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About the company
Egnyte is an AI-powered content cloud that helps businesses manage, secure, and govern mission-critical content in one place. Companies across industries like architecture, engineering, construction, financial services, life sciences, and media rely on Egnyte to collaborate safely while meeting strict data protection and compliance standards.
Kenedi Padgett, Manager of Scaled Customer Success, leads a three-member team that supports nearly 13,000 customers worldwide. Her team handles high-volume customer communication across the full lifecycle. They guide clients through onboarding, deployment, product adoption, and ongoing usage.
Challenge: Managing scale with no system to track or assign customer queries
As Egnyte prepared to launch its customer success operations, Kenedi Padgett faced the challenge of building a system that could manage thousands of customer conversations with a small team — before the first email even arrived. She knew that without the right structure, visibility, and automation, the team would quickly run into bottlenecks once volume grew.
1. Avoiding chaos before it started
With nearly 13,000 customers to support and just three people to manage communication, Kenedi anticipated how easily ownership could blur, responses could overlap, and messages could slip through the cracks.
2. Preventing confusion around ownership
She wanted to ensure that every email reached the right person from day one. Without a clear assignment system, the team risked losing accountability as customer queries increased.
3. Ensuring visibility from the start
Kenedi needed a way to monitor team activity and workloads in real time — not after issues surfaced. She aimed to build transparency directly into the team’s workflow.
4. Building reliable coverage early on
Even one absence could disrupt customer response times. Kenedi needed a process that would automatically redistribute work and keep responses flowing without gaps.
5. Creating a foundation that could scale
From the beginning, her goal was to launch with structure — automated assignments, seamless collaboration, and measurable efficiency — rather than patch problems later.
6. Coverage gaps when team members were unavailable
When someone went on leave or vacation, conversations piled up. Without a system to redistribute work automatically, urgent customer questions risked being overlooked.
7. Manual processes that couldn’t scale
As Egnyte’s customer base expanded, handling everything manually became unsustainable. Kenedi needed a reliable way to route requests, track progress, and keep every conversation visible to the entire team.
By implementing Hiver from day one, Kenedi avoided these pitfalls entirely. The system gave her team the structure, clarity, and accountability they needed before the challenges ever had a chance to surface. Kenedi Padgett, Manager of Scaled Customer Success, says:
“We were trying to support thousands of customers with no system to track ownership or workload. It wasn’t sustainable — sooner or later, something would slip.”
Search for a centralized system to improve visibility of customer requests
Kenedi began to look for a reliable solution that could address the problems related to visibility and ownership. Her team briefly considered Gmail’s collaborative inbox but quickly saw that it couldn’t route conversations, track ownership, or balance workloads.
Kenedi explored other tools but found that most required switching platforms or adding extra steps to the team’s day-to-day work. Then she came across Hiver which stood out because it supported team-based collaboration while fitting naturally into their existing workflow.
“We built this team to move fast and stay accountable, and Hiver fit that vision perfectly. It gave us structure on day one instead of forcing us to fix broken processes later.”
Kenedi introduced Hiver to the team, and from day 1, they could start seeing changes. Hiver helped the team route requests efficiently from the start and gave the leadership clear visibility into workloads and ongoing conversations. It also created the structure Egnyte relies on today to support thousands of customers even with a three-member team.
Solution: How Egnyte built a unified system to manage customer requests at scale
After adopting Hiver, Kenedi rebuilt the team’s workflow around one central system. Now, every request is assigned, tracked and collaborated on in a single platform. This shift helped the team stay aligned, move faster, and handle thousands of customer conversations without losing visibility or control.
1. One Shared Inbox to manage all customer communications
With Hiver, Kenedi created a single inbox (eg: suppor@) for all customer conversations. Every request flows through that inbox, and every response goes out from it. This keeps communication consistent and gives the entire team complete visibility into every thread.
2. Automated routing of customer requests
With Hiver, Egnyte has been able to route every new customer request in a Round-Robin manner. This means queries get routed to the next available team member. This automation helps in three ways:
- balances the workload across the team so that no one is burnt out.
- prevents confusion around ownership of queries since each one has a dedicated assignee
- removes the need for manual sorting or forwarding.
“I do not have to assign them (queries) manually. Hiver’s automation just does it Round-Robin fashion. Saves so much time!”
