For businesses that have built a reputation on quality craftmanship, becoming a victim of their own success is a very real threat. As sales increase the customer base grows. But scaling customer service quality in tandem poses a huge dilemma. Fully automating to meet the higher demand may not align with brand values. But increasing headcount can see costs spiral.
Many businesses are facing this challenge. CX Network's annual research into the state of CX asks practitioners how much their customer service interactions have increased in the last 12 months. In 2026, the largest share of practitioners (21 percent) reported growth of 11-20 percent, with 12 percent of respondents reporting a demand increase of 21-40 percent.
Luxury women's brand Cuyana is in this position. It has built its name on sustainably, hand-crafted leather bags, apparel, and accessories, working to a philosophy of "fewer, better". All its bags are fully customizable, allowing owners to co-create items that support and reflect their lifestyles and needs. The tanneries it buys from are certified by the Leather Working Group, the world's leading environmental certification for the leather manufacturing industry. Silk has higher momme counts, cashmere is validated by the highest certifications as sustainably-made, and its pima cotton is fully sustainable, grown and spun in Peru.
However, as the brand's global footprint grew, its small but dedicated customer service team faced an increasing gap between customer expectations and operational capacity.
This case study explores how Cuyana went from missing almost half of all inbound calls to serving a growing customer base with a hybrid support strategy that deployed automation and AI-driven tools to meet demand without losing the human touch.
Keeping up with customer base growth
In retail, sales growth and seasonal demand spikes are one of the greatest workforce management (WFM) headaches.
The team at Cuyana was struggling to deliver premium results under growing volume – compounding this challenge, seasonal spikes like Black Friday were stretching resources at critical moments.
Customers wanted help with order tracking, returns, and exchanges, among other queries, but nearly half of all incoming calls were going unanswered; email response times were as high as two days; and the friction in the service journey was at odds with the product experience. In the world of retail, "fast fashion" may signal bad quality, but fast service is expected as a minimum.
Increasing headcount wasn't an option – demand was so high the brand needed new tools to support its existing team to deliver the thoughtful, humanized experiences its brand and service proposition was built on.
The hybrid strategy
Cuyana took the hybrid route, augmenting its human workforce with new tools to scale the quality of their work without adding to their workloads.
After exploring several automation tools, Cuyana deployed Crescendo's AI-native platform to support a growing customer base across email and voice, while keeping the experience deeply human. This approach helped the brand to scale with standards, giving customers faster answers while preserving the quality and care expected.
The hybrid strategy focused on three key pillars:
- Autonomous resolution: To address customer requests – including order tracking, returns, and exchanges – Cuyana implemented an AI layer to handle 55 percent of email inquiries autonomously, providing speedy resolution without the need for any human intervention.
- Agent augmentation: When a customer requests a human, Crescendo's Expert Assist surfaces a full conversation summary and relevant CRM context, allowing the agent to resolve the issue without the customer having to repeat themselves.
- Dynamic knowledge retrieval: Rather than using rigid decision trees, the system pulls live answers from Cuyana's knowledge base and company policies to ensure responses remain contextual and on-brand.
"With Crescendo, it went off without a hitch," says Cuyana's director of CX, Tyler Gardner. "The biggest reason was their technology and the way it was implemented. Our tech team didn't have a heavy load to upload the things that were needed. [Crescendo's] team really did take the time and attention to detail to make sure it was done right, and had their engineers develop and implement within our site."
Hybrid support in action: Shorter wait times, higher CSAT
Cuyana's priority was to reduce friction and build loyalty, leveraging a solution that would achieve this in line with its established company voice and securing higher operational capacity.
The results of the hybrid AI-and-human CX model delivered a significant improvements, achieving:
- 99 percent reduction in wait times: Average time-to-agent fell from up to 48 hours to just 54 seconds.
- Consistently high satisfaction: Despite the high volume and use of automation, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores have remained steady in the 85–86 percent range.
- 55 percent AI resolution: More than half of all email inquiries are now handled autonomously, freeing the human team to focus on complex, high-value relationship building.
"The support quality matches the quality we aim for with our products," Gardner says. "Everything works together seamlessly, which saves our team time and helps us deliver the same level of care our customers expect."
Improving CX beyond service
The improvements also extend to other points in the Cuyana customer journey.
In research and sales journeys, engagement is boosted through tailored product recommendations, which leverag real-time browsing behaviors alongside deep data integrations to build comprehensive customer profiles.
By moving away from a legacy support model, Cuyana has effectively replicated the role of a personal in-store stylist in the digital service space to drive hyper-personalized interactions and sales moments.
The Cuyana team also utilizes Crescendo's automated insights to strengthen operations such as quality control.
Gardner's daily work utilizes AI to monitor real-time customer feedback and identify, for example, if a specific pair of shoes ran a half size too big, or if the appearance of a specific color of leather appears brighter in the website images than real life. This information allows the Cuyana team to stay one step ahead and address these concerns early, enabling the team to optimize the company's overall business operations in addition to CX initiatives.
AI as augmentation, not replacement
More customers is always a good thing. In 2024, 2025 and 2026, CX Network's annual research found that customer base growth was the number one strategic CX aim for members.
However, scaling service quality to meet growing customer demand requires a new strategy.
While the business world debates whether AI should replace human workers, Cuyana's experience proves that AI and automation tools are most impactful when applied to amplify current capacity, improve efficiency, and strategically augmenting existing workflows.
For premium retailers, the stakes are higher and Cuyana's use of AI for quality control and hyper-personalized product recommendations demonstrates that quality at scale is possible, even with the smallest teams.
Quick links
- When compliance kills CX: How to automate with judgement
- What high-performing companies do to improve CX
- 5 brands transforming CX and service with conversational AI