At a Glance

Hearth Display is an all-in-one system that helps families reduce the mental load and build independent kids. It brings together a shared calendar, routines, Lists, meal planning, and Hearth Helper — an AI-powered assistant there to help with family organization.

Who is Beunka Hollimon?

Meet Beunka Hollimon, Manager of Customer Experience at Hearth Display.

About Hearth Display

Hearth Display is a centralized touchscreen that turns tracking daily routines and family goals into a shared responsibility, with beautiful, easy-to-use tools engineered to make the chaotic less complicated.

Beunka’s CX Journey

Beunka’s experience in customer service actually began where you might expect, a call center. But she didn’t take long to venture into something a little different, startups, beginning with Airtable.

Starting as a contractor for the tier one customer experience department, she continued to move around to different startups like HubSpot and MuckRack, always working in the customer experience space. And then, she finally made it to Hearth.

Over the next three years, Beunka went from Customer Experience Lead to Manager of Customer Experience, working with not only the tech part of the department, but being able to influence how the CX team operates. In fact, Beunka has been rebuilding the customer experience the way she knows it can help the customers and the team.

The CX Team at Hearth Display

Overall, the entire team at Hearth Display is quite small, and they do lean into AI as much as possible. On top of that, the entire team is remote, with people located in the US and elsewhere around the world. In fact, the entire company at Hearth is remote, ever since the beginning.

That doesn’t always mean that it’s easy. There’s no location to check into, but with everyone remote and located in different parts of the world, managing time zones and making sure all of the operational processes are in place because of those time zones can be difficult. By making sure that there’s always someone available to take care of customer service needs it makes everything run much more smoothly.

Hiring New Team Members

Hiring someone new into the team means looking at one important skill, problem solving. With the entire team being remote and in different time zones it’s important that each member can handle situations as they arise, on their own. Making sure everyone has good judgement and knows when and how to move forward or when to pause and wait is essential.

Next? Empathy. After all, the company deals with families who don’t have a lot of time, who need assistance. And that means it’s important to be kind and to really look for as many ways to help as possible. That also leads into the final part, putting the customer first.

When working with customers you always have to make sure that you focus on what’s best for them.

So, hiring a new team member means asking about all of those things and seeing the passion that they have for helping customers and following through on each of these.

Training the Team

Once they’ve found new team members, it’s time to train them. And at Hearth Display the training process is very hands-on. Beunka herself already knows she’s a visual person, but she also knows that there are different learning styles for different people. That means making sure that the onboarding process is more customized to the person.

It includes considering videos, hands on processes, recording videos, reviewing on their own, working through things with another person, or anything else. And Beunka looks at ways she can make the process work for any new hire.

For her own part of the process, she uses Notion to showcase internal processes and keep everything organized so that SOPs are always available to the team. They can always go back and take a look and read about things they may not be sure of. And then, shadowing and reverse shadowing help improve the onboarding process.

Tech stack

Tech at Hearth Display is extremely important and the whole thing starts with Zendesk as their ticketing system. While Beunka admits that there are some missing features compared to other systems they have used, Zendesk has much stronger analytics. Scaling is crucial for the company, and Zendesk makes sure that they can continue to do so. It offers help center self-service as well, and ensures their system works for everyone.

With the addition of Cavalry, they’re able to automate around 40% or more of their tickets, especially things like billing or general membership questions. The key, Beunka says, is making sure that the AI focuses on things that the rest of the customer service team really doesn’t need to be spending time on, but that is taking a lot of their time. Quick tech support questions are now being handled mainly by the AI system, and that saves them a lot of time.

Revenue Generation/AI/topics of interest 

The current system for AI at Hearth Display starts with Calvary. While they started out with Zendesk’s AI service to go along with the ticketing system they were already using, they’ve since migrated to the new platform, creating a completely new process for their customer support.

While Beunka definitely doesn’t want to replace humans in customer experience, she is looking at ways to make sure AI can be utilized best and ways that it can augment their current system. One way to do this is to use it as a tier one customer service ‘agent.’ It allows customers to get answers to basic questions quickly and through the AI system, but still get to human agents with more detailed questions or concerns.

Handling Busy Periods

Handling busy periods of the year, which includes back to school and the traditional holidays, means focusing on prioritization. When tickets are coming in quickly and it’s not possible to stay on top of them all at the same time, Beunka looks at what’s the most important. If it’s a new customer who’s just learning the system and still in their 120-day return window it’s important to get to them as quickly as possible. Other people who are already customers are also going to be at the top of the list.

Someone who’s locked out of their membership or doesn’t know how to reactivate should also be prioritized. After all, these people are paying for their services every month and Beunka makes sure that they have access to that service and all of its features. From there, they can help those who have general questions or who aren’t customers yet.

The Future of Customer Experience

Beunka sees the customer experience space becoming exceedingly operational and that it’s going to become even more strategic. She also believes that with the way AI is moving so fast most customer service teams aren’t going to have humans for their tier one anymore. Instead, it’s going to be about tier two agents and engineering teams at their three. But what does this mean? It means someone needs to make sure that the tier one service, the AI robots, are doing the job right.

Currently, Beunka spends a lot of time training the AI and making sure that it still has a human feel. Even though it’s essentially a robot agent, she doesn’t want anything to feel robotic. Instead, she wants it to feel more like talking to someone real. No matter how advanced AI gets, she never wants anyone to feel like they’re talking to a robot when they just want human connection.

With AI continuing to be more capable, it’s going to be even more possible to get it working as a stronger, more comprehensive ‘agent,’ but Beunka still knows that human interaction and connections are crucial.‍

AI in the Customer Experience Space

What does AI in the customer experience space really mean? Well, Beunka knows that when you’re automating the right tickets it can be great. But if you start using it for the wrong tickets it could be a problem. After all, AI still makes mistakes and if you make too many mistakes or you execute a process incorrectly because AI is ‘handling it’ that can make a customer very upset.

That means Beunka is still keeping very hands-on about the entire process until she’s 100% confident that the AI can handle it. And she’ll continue to work on training the AI service until it gets there.

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