Summary
Kent Outdoors supports consumers across 15 outdoor and watersports brands, including BŌTE, Liquid Force, Barefoot International, Hyperlite, Full Throttle, and more with a 30-person CX team working in Kustomer. The team uses data to prioritize projects, but the most important data point, why customers reach out, depended on agents tagging every conversation by hand. Agents read conversations differently, so leadership couldn’t fully trust the reporting.
With Kustomer’s Conversation Intelligence, powered by AI Attributes, Kent Outdoors now classifies conversations automatically, which took tagging off agents’ plates, made the data consistent across brands and gave CX leadership reliable visibility into the full customer journey.
Inconsistent Manual Tagging Undermined Reporting Confidence
With 15 brands and 30 people supporting customers, Kent Outdoors relied on agents to choose a “Contact Reason” for every conversation, and those reasons guided which projects leadership prioritized. The problem was that everyone read a conversation a little differently. One agent’s “product question” was another agent’s “warranty inquiry.”
The goal was also bigger than one tag per conversation. CX leadership wanted to know both the original reason a customer reached out and any other questions or issues that came up during the conversation, so the team could fix problems upstream before they turned into future conversations. That’s a lot to ask of agents whose time and energy should go into helping the customer in front of them. When the focus is on the customer, the original contact reason and those following are easy to miss.
“My perception of a contact reason can be different than somebody else’s. We are consistently working with the team to think and work in a similar direction to support data integrity - but we understandably have different perceptions of conversations.”
Lizzy Beers
Senior Manager, Consumer Experience at Kent Outdoors
The result was data leadership couldn’t fully trust. When leadership asked how many warranty inquiries were tied to a specific product, the reported numbers didn’t always match the underlying conversations. Getting a reliable answer meant reviewing conversations by hand and cross-checking reports, which slowed down the team’s ability to turn customer feedback into action.
“Our leadership team often asks how many warranty-related conversations we’ve seen for a specific product. But when I looked at the contact reasons, the data never matched up.”
Lizzy Beers
Senior Manager, Consumer Experience at Kent Outdoors
Consistent, AI-Powered Conversation Classification
Kent Outdoors implemented Kustomer’s AI Attributes to classify conversations automatically across all its brands, starting with warranty inquiries. A warranty-stage classifier identifies where each customer is in the warranty process, so agents no longer have to assign contact reasons manually. Agents can stay fully engaged with the customer while AI Attributes captures consistent, reliable data in the background.
“I want our team fully invested in the customer they’re talking to, not deciding which contact reason to pick. AI Attributes takes that ask off their plate and gives leadership consistent, reliable data on the whole customer journey.”
Lizzy Beers
Senior Manager, Consumer Experience at Kent Outdoors
That data flows into Kustomer’s Data Explorer, where CX leadership can quickly explore warranty trends, answer questions about specific products, and find insights without validating conversations one by one.
“Now that AI Attributes gives us more consistent, reliable data, Data Explorer is that much more powerful. We can quickly uncover trends, answer leadership’s questions, and pull insights with confidence because we actually trust the data behind our reports.”
Lizzy Beers
Senior Manager, Consumer Experience at Kent Outdoors
The Results: Faster, More Trustworthy Insights
By replacing subjective manual tagging with AI-powered classification, Kent Outdoors has made reporting faster, more consistent, and more trustworthy. Across more than 140,000 conversations over 22 months, removing manual tagging saves an estimated 664 hours across the entire team. That’s more than 360 hours a year, and nearly 90 hours in a single peak-season month. Agents spend that time on customers, not categorization, and leadership can use the data with confidence to understand customer needs and spot trends across brands.
Beyond reducing manual work, the biggest impact has been greater trust in the data. The team can now turn everyday customer conversations into reliable insights that drive upstream fixes and better business decisions.
“It’s unbelievable what we’ve been able to automate with Kustomer’s Conversation Intelligence in such a short time. We are no longer relying on manual tagging or individual interpretations of customer conversations. Now, we have consistent, reliable data across all our brands, giving us greater confidence in our reporting and the insights we use to make smarter, data-driven decisions.”
Lizzy Beers
Senior Manager, Consumer Experience at Kent Outdoors
The Future: Building on a Foundation of Trusted Data
With reliable conversation data in place, Kent Outdoors is looking ahead to using Kustomer to improve quality across its support operation. The team plans to bring AI QA into its workflow, giving leadership a clearer view of how both human and AI interactions are performing.
Conversation Intelligence, powered by AI Attributes, gives Kent Outdoors confidence in understanding why customers are contacting them. Looking forward, AI QA will help the company extend that confidence to how well each of those conversations is handled.
“It's incredibly helpful to have all customer and conversation data in one clean, easy-to-use platform rather than rely on an outside source, and I think it’s going to be a huge value add for our brands.”
Lizzy Beers
Senior Manager, Consumer Experience at Kent Outdoors
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