Florence Marine X boosts premium surf-brand support with hybrid AI + human team, hitting 91% CSAT

Premium performance brands need premium-feel support. Florence Marine X built a hybrid AI + Human CX operation with Influx that holds chat responses under 2 minutes, email under 2 hours, and the inbox at zero by the end of every shift, without losing the founder-driven brand voice that makes the brand what it is.

Background

Florence Marine X is a performance apparel and equipment brand founded by John Florence, two-time Olympian and three-time World Surf League Champion. Every product is "North Shore Tested" on Oahu by John, his brothers and a team of Test Pilots in real-world conditions. The result is gear designed to keep people outside and in the water longer, built around a clear environmental ethos.

The brand's product range spans wetsuits, boardshorts, casual apparel, paddleboards, and the Florence Membership program. Each category brings its own customer questions, sizing on a 4/3mm fullsuit, made-to-order wetsuit lead times, store availability across Hawaiian retail partners, member-exclusive pricing, Test Pilot Program eligibility, and more.

Florence Marine X partnered with Influx in May 2021 to build the customer support operation that could carry that complexity to the standard the brand expected.

The challenge

By the early 2020s, Florence Marine X was running a sophisticated direct-to-consumer business with a global customer base and a deeply specific product catalog. Support couldn't be a generic ticket-handling function. Customers buying a $330 made-to-order wetsuit or joining the Florence Membership expected the same care in the inbox they got from the brand on the beach.

The CX operation needed to:

Hold a premium tone, consistently. A founder-led performance brand has a distinct voice. Every reply needed to sound like the brand, not like a generic support template.
Handle real product depth. Wetsuit thickness, insulation comparisons, boardshort fit, paddleboard fulfillment from third-party warehouses, membership benefits, partnership and bulk-order routing, agents needed to work across a wide and technical knowledge base.
Move fast on chat and email. The brand's KPIs are clear: chat under 2 minutes, email under 2 hours, inbox zero at end of shift, and customer updates if a resolution needs more time.
Scale efficiently with new collections and seasonal launches like the Sig Zane Kalo collection or the Standard Issue Fullsuit pre-order, without throwing more headcount at every spike.

Influx was selected to manage the full-service customer support operation as a hybrid AI + Human team which combines an AI agent for high-volume, well-defined questions with dedicated human agents for everything that needed judgment, escalation or brand-led care.

As an emerging brand, we move fast. New product launches, evolving systems, and changing customer expectations are constant. Influx has been a trusted partner through all of it, adapting alongside us while helping maintain the premium experience our customers expect from FLORENCE. What makes the relationship valuable is that they go beyond traditional customer support. Their team is proactive, solutions-oriented, and consistently helps us identify better ways to support our customers as the brand continues to evolve. They’ve become an extension of our internal team.

Eric Allen, Director of DTC at FLORENCE

Influx designed a hybrid CX framework that embeds an AI agent inside Florence Marine X's existing support stack, with human agents handling the conversations that need them and an AI Agent Manager continuously tuning the AI's performance against real customer outcomes.

Key elements of the model:

Dedicated team management. Influx sourced, trained and manages a dedicated team of three customer service agents, supported by a Team Leader and a Service Delivery Manager.
AI agent, actively managed. A dedicated Influx AI Agent Manager owns the AI's performance by tuning prompts, refining the knowledge base, reviewing AI-handled conversations, and feeding what's learned back into both the bot and the human team.
Brand-trained on real product depth. The team works from a 40+ page brand knowledge base covering product specs, sizing, materials, membership policies, partnerships, returns, and the full Test Pilot Program. The AI and humans share that source of truth, so customers get the same answer regardless of who replies.
Tight handoff between AI and human. The AI handles well-defined, high-volume questions where it can give a confident, on-brand answer. Humans pick up anything ambiguous, complex, or sensitive such as escalations, made-to-order edge cases, partnership inquiries, anything that needs judgment.
KPI-driven cadence. Performance is reviewed continuously against the brand's response-time, accuracy, and inbox-zero targets. Adjustments happen in cycle, not at quarterly reviews.

The model is designed so the AI scales the easy questions, the humans scale the hard ones, and the brand voice stays consistent across both.

Results & proof points

<2 min chat response

Live chat first response held under 2 minutes against the brand's KPI, supporting real-time decisions during the shopping moment.

<2 hr email response

Email first response time held under 2 hours, well inside what customers expect from a premium DTC brand.

5 years of partnership

Influx has run Florence Marine X's customer support operation since May 2021, through new collections, product launches, the rollout of the Florence Membership, and the introduction of an AI agent into the workflow.

The hybrid AI + Human model delivers measurable improvements across speed, consistency, and capacity:

Chat first response under 2 minutes — the brand's KPI, met consistently exceed expectations with Chat FRT averaging 19 seconds!
Email first response under 2 hours — well inside the SLA for a premium DTC brand.
Inbox zero at the end of every shift — no rolling backlog, regardless of volume spikes.
Hybrid coverage at scale. The AI agent handles high-volume, well-defined questions (order status, sizing, store locations, membership basics), while three dedicated human agents handle escalations, made-to-order wetsuit queries, partnership inquiries, and anything requiring brand judgment.
Continuous AI improvement. A dedicated AI Agent Manager actively tunes the AI's responses against real customer outcomes by refining the knowledge base, improving accuracy, and expanding what the AI can confidently handle.
Five years of partnership. Operational continuity since May 2021, with the team adapting through new product launches, the Florence Membership rollout, and the move to a hybrid AI + Human model.

Impact

By partnering with Influx, Florence Marine X built a CX operation that scales with the brand without compromising on tone, accuracy, or speed. The hybrid AI + Human model gives the brand the efficiency of automation on high-volume questions, the judgment of trained human agents on everything else, and a single source of truth that keeps both consistent.

The result is support that feels as considered as the products, both fast on chat, on top of the inbox and recognizably Florence Marine X in every reply.

Get started with Influx

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