At HireBOB we love to share stories of how businesses across the leisure sector are leveraging the capabilities of AI employees to drive efficiencies and improved performance. So we recently asked Charlie Bull, Marketing and Communications Manager at Brio Leisure, to share his experience of how service delivery has improved since the utilisation of HireBOB AI employees.

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What made you think of bringing AI into the business?

Like others across the sector I had heard about the excitement surrounding AI employees, and how their use could benefit leisure facility operators. We knew that within the business we had areas where our service level and customer experience was not as good as it could be, essentially, our staffing level could not cope with the demand. Rather than recruiting more people, which would have a high cost, we started to chat to HireBOB and explore how AI employees could be a more cost effective and scalable solution

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What did you want AI to achieve?

We had recognised an ongoing issue with the volume of phone calls that our reception team were receiving. On analysis, we identified that only 20% of incoming calls were being answered. Obviously there is an issue there that we were not delivering a brilliant experience for our customers, there was a pressure on our reception team to balance the constant flow of face to face interactions and telephone enquiries during the busiest periods, and also an unknown opportunity cost of how many sales enquiries, booking requests and customer service issues we were missing each day.

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We had previously considered a centralised ‘call centre’ approach to deal with the volume of calls and manage a manual web chat, but the set up costs, recruitment and management of people and the ability to deal with the volume of incoming enquiries was still too inefficient.

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We recognised that there was a solution in implementing AI to handle enquiries for us, educating our customers to utilise conversational AI through our App and website rather than picking up the phone.

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What has been the experience so far?

We launched HireBOB across the business in January 2024, and since then our customer service experience has radically changed. Call volume has significantly reduced to a manageable rate for our team, and our customers now engage with HireBOB as a preferred communication method through our website and App. Our AI employees are responding to almost 2,000 enquiries per month 24 hours a day, with a response rate average of 1.85 seconds.

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For the first time we have full visibility of our enquiry insights, allowing us to measure goals, look at the sentiment of our customers, map popular questions, and view every response.

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We introduced AI into the business to deliver efficiency, but our commercial performance has also increased with a significant shift in online joiners as the AI employees handle membership enquiries, nurture the prospects and signpost them to join online.

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What’s next?

We have seen the capabilities and benefits that AI employees are delivering across the business from a service perspective, so now we want to leverage this more to support the commercial performance of our Swim Lessons programme.

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In the coming weeks we will be launching more online functionality for the sale of swim lesson memberships, using AI employees to deal with sales enquiries, assessing the correct lesson stage for the learner to enter the programme, and then linking them to join online. This will save a huge amount of administrative time and process for our swim team, freeing them up to focus more on programme delivery.

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