The Big Table Group Chooses PolyAI's Customer-Led Conversational Assistant to Improve Customer Experience and Enable Growth

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28 Feb, 2023, 13:00 GMT

All calls answered and up to 75% fully handled at Bella Italia and Café Rouge by PolyAI

LONDON, Feb. 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- PolyAI today announced that leading independent UK restaurant group, The Big Table has chosen its customer-led conversational assistant to improve customer experience and enable growth. The Big Table Group wanted 100% of customer calls to be answered, which is now being achieved with PolyAI's support at its Bella Italia and Café Rouge restaurants. Many of these calls, such as reservations and answering questions, do not require a member of staff to help customers. Up to 75% of calls and 91% of telephone booking requests have therefore been handled completely by PolyAI's conversational assistant.

With so many calls fielded by PolyAI's conversational assistant, the pressure has been taken off staff at Bella Italia and Café Rouge. They are now able to more effectively focus on customers already at its restaurants, and to only answer the phone to help customers with special requirements.

The restaurant group receives >2.5M calls annually across its three major brands: Las Iguanas, Bella Italia and Café Rouge. However, almost 50% of incoming customer calls to the group's 150+ restaurants were being missed or abandoned. This resulted in unhappy customers, lost revenue and staff being torn between serving customers at tables or answering the phone to new ones.

"Creating the exceptional dining experiences that our customers expect means that we have to focus on digital advancements, data, improved technical services and process efficiencies that really add value," commented Sarah Pope, CIO at The Big Table Group, "PolyAI allowed us to achieve this in a very short timeframe and make a positive impact which was easy to quantify and self-evident to our customers, staff and board. Never missing a call, helping customers and thereby increasing revenues at Bella Italia and Café Rouge is a great result!"

In addition, the data garnered from customer conversations with the PolyAI conversational assistant is now providing actionable insight for the team at The Big Table Group. This allows them to produce personalised communications to more effectively engage with customers and drive up-sell. Any changes required, as a result of this insight, can also be quickly rolled out across the business through PolyAI's solution.

"Customer-led conversational assistants put customers in the driver's seat, allowing them to solve problems through natural conversations," commented Nikola Mrkšić, CEO at PolyAI. "Effective automation is only possible when customers have the freedom to speak however they want, and the confidence that they are receiving the best possible outcomes. The Big Table Group has launched an automated experience that customers trust, freeing up their staff to focus on the guests that need them the most."

Hear more on The Big Table Group / PolyAI use case when Devon Trew, Head of IT Projects and Operations at The Big Table Group joins Nathan Liu, Head of Deployments at PolyAI on stage at the European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit, 15-16^th March.

About PolyAI
PolyAI builds customer-led conversational assistants that conduct natural conversations with customers to solve their problems. Our conversational assistants understand customers, regardless of what they say or how they say it. We serve enterprises where customer conversation is an important part of doing business. Our customers include some of the leading names in banking, hospitality, insurance, retail, and telecommunications.

Our enterprise clients deploy PolyAI conversational assistants to cut down on wait times and free up live staff to focus on calls requiring empathy and judgment. As a result, our enterprise clients see improved customer satisfaction, employee retention and operational efficiency.

PolyAI was born in the same University of Cambridge lab that pioneered speech recognition. Together, we have published over 200 papers which have been cited over 14,000 times, and registered 7 patents with 4 more pending. PolyAI has offices in London, New York and San Jose.

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