How Kin makes customer-first insurance possible with Kustomer

Kin is a direct-to-consumer insurance company that provides affordable coverage to homeowners, removing the usual stress and complexity from home insurance. With customers in states like Florida and Louisiana—areas with a history of natural disasters and costly insurance—Kin is one of the few companies delivering on the promise of truly customer-first insurance.

As VP of Growth and Business Development, Eli Gratz is responsible for the technology that powers Kin’s business teams. When he joined, the team was just 15 people strong. Three and a half years later, that number had grown to nearly 300, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for the sales and support teams to serve homeowners effectively.

Like many fast-growing startups, Kin had to scale quickly while still delivering excellent customer experiences. But the tools they were using held them back.

Kin relied on bespoke solutions, where even answering basic questions required coding and deployment. Without a centralized system for support and communications, the company had no visibility into the customer journey. Different teams managed interactions in silos, and important insights were buried in disparate tools. For agents, this meant inefficiency and frustration. For customers, it meant slower responses and inconsistent experiences.

Hopper’s team evaluated eight providers against a 300-point rubric. Kustomer stood out for its flexibility, speed, and advanced data model. Unlike legacy CRMs, Kustomer’s many-to-many structure allowed Hopper to push hundreds of booking and account attributes directly into the platform, creating a unified timeline of every customer interaction.

This shift unlocked priority-based routing, ensuring urgent issues reached the right agent immediately, and enabled follow-up conversations to route back to the same person for continuity. Just as importantly, Kustomer consolidated 13 separate tools into a single, intuitive workspace, lowering costs and simplifying operations.

Kin considered building an entirely new communication ecosystem but found what they needed in Kustomer.

Kustomer offered native integrations that made it simple to stream real-time data into BI reporting. Sophisticated workflows allowed technical business users to design processes without engineering involvement. And, critically for an insurance company, Kustomer aligned with Kin’s document retention and security policies.

Once Kin moved to Kustomer, everything changed. All communication channels—phone, SMS, email, and chat—were unified in one place, giving teams the visibility they needed to collaborate and respond faster.

With Kustomer in place, Kin quickly saw measurable improvements in how they served customers.

The company gained visibility into every interaction, making it easier to help customers, share knowledge across teams, and eliminate duplication of work. For the first time, Kin could track and manage email support, analyze support times, and ask smarter questions about where tickets were coming from.

Most importantly, the sales and support teams could respond faster without increasing their workload. Workflow automation eliminated manual triage, and agents finally had a clear chain of evidence for who said what, and when.

Today, Kustomer is a central hub of Kin’s business and a key part of how the company operates. Looking forward, Kin plans to build more integrations, including ways to measure customer sentiment directly from conversations rather than relying on manual analysis.

As Gratz notes, “Every customer interaction can be made better with increased visibility.” With Kustomer as a foundation, Kin is well-positioned to continue simplifying the insurance experience for homeowners—removing stress, saving time, and putting the customer first.