How Kustomer’s AI Product ‘Answers Questions You Didn’t Even Know You Had’

Sifting through company data often has a lot of barriers: Not only is a background in data science useful, but specialized tools are generally required to organize and make sense of large amounts of data in a scalable way.

According to Rachel Hughes, however, that’s all in the past — thanks to an innovative product her team recently launched. 

“Data Explorer democratizes access to those insights, and truly goes much deeper by answering questions you didn’t even know you had,” she said.

As the VP of Product at automation and customer service platform developer Kustomer, Hughes anticipates the newly launched Data Explorer, a self-service analytics and reporting tool, to be a gamechanger for customers and internal teams alike. The product was built on the heels of a $30-million Series B investment, and was created so that CX teams could dig into customer, operational and conversation data — without needing engineering support.

What Data Explorer Does — and Who It’s Built For

Hughes explained that the motivator behind Data Explorer was to give professionals the tools they need to sift through data to find the golden insights they need. Whether they work in support, ops or analytics, anyone with access to this new product will be able to answer questions around events and actions, customer attributes, conversation metadata, and agent activity and performance.

“It’s an incredible tool that allows anyone to chat with their CX data to uncover key drivers, anomalies and operational insights — paired with clear recommendations,” Hughes said. 

Built In spoke with Hughes in detail about how Data Explorer came together and what it’s like to work on the product and engineering team that built it.

Rachel Hughes

VP of Product

What is a product your team is excited about? 

Data Explorer. It is an incredible tool that allows anyone to chat with their CX data to uncover key drivers, anomalies and operational insights — paired with clear recommendations.

Why did Kustomer need to build this product? What gave rise to it, and what impact will this product launch have on the business or customers?

Reporting historically has always been so opaque — requiring knowledge of how to hunt and peck through dropdowns and filters to find the right information. Data Explorer democratizes access to those insights, and truly goes much deeper by answering questions you didn’t even know you had. Customers have been loving it, as well as our internal teams.

“Customers have been loving it, as well as our internal teams.”

How Kustomer Built Data Explorer Using Agentic AI and Rapid Experimentation

What role did you play in developing and launching the product? What tools or technologies did your team use to build the product and why?

This product was on our roadmap and we decided to accelerate it through a new motion we have developed at Kustomer called GSD (Get Sh*t Done) weeks. We brought a small group of product and engineering folks together for a week in an offsite setting to meaningfully drive forward our core AI automation engine that forms the basis for Data Explorer and all of our AI assistants, and honestly didn’t know what would come out of that week — besides a lot of of fun experimenting and pushing for new solutions.

Where we ended up was built on the strength of our foundations, but way beyond what I thought would be possible so quickly. The team (including the product team!) worked heavily in Cursor, Claude Code and other AI tools to build, iterate and test.

What obstacles did you encounter along the way? How did you successfully overcome them? 

The biggest obstacles were in bringing the company along given the rapid pace of innovation and development. Everyone was incredibly excited for what we were doing, but also had some curiosity about such a different way of working. My approach was to get the product in the hands of our internal teams as early as possible so everyone could start playing with it and understand how powerful it truly is. There was a lot of internal communication as well, but I find that with AI products in particular you really need to play with it to understand it well.

What It’s Like to Work on Product and Engineering Teams at Kustomer

What teams did you collaborate with in order to get this across the finish line? 

Product and engineering worked closely with almost every team at Kustomer, including marketing, sales, customer success, technical support, legal, finance, and many others.

When you think of other companies in your industry, how does Kustomer compare when it comes to how you build and launch new products? 

The speed and scale of innovation at Kustomer is truly unlike anything I have seen before at other companies. A lot of that comes from the leadership and deep expertise of our CEO and CTO, Brad and Jeremy, both of whom are engineers. We also intentionally blur boundaries in a lot of ways within product development, which is where I think the world is heading. 

Product managers and designers get incredibly close to the code and take full ownership of the product and the experience. Engineers think and act as product managers and designers. It’s a really fun way to work and has delivered exceptional results for customers

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