesn't have as much time, and they're trying to see what can they get the most impact in the shortest amount of time. Like, let's say, thirty days. What would be the first thing you would do? That is there's ways to go with that. Yeah. I know. A lot of ways to go with that. So, I mean, if you were already a Front customer or you were thinking about it and there was one thing to do, it would just be, you know, building out the templated message library so that that is a very quick, accessible way to have, like, the same message, the same brand, the same support, you know, reduce response times, and get everybody aligned with the same type of process. Process. Like, I think when you start to scale, right, you have those you have you that is a breaking point is when something, Yeah. you know, does and and, you know, to have, like, an SOP outside of somewhere some system, like, you really can build that all through through messaging, through through template messages. So that would probably be, like, one, and I'm gonna give another one because I think enough. as a This is your stage. not as someone who's like, I I don't operate in the inbox at with as much frequency as I used to. Mhmm. So for me, like, I think the the smallest change with big big impact is, like, find someone on the team who's just interested in this, who's interested in, like, learning and building, and maybe they you know, get to know your team. And so what you can do is you can find these frontline folks who can can be your partner in building and playing around with the technology, and you don't have to do it all. Like, they sometimes are gonna know better what's gonna help their work. And so it's been fun, like, for me to find people who have these special interests and partner with them and allow them to kinda, like, develop their role, develop the system, and build together, which really, like, Mhmm. makes the ownership story a reality for people at Fireclay Tile. So, you know, I could not we could not grow without the people who are on the front lines, you know, the people who are taking the phone calls and finding the people who are interested in AI and tech and giving them a piece of the ownership has been a huge part of the reasons why we're successful. Yeah. That's such incredible advice. I I even think about it in our case. Like, I've got many different coworkers that have their own unique interests, and they kind of just stepped up to help things. Like, I've got certain coworkers that love to maintain our demo environment, and they they handle that. And that work they're doing helps everyone here upfront. And so it goes to show you that, like, if you find the passions that your team has, Yeah. they can, like, really push into it, and it elevates everyone else. Yeah. Because, like, ultimately, client success is about is like a people industry. You know? It is Yeah. it is about, it it could not be it is the most people oriented industry. And so we we have to do this as a team. Like, we are we are never gonna achieve our $100,000,000 revenue goals as unique individuals. So Yeah. being able to kind of identify the people who have those unique passions and interests, and then that's a thread. And then it helps to build the fabric of of the team and support the wheels of Fireclay Tile, which then support the broader stakeholders of our customers and homeowners and yeah. So that's definitely important to us. Yeah. That's so cool. Okay. Well, we have about ten minutes left in this call. I figured we'd leave a little bit of time for maybe some q and a. If anyone in the chat would like to ask some questions, we'd we'd be happy to answer. And let's just let's see see if there's anything there. Let just get my windows organized. I've got so many things pulled up. Sometimes you have a chatty group, sometimes you don't. Yeah. And that's totally okay. If there is if there's no other questions, we're happy to give you some time back. We actually have a few. questions in the chat here. Yeah. Perfect. Sorry. I don't know if you can see them, Eric. But, so, Rachel, I agree with everything you said about visibility, coordination, streamlining. We love Front, and it has kept us sane. But sometimes it seems like there are too many cooks in the kitchen with people brought into the comments, and there's too much noise. How have you balanced that out to ensure the right balance and that front collaboration leads to maximized efficiency rather than leading to too many comments and long run on chains. Yeah. I've seen that happen. I know that can happen. One of the well, I think one of the most important parts upfront, right, is, like, there is the ownership. So you know who's assigned a conversation and who needs to be on the conversation. So unsubscribe, baby. That is, you know, that's the option. I think that we we highly encourage unsubscribing from conversations so that a personal inbox just doesn't become overwhelmed by the collaborative efforts. And and I I I believe we're on the, like, verge of doing some more automation on that so that it doesn't have to be a click. But we we do encourage that for almost all conversations once the ownership of it has been identified and resolved. Yeah. I think that's a a great piece of advice there. And something I've noticed on my end too is I think sometimes when you come into this shared space, you're first of I was like, wow. Everyone should be involved. Everyone should collaborate. And so sometimes the tendency is to over, notify people and use rules to notify people that maybe don't need to. And so sometimes trying to find the balance of, like, only notify those that truly need it or at mention people can kinda help you find that balance. Yeah. We we did run into that also in the beginning where, you know, someone might want just want feedback or help on something. So they'd they'd tag, like, three people. And it's like. so that some of that was just outlining this is how we use Front, and you don't need to, you know, escalate or tag three people at one time. You know, if you're gonna start with one and kinda outline how do you how do you use Front. I think that was kind of important. part of our journey was we did, at some