Customer Support at Kiwi.com

Posted on 25/05/2023, Adam Greghni

My name is Adam Greghni and I’m the Director of Customer Support Operations at Kiwi.com, responsible for customer service operations at our Brno HQ. I joined Kiwi.com in March 2021 from Virgin Atlantic in London and I have spent my whole career in the travel industry, covering mostly customer operations, commercial and technology functions.

How Customer Support operates at Kiwi.com

Here at Kiwi.com, our Customer Support teams are at the heart of the organisation. They are responsible for making sure our customers’ travel plans go smoothly, from the moment they book, to when they return home from their trips. Our team is made up of over 400 Kiwis based in our Brno HQ. We are also supported by key partners across the globe, helping us process over 150,000 tasks and contacts a week. The department is large and complex, with a lot of moving parts that are continuously changing and adapting and this makes it a fun, fast paced and exciting environment to work in. We are constantly looking for new and better ways to do things. 

Customer Support teams are divided into six different areas. Front Office, Guarantee, Claims, GDS, Order Processing and B2B Operations. We also have a number of key business support areas such as Workforce Planning, Analytics, Customer Relations & Legal, Information & Quality and Vendor Management. 

Front Office and Guarantee are customer facing teams, as is our B2B operations team. Our front office operations are focused on supporting our customers directly 247, 7 days per week. We offer service in more than 12 different languages across multiple contact channels. Our back office teams are there to ensure our customers’ bookings are fulfilled and processed in good time; that goes for the original booking, managing all sorts of changes and possible disruptions in between, as well as looking after refunds. 

Customer Support on a mission

Kiwi.com’s goal is to be a global app that makes air travel simple. We in Customer Support know that things don’t always go according to plan and our role is to make sure that we support our customers proactively, and also if they reach out to us with an issue. We invest in a number of tools and resources to monitor travel disruption and other possible incidents that could disrupt our customers’ travel plans. This allows us to stay one step ahead and keep our customers informed on the latest travel information.

So whether you’re an agent in our Guarantee team helping customers at the airport, an Expert in Claims looking at how to improve our customer refund journey, or part of the Order Processing team working on check-in’s, everyone plays their part in making sure our customers get where they need to go as smoothly as possible. If customers need us, our focus is to make sure we have the resources available to help them quickly and efficiently. That means we put a lot of effort into driving first contact resolution for customer issues. All teams focus on this to ensure we provide the most efficient service. 

How People Grow In Customer Support teams

Given the diverse responsibilities of the area and how big the department is, there are some great opportunities to move on and progress within Customer Support itself (on this link you can read about one of our examples), or into other areas around Kiwi.com. We have more than 90 people across Customer Support growing in their careers yearly and a lot of agents progress into Team Manager positions or Expert roles within their operational areas. Team members also move into Analytics, Workforce Planning or our Learning & Development team.

Two L&D teams provide functional line specific training support to Customer Support and are dedicated to the onboarding and upskilling of Customer Support agents from all lines of business within Customer Support. We also have a developmental pipeline for Customer Support teams, a career path that maintains a career development link between Customer Support Training Teams.

Apart from that, people can enroll in our Kiwi to Kiwi Mentoring Program, or a number of developmental opportunities led by our Learning and Development team, ranging from self care, to decision making skills. Employees can enroLl in English lessons provided by an external partnering language school and some of the most popular courses we offer include Intercultural awareness, public speaking, communications skills and more.

We are always on the lookout for new people to join our team. If working at Kiwi.com sounds interesting, look at our open roles and apply.