Zesty powers their operations and customer support with Front

Zesty, an SF-based catering company acquired by Caviar, uses Front to manage logistics, support, and community outreach to stay on top of the daily lunch rush and maintain personal relationships with partners.

Started in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, Zesty is a popular catering company that partners with other caterers and restaurants to provide corporate clients with breakfast, lunch, dinner, happy hours, and snacks. With so many companies offering catered meals to their employees today in Silicon Valley, Zesty has quickly grown from one office to three Bay Area locales, and will soon be expanding to a fourth.

Challenge

Mike Kane oversees the logistics teams, support, and community outreach as Zesty's Community Ops Manager. Though catering may feel effortless for the client, there's a ton of effort and coordination on the back-end. Between the orders, food preparation, drop-off, set-up, and clean-up, communication is paramount to make this complex culinary operation run smoothly from start to finish.

Solution

"Front has been an integral part of Zesty's operations from the beginning," Mike says. "It's the main communication tool for logistics, support, and community teams to communicate and coordinate with Catering Captains, who are responsible for the food delivery." Here's how Front has helped Zesty make the catering experience go off without a hitch.

Front has been an integral part of Zesty's operations from the beginning. We've been really happy with it.

- Mike Kane, Community Operations Manager, Zesty

Teams resolve issues faster

Zesty's peak time is 10am to 1pm for the lunch rush. To support Zesty partners, Catering Captains, and customers, the support team has set up separate Twilio phone numbers for each region, and support@ email addresses.

Every week, Zesty's support team handles 1500-2000 messages on the high-end, and 600-900 messages on the low-end. Messages are routed and assigned to 4-5 team members to resolve. Using Front over the past few years, they've been able to reduce their first response from two minutes down to one minute, and save half a minute on follow-ups to keep it within two minutes.

"With Front, the support team is able to triage customer requests, and internally coordinate in real-time across email, SMS, and chat without switching tools," Mike says. "This lets us address the issues as they come a lot faster than if we had to check the different channels separately."

Easily manage day-to-day tasks

Zesty uses Front for their less urgent day-to-day jobs. With Front's tools, they can snooze emails, set reminders, and schedule messages to be sent later when they don't need to be handled right away. They've also taken advantage of Front's rules to assign incoming messages to the right person, separate inboxes, and reduce redundancies across the board.

Using Front's Asana integration, Zesty is able to assign requests from Catering Captains to specific boards, create and assign tasks. And with the Slack integration, they can address messages instantly, or forward them along to the right team to make the right call.

Foster more personal relationships with their extended team

While the end-goal may be seamless catering for the client, Front has helped the Zesty support team build stronger relationships with their extended contracted team of Catering Captains. "Front gives our Catering Captain community a resource and option to text someone, to speak to someone, and to get a response to a real person. The ability to add a smiley face or a thumbs up on a job well done has allowed us to be more personal, and have more fun," Mike says. "Even the simple emoji functionality in Front has played a role in building a highly communicative, high-functioning team.