Incredible Personalization Starts with Incredible Customization at Feastables

If you don’t know who MrBeast is, the kids in your life definitely do. As the world’s biggest YouTube influencer, he’s created a brand that’s often over the top but always fun.

MrBeast has spread far beyond YouTube, creating other brands such as Feastables, a better-for-you snack brand. We sell chocolate bars, cookies, and plant-based gummies made from organic ingredients you can actually pronounce. Everything about Feastables mirrors the MrBeast brand. He has more than 200 million subscribers, and the team behind MrBeast genuinely cares about their subscribers and their experience when watching his videos and engaging with the brand. The Feastables team has to create that same level of care. 

Feastables isn’t just a better-for-you snack brand. Yes, that is one pillar, but the team also highly values the digital experience. When you go to the website, what are you experiencing? Is it fun? Is it exemplifying the MrBeast brand voice? When you’re looking at the packaging, does that exemplify the MrBeast brand? 

I was the company’s fourth employee, tasked with creating customer experience from the ground up. Authentic CX is my bread and butter, and I’ve spent 15+ years working in environments like banks, e-commerce, and everything in between. I love getting into the weeds of customer success, product support, order support, community management, and digital experience. I can also dig into retention and customer lifecycle. If you need something done, I got you.

We Got Off to a Rocky Start with Our First CX Platform

Feastables went live in January 2022. After launch, I began to learn so much about our customers and hatched all sorts of ideas I couldn’t wait to implement. It quickly became clear that the CX platform we had chosen wasn’t a good fit. Sure, it could handle our weekly ticket volume, but it made basic tasks more complicated than necessary for our agents. Over several weeks, the complaints began to pour in:

• The process of receiving and answering messages from various channels was disorganized, which made it challenging for agents to get context or track down customer details.
• We were getting thousands upon thousands of tickets for multiple types of teams, and the platform didn’t have good tagging tools to keep track of each customer’s journey.
• Poor SMS and chatbot integrations created confusion for our agents and led to an inconsistent customer experience.

Imagine 32 stressed-out agents trying to answer 30,000 to 40,000 tickets per week—and dealing with these issues on top of that. And this was just the beginning! I made it a top priority to create a cleaner environment to handle our channels. I also wanted to streamline the tech stack, allowing all integrations to work with each other across different channels.

So, the hunt for a new platform began. I have two requirements when adding new tools to my stack:

1. I need the space to grow and explore with lots of features, including access to customizations far beyond out-of-the-box features. 
2. I need partners who can come along for the ride as I develop ambitious plans and ideas.

Zendesk offered the basics, but it felt a little outdated. I wanted something cool, hip, and connected. Community is essential to our brand, and we needed to find a better fit to connect more easily with our customer community. Kustomer emerged as a great option that was sleek, modern, and focused on community. Compared to many other companies that seemed stuck in their ways, they had a great roadmap and continue building their product based on partner feedback. And to be honest, they seemed really dope.

That’s why we migrated from our initial CX platform to Kustomer just three months after our launch. And then things really took off.

Kustomer + Feastables = the Dream Team

Almost a year after adopting Kustomer, we’ve created a much better agent experience while evolving our customer experience. We’ve reduced our weekly volume to roughly 5,000 tickets or less, mainly with the help of SMS integrations. And because of this, we’ve reduced the number of agents from 32 to five. 

Kustomer has worked with us to build those integrations, even if we don’t use Kustomer tools (like our chatbot, for example). We put our custom chatbot on the web and Kustomer’s SMS channel, creating the integration via custom workflows. We’ve also centralized communications for all of our channels. Integrations allow us to automate more and increase our self-service options, making the agent experience much smoother and giving them a holistic picture of each customer journey. This information enables them to provide a humanized experience and more personalized interactions, which are so important to the Feastables vision of CX.

Creating separate metrics is important because much of the team is now in different time zones. Setting up appropriate permissions for respective teams is foundational to what we’re trying to do, too. We can create multiple teams and still give everybody visibility and their own metrics. It’s very easy to see everybody’s activities while limiting the exposure of sensitive information.

Kustomer is all about improving and automating existing workflows and managing the customization a business needs. They never ask, “How can we put you in our box?” but instead, “How can we make the box bigger to accommodate your existing workflows?”

My favorite feature is the customization of tags. This often gets overlooked in CX, but I love that I can get so meta between categories, subcategories, and outcomes. If I have to make a business case to leadership teams for more resources, for example, I can easily refer to that granular data. I can also weigh in on R&D, marketing, retail requests, and other areas of the business with more conviction and data about customer sentiment and behavior to back me up.

All this automation and customization leads to less tech spend overall because we need fewer platforms to do the job. It also helps streamline the agent experience. When agents spend less time navigating between platforms, they can spend more time crafting an authentic brand voice.

What more could you want from a CX platform?

A Platform That Grows with Our Brand

I come from the world of B2B, product support, and tiered customer service, and having a holistic vision of CX is vital to offer the best support to all customers important to me. Thankfully, Kustomer feels the same way, and they go above and beyond to provide the tools you need.

Kustomer isn’t a one-size-fits-all platform, but it can talk to many different types of support teams. It doesn’t have to be for industries like e-commerce or food and bev, either—it could be for healthcare, travel, and everything in between.

As you start a business, you’ll have lots of platforms to choose from. But there’s a difference between what you think you might need at the onset and what you need in two months, let alone a year. The best thing you can do is start with a platform that can scale alongside your business. For me, that tool has been Kustomer. It's transformed CX operations at Feastables, and there’s still much more to do.

Let’s f*cking go!