3. Strong coverage even when someone is away
When a teammate marks themselves Out of Office, Hiver simply removes them from the auto-rotation. Others can pick up new requests instantly and jump into ongoing conversations because the full context is already visible. Customers never wait for someone to return.
4. Categorization of conversations to focus on the right priorities
The team uses Tags like onboarding, adoption, renewals, and sales inquiries to organize the types of requests. This helps them spot urgent issues quickly, understand customer needs, and shift priorities as demand changes. So those categories help them to stay organized and be clear as they enter a conversation about what they’re going on and also helps them prioritize what would probably be a higher priority query versus a lower one.
5. Faster replies with canned responses
For recurring questions, the team uses Templates to draft responses quickly. They personalize as needed but avoid re-writing message after message. This keeps replies fast and consistent even during peak periods.
6. Collaboration directly inside query threads
Instead of switching to Slack, the team shares Notes and @mentions directly beside the query thread. They ask for help, loop in a teammate, or even request @Kenedi’s input—right where the conversation lives. This creates transparent, traceable collaboration.
“We love just being able to be in one place instead of them having to go over into Slack or another form of communication to coordinate with me on queries.”
7. Real-time insights to coach and balance workloads
Kenedi checks response time, resolution time, and workload balance through Hiver’s Live Reports. She spots delays, reallocates work, and supports her team through one-on-one coaching based on actual activity.
“There’s a huge difference between responding and managing. Hiver gave us that shift — from chasing emails to running a process we can trust.”
Result: Handling high customer volume without losing speed or accuracy
Hiver strengthens the team’s workflow by clarifying ownership and reducing manual effort. The team handles requests with more speed and consistency as a result. These gains appear in key parts of their day-to-day work:
1. Faster responses with balanced workloads
Round-robin routing keeps workloads evenly distributed across the team. With clearer ownership and fewer manual steps, Egnyte’s response time has improved by 40%, on average. Even when a team member is out of office, Hiver continues routing new requests to available teammates so customers don’t wait longer than necessary.
2. Real-time visibility on metrics that help in team coaching and planning
Kenedi tracks live performance data, including response times, open conversations, and daily volume. These metrics help her coach the team and adjust workloads before delays accumulate. The improved visibility has reduced internal back-and-forth and made day-to-day operations roughly 30–35% more efficient, based on her assessment of team performance and coaching conversations.
3. Consistent, reliable communication across thousands of interactions
Every customer now receives a timely, accurate reply — no overlaps, no missed threads. The team maintains a consistent tone and follow-through across thousands of interactions each month.
4. Ability to support volume without adding headcount
With structured workflows, automated routing, reusable templates, and shared context, Egnyte’s team supports up to 1,000 weekly customer conversations with the same three people. The team keeps pace with demand without needing additional roles or sacrificing speed, clarity, or quality.
5.More time spent helping customers, less on coordination
By reducing manual triage, handoffs, and follow-ups, the team redirects more hours toward customer work. Across a typical week, this saves several hours per team member—time that previously went into juggling threads or checking status manually.
“We built accountability into every customer touchpoint. The team responds faster, handles higher volume, and works with a level of confidence we didn’t have before.”
Kenedi Padgett
Manager of Scaled Customer Success
Looking forward
Kenedi plans to expand how her team uses Hiver as Egnyte continues to scale. Her goal is to add more automation and AI intelligence while keeping the workflow simple and efficient.
AI-powered triaging will help the team sort and route incoming customer requests instantly. AI Copilot will support them by drafting clear, accurate replies so they can move faster during high-volume days.
Kenedi also wants to explore more integrations, especially with Salesforce and Gainsight. This will let her team view key customer data and past communication in one place without switching tools.
She also wants to bring more teams onto Hiver—especially Support—so everyone involved in customer touchpoints can collaborate inside a single system with shared context.
Kenedi continues to explore ways to help her team work faster, stay proactive, and stay connected as the business scales, ensuring every customer gets timely and consistent guidance.
“The groundwork is done — now we can innovate. I see AI as the next step to help the team handle scale effortlessly and respond even faster.”
Conclusion
Hiver gives Egnyte’s customer success team the structure and visibility they need to manage thousands of conversations with ease. It helps them assign ownership instantly, collaborate within context, and track performance without losing focus.
The team now works faster and more confidently, handling a high volume of customers without adding headcount or complexity. As Egnyte grows, Hiver continues to strengthen how the team communicates, stays accountable, and delivers a seamless experience to every customer.