point, figure out we needed to kind of codify how we used it, because there is a lot of ways to personalize the way you work. But as a team in Box, we definitely were like, we operate in this way. Awesome. We I I don't think we're gonna be able to get to all of these, so I'm trying to see what would be the best. David had a question. Annie, I believe I heard you mention your success team answers phone calls as well. How does your success team balance and handle them among the email inquiries? Also, is your phone system integrated with Front in any way? They use Dialpad with Front. Oh, I'm so glad you used Dialpad with Front. We do as well. And the the most effective way is really through, like, utilizing the hotspots of your day. Right? I think that's that's the cool thing is you can kinda see, like, when are we getting the most conversations at this time on this day? And so we definitely have some some staffing models to be able to help, like, surges of conversations. We we have a couple roles in the inbox, which okay. This is as kinda Eric I was telling Eric, we you know, if you get to know your people and what they like to do, you can you can kind of identify things. So I have, like, an expediter, and this person kind of is doing a little extra air traffic control. So they're able to see things, like, if something in a conversation if if a customer replies and it's urgent because we have urgent tags and we have urgent inboxes, they can they can help triage and move things around in the inbox. I would say, like, our phone calls are not extremely long in client success. You know, our average phone call is probably between, like, four and eight minutes. But, being able to have those types of conversations tracked to have an expediter to kind of triage if someone gets taken offline for a reason. You know? It all really comes back to that shared workspace to be able to to use a team model. Thank you, Annie. Sorry. Just scrolling through here. Do you have any tips on training clients to email the shared inbox address instead of their direct contact if moving from assigned account managers to a shared inbox? We have something. So we the client success team, everybody knows us by the support at Fireclay Tile email in, and that that is separate. You know? But what has it been now? Like, Eric, a year and a half or a year since we brought our sales team into Front? You know, Yeah. like, It's about like that. Yeah. you know, we really did want those salespeople to be able to maintain their identity for their accounts and to not to not water that down in any way, shape, or form. We're account based selling to sales team. We wanna be able to service those people. So we've set up some kind of, like, mirrors that allow inboxes to kind of flow through shared email inboxes, but then to be able to be, like, replying from your personal in email. So that is, like, the hybrid approach. That is where we brought Eric in because we were like, we really want people to be able to use, like, the sales team to retain [email protected], but we want to harness the shared email environment. So their front did allow for us to do some kind of mirroring rules that allowed conversations to flow and kinda be sorted while retaining that individual email address and and getting the the upside of the shared workspace. Yeah. I think it's a great, example of this. And so for those that are curious, basically, Front has a special role you can enable at the company level, and you can give it conditions like, if this is a customer or if it has something from this domain, what it will do is move it out of the person's personal inbox into a shared space and then just automatically reassign it back to them. So now you can use all those collaborative features, but you still have that personal touch if that's what you need. Yeah. I think that, you know, the sales team has found insane value, you know, and retained that really personal touch. But we've been able to use everything in Front for them to to enhance their role. That's awesome. Okay. And we have maybe time for one more. Does scaling operations via AI tooling typically include changes to operational procedure or ownership of processes? How do you think about balancing scaling via tooling when it can require such changes? Okay. A lot there. So That's a good question. I wish I could, like, read that. I think it is somewhere in the chat. So the question is about kind of scaling and then how it kind of becomes a reality in the operations world, how how the AI support of scaling has affected the like, an operational change? I think they're also asking, does the addition of AI have to require you to change your processes as well? Like, so how do you devote the right time to making those changes to support AI in your workflow as well? I think if I heard that correctly. Yeah. I think that the using the using AI for us in a vacuum with the customer is is fine. Like, it allows one person to be more effective, but that's not what has is going to, like, push the operations of the company at large. So I think with everything that we've done, we've we do the we do a lot of sharing around what we're doing with AI so that whatever we're building isn't really happening in a silo because we may be working on something that we decide needs to bring in a team that isn't in Front. They may be not even be on the computer much. Maybe it's a warehouse team. So we do a lot of AI skill sharing because we had to break down those, like, silos to be able to help other teams kind of catch up maybe with some of the changes we've made. I don't know. I don't know if that's that answers it. But I think that's great. We can follow-up afterwards think with the if there's more details needed. cool. awesome. Well, thank you so much everyone for joining today. And once again, Annie, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It's been awesome having you. Thank you, Eric. I'd have a lot of fun, and it's been Front is really special to me. And I, you know, I joined the customer advisory board last year. I cannot wait to just continue to play around and grow the organization with in partnership with you. That's awesome. Thank you so much. Okay.