FrontdeskAI Turns Gym’s Virtual Customer Service into $30K Savings a Year
Business AI developer FrontdeskAI has reached a new benchmark, saving its client Sensory Fitness tens of thousands of dollars a year and boosting its membership enrollment rates and revenue at the same time. The success of the virtual assistant in helping Sensory Fitness also shows how even small businesses are starting to explore the potential of voice AI to improve their practices.
AI Gets into Shape
FrontdeskAI’s voice assistant for fitness companies is named Sasha. When people call Sensory Fitness, Sasha answers the call and is able to carry out conversations about the gym and its features and help enroll people in its programs. For a small but quickly growing gym, not needing a large front-desk staff is a real boon. More than 160 calls that would otherwise have gone unanswered were instead handled by Sasha. The AI made and rescheduled appointments, informed callers about the gym’s hours, and helped the gym sign up more than two dozen new customers every month on average.
“Sasha for Fitness by FrontdeskAI service has maintained the quality and speed of our customer engagement, and it is accelerating the ease and speed with which we can sign up new customers: $1,500 in additional monthly recurring revenue speaks for itself,” Sensory Fitness owner Enrique Gomez said in a statement. “And, while we did not deploy FrontdeskAI with the intention to save money, the ability to save around $30k in [operating expenses] is an excellent bonus.”
While a notable success for FrontdeskAI, Sensory Fitness is one of hundreds of small businesses using its AI technology. The two-year-old company closed a $2 million funding round in March led by Pi Ventures to fuel its expansion and has been rapidly adding new clients since then.
Small Business AI is Big Business
FrontdeskAI isn’t alone in exploring ways to provide businesses with AI customer services. Google created its CallJoy program to perform some of the same functions, albeit more as a receptionist answering questions rather than actually carrying out scheduling like FrontdeskAI. More closely related, but for different industries, are IPsoft’s Amelia platform, which focuses on healthcare and helps hospitals and insurers arrange and manage patient care. The virtual agents developed by Inference Solutions are also designed to smooth the interaction between customers and call centers, including for larger companies like AT&T.
The power of conversational AI to both save money and generate revenue for small businesses is truly enormous. A major Gartner report last year put the value of virtual agents in 2017 at $300 billion, and projected that it will grow to $1.2 trillion by 2030. As the software becomes more sophisticated and people become more comfortable interacting with AI to carry out their scheduling and answer their questions, companies like Sensory Fitness are going to become more common, while the idea of needing to leave a message on voicemail instead of talking to FrontdeskAI or a similar program may seem as outdated as tape answering machines.
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