Customer case study
One practice system across sales, service, and coaching
Hailie Miller runs 70 short-term rentals, a coaching program, and a VA placement agency on one rule: an hour of AI practice a day, every day. She reports a 100% performance increase across her teams.
Request a walkthrough of Kendo- 22 years old
- 70 short-term rentals
- Coaching program
- VA placement agency
- One of Kendo's earliest customers
The headline numbers
100%
Reported performance increase
Hailie reports this figure across students, callers, and ops, from her own count.
1 hour per caller, per shift
Practice cadence
Every cold caller, every shift, in place for more than a year. In her words, "one hour every day."
3 businesses
Running on one system
Short-term rentals, coaching, and VA placement share the same practice and scoring layer.
Before, loop, result
What changed
Same teams, same leads, same phones. Practice now happens before the call, and the call gets reviewed after.
Calls were recorded, almost none reviewed
Day one on real leads for new coaching students, script in hand, no practice first.
About four calls reviewed, out of everything her cold callers recorded.
No tracking at all on guest-service calls. Her words: "I wasn't even listening to them."
Practice first, then the phone
One hour of Kendo practice per cold caller, every shift, before the phone.
Scores and rankings everyone can see, walked in a Friday review.
Scenarios rebuilt from whatever went wrong on a real call.
What the operator sees now
- A 100% performance increase, as Hailie reports it across students, cold callers, and the wider operation.
- More leads arriving, because her cold callers are better on the phone.
- Faster yeses for coaching students, and more confidence getting them.
The evidence
One Kendo practice layer under three different teams
Three teams with almost nothing else in common run through the same four steps. Only the scenarios change: cold-call objections for the callers, guest incidents for customer service, industry objections for the coaching students.
Three teams feeding one shared practice layer
- LANE 01 Cold callers 1 hr/day, every shift Lead volume is up because her cold callers are better on the phone.
- LANE 02 Customer service Guest scenarios, tracked Responses get fine-tuned after the fact, down to the wording used on a guest issue.
- LANE 03 Coaching students AI prospects before real leads Objections rehearsed first: permitting, fundamentals, caps.
Shared Kendo layer, identical for all three
- Practice
- Score
- Leaderboard
- Friday review
100%
Hailie's reported performance increase across her teams
Her words: "100% increase. That's not even me just being nice." She measures it herself, across her students, her cold callers, and the wider operation.
"With the AI, it's harder than if you actually picked up the phone and called a lead because no matter what you say, there is another objection. So if you can master Kendo and score 80, 90, 100%, by the time you go pick up the call, you're going to know everything to say."
Hailie Miller, Airbnb investor and coach (8:10-9:20)
The operating model
How the three teams used Kendo
Three teams, one loop. The cadence is the part she will not move on: an hour a day, after more than a year on the job, no exception for tenure. The screens below are the Kendo surfaces each part of that loop runs on.
An hour of practice, and every call comes back reviewed
Her cold callers practice inside Kendo before the shift's real calls, and the calls they make come back as a written summary she can read in a minute.
- One hour of practice per caller, every single day of their shift.
- Still required after more than a year on her cold-calling team.
- Every call comes back with strengths, weaknesses, and a next step, instead of a raw recording.
"All the cold callers, they use Kendo for one hour of practice every single day of their shift. They've been with me for over a year now, but I still every single day I don't care. One hour every day."
Hailie Miller, Airbnb investor and coach (1:47-2:52)
Scenarios built from what actually went wrong
When a guest call is handled badly, Hailie turns that situation into a practice scenario and puts it on the service team's path.
- Specific wording is corrected and then rehearsed, down to how a lock problem gets answered.
- Practice paths carry the scenarios, so a fix is trained rather than mentioned once.
- The driver is Airbnb getting more stern with hosts, so the guest experience has to hold up.
A score before the first real lead
Students rehearse against AI prospects trained on the objections they will actually hit, and the score is what says they are ready for a real one.
- Permitting, fundamentals, caps: the objections are loaded into the practice prospects.
- 80, 90, 100% on Kendo first, instead of learning on a qualified lead.
- Their own teams get trained the same way once the students have it.
"Instead of blowing through qualified leads their first day, I have them practice inside of Kendo with my trained prospects on different things that are really big objections when you come into the industry."
Hailie Miller, Airbnb investor and coach (3:01-3:36)
Accountability
What tracking actually changed
The intent was always there. The follow-through was not, because reviewing calls by hand does not survive a busy week.
Friday, leaderboard, rankings
Every Friday, Hailie runs team calls where she shows the leaderboard and the rankings. For students she turns it into competition: "Here's number one, number two today. Let's get some calls going."
About 30 minutes a day
Reviewing used to mean seven-minute audio recordings and handwritten notes, which is why it did not happen. She now spends about 30 minutes a day tracking inside Kendo, and says the numbers are what keep her in there.
Summary
The bottom line
| Measure | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Reported performance increase | 100% | Hailie's own figure |
| Practice cadence | 1 hour a day per caller | Standing rule, more than a year |
| Her tracking time | About 30 minutes a day | From Hailie's interview |
| Businesses on the system | 3 | Rentals, coaching, VA placement |
Scale of the account: one operator running 70 short-term rentals, a coaching program, and a VA placement agency. Figures come from the recorded interview with Hailie Miller.
"This saves me time, which is the most important thing to me, and it increases my revenue. Do a little business audit and see where you're actually at, not where you think you are."
Hailie Miller, Airbnb investor and coach (14:43-16:22)
Run your own calls through the same loop
Walk through the call review, the targeted practice, the scoring, and the weekly review on your own recordings and your own success criteria.
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