How Halfdays Trained an AI Agent Like a New Hire and Brought Multilingual Support to Europe

Amanda Smith is the Senior CX Manager at Halfdays, the Denver-based women’s ski and outdoor apparel brand, where she runs customer experience with a small team and no plans to make it bigger. Growth was coming either way. The pressure point was Europe, where the usual playbook meant new languages, new market rules and new hires to cover a workday that starts while Denver is asleep.

Amanda knew whose plate that playbook would land on.

“That would have been a pretty big lift on myself, just as the sole CX manager. I would have to manage multiple teams in different time zones.”

— Amanda

Siena took on the languages instead. It was ready for them because of a decision Amanda made a year earlier, while Halfdays still had time to make it well.

Growth usually comes with a job description

Amanda has been at Halfdays for four years, long enough to know that growth shows up in the inbox before it shows up anywhere else.

More orders mean more “where is my order?” emails, and every holiday season runs heavier than the one before. Most brands answer that the same way, with another hire and a few weeks of training before that person can carry a full queue. In a new region it’s worse, because the support costs arrive before the revenue does.

Amanda wanted a way around that before Halfdays needed one. At the time, the brand didn’t need AI, or even more support. She wanted room to grow without adding a ton of seats.

“None of us like to be scrambling after the fact, thinking, okay, I have to get this live immediately,” she says. “I just feel like that never really goes very well. In my opinion, best to always be forward-thinking.”

Same onboarding, different hire

Amanda had never trained an AI before, and Siena’s team was upfront about what it would take.

“There were no false promises of being like, we can get this up and running in a week, and you’ll be great,” she says. “It was very much like, this is what it’s gonna take. This is the time commitment.”

Early on, someone on Siena’s team gave her the advice that made it click: train the AI the way you would train one of your human agents. Amanda already had the resources for that. She put them into a format Siena could learn from and onboarded it like any new hire, starting with voice, tone, and the brand image Halfdays’ founders care about.

“AI is only going to be as good as you train it to be.”

— Amanda

Siena went live in mid-December, right in the holiday rush, on a few of the most common questions, starting with order status. Each request type since has gone live faster than the last, partly because Siena keeps learning and partly because Amanda knows the software better.

What Siena runs at Halfdays now

Halfdays chose Siena so it could grow without adding seats, and trained it before the busy season arrived. A year in, it covers:

• The everyday volume. More than 50 types of customer requests, starting with order status, answered in the Halfdays voice.

• Handoffs. Complex cases and escalations go straight to Amanda’s team.

• Every EU market, in its own language, at any hour. Over 100 languages, with policies set for each market and answers outside business hours.

• A check before launch. Amanda builds each new request type herself, then gets a second opinion from Siena before customers see it.

• A weekly read on customers. What people ask about most, product issues, and sentiment, whenever Amanda asks.

What a year of training bought

The first payoff came in those December weeks. Order-status questions pile up at every brand over the holidays, and handing them to Siena was, in Amanda’s words, “a massive unlock for our team.” Her people spent peak season on complex issues and escalations while Siena took the lower-lift work off their plate.

Last winter: live in mid-December on a handful of request types.

This winter: 50-plus request types from the first day of the season, 100-plus languages, three to four hours a week to run, and the same team as last year.

Amanda would happily give it more time, but Siena has reached the point where “it’s almost like she’s kind of self-sufficient.”

Europe was the bigger test, and it’s where the early start paid off. Siena went into the new market already knowing the Halfdays voice and policies. Adding the languages took one line of setup, alongside the translation tools Halfdays already had. “Super easy,” Amanda says, “and honestly, a no-brainer.” She worked with Siena’s team on policies for each EU market, since the rules vary slightly from one to the next. And because Siena doesn’t sleep, a customer writing in on a European morning gets an answer before the team’s workday has started.

“I definitely don’t think I would feel as confident going into the launch without Siena. Being able to expand our support hours, offer that multi-language support, and really meet the customers where they’re at.”

— Amanda

A small team, on purpose

Amanda’s team is small and close-knit, and many of them have been at Halfdays for years. She wanted to keep it that way. The alternative was scrambling to hire a bunch of people at the last minute, and, as she puts it, “maybe not having the best team, because we’re having to scramble.”

She also knew what her team would think the day AI showed up. “The first thing everyone’s gonna think is, oh, my job’s on the line,” she says. On the advice of her Siena CSM, she was honest with them from the start. “We knew we didn’t want her to be a replacement for anyone on our team. We wanted her to be an additional tool, and something to use as we scale, so that we can keep our team close-knit and keep the best people on our team. And it’s really allowed us to do that.”

Her team now works alongside Siena “just as if she was a real member of our team.” For other CX leaders, her advice follows the same logic: “Just like with any new hire, you can’t expect perfection right away. A lot of testing, a lot of coaching, leaning on the Siena team for guidance, and you’ll be set.”

The question Amanda asks every week

Automation rate is a new KPI at Halfdays, and in Amanda’s view it “only kind of skims the surface.”

She’s more excited about the customer insights. Normally, a report like that means scanning a pile of different data outputs and stitching them together by hand. “None of us have time to go through hundreds of customer emails and compile that ourselves,” she says.

Now she asks Siena. Most weeks it’s a simple question: “What are our customers asking about the most this week?” When she wants something specific, she’ll ask what problems customers are reporting with the products they receive.

Those answers matter beyond her inbox. CX hears about all of it: “If there’s a product issue, we’re going to hear about it. If there’s an issue with the website, we’re gonna hear about it. If someone didn’t like an ad we did, someone’s gonna hear about it.” Anything that improves that line of communication with product, marketing, operations, and ecommerce, she says, “really helps to prove our department’s worth.”

The same agent that clears the inbox is the one telling the company what is in it.

“CX is really like the heartbeat of the organization, because everything ties back to CX in a way.”

— Amanda

Growing without the job post

Most growing brands hire their way through each new market and each bigger peak. Halfdays trained its way through, and started a year before it had to.

Siena takes on more of the work each season, and Halfdays is already looking at what comes next, starting with Siena’s Shopping Agent.

The languages took one line. The year of training behind them is the part no brand can rush.