Viva Brazil is a well-established Brazilian restaurant in Cardiff, with a loyal customer base and a reputation for high-quality service.
Like many hospitality businesses, it has faced sustained cost pressure over the past two years, from rising national living wage obligations to increased business rates, and needed to run more efficiently without compromising the guest experience.
Industry
Hospitality: restaurant
Product
Integration
TableFox
Outcomes
Grow your business, improve customer experience
Go-live
2 weeks
To manage overheads, reception hours were reduced and inbound calls were shared across the management team. On paper it worked. In practice, calls were missed during service, and customers who couldn’t get through started emailing head office to book.
Mystery diner reports returned consistently poor scores for reception, with assessors simply unable to reach anyone on the phone. The problem was never the team. Staff in a busy service are rightly focused on the guests in front of them.
“During peak service periods, balancing guest interaction with answering incoming calls became extremely challenging. Prioritising excellent customer service on the restaurant floor often meant calls could not be answered promptly.”
Daniel, Operations Manager, Viva Brazil
Viva Brazil had used a third-party phone booking tool as a stopgap. It was robotic, inflexible, captured limited booking information and didn’t connect to the restaurant’s booking system. Aila was different from the first test call.
Before
With Focus AI
Answering
Calls missed during service
Every call answered
Booking details
Limited information captured
Name, contact, party size, notes and allergies
Booking system
No integration
Live in TableFox as the call ends
Caller experience
Robotic and inconsistent
Natural, warm and consistent
Staff time
Managers juggling calls
60% of call handling time recovered
“I didn’t expect customers booking large group events to feel comfortable interacting with AI. Seeing someone confidently arrange a 28-person birthday booking through the system was a real turning point.”
Daniel, Operations Manager, Viva Brazil
A bespoke integration between Aila and TableFox, rather than a packaged product.
Aila answers inbound calls, handles bookings, captures customer information and manages common enquiries in a natural, conversational tone. It is GDPR compliant, responds only from approved sources and has built-in guardrails: if it can’t answer, it says so.
Every call answered
However busy the floor, every caller gets the same warm, unhurried response.
Booked straight into TableFox
Bookings land in TableFox in real time, with nothing left in a holding queue.
Every call answered
Allergy and dietary information is taken on the call and passed through on every booking.
How a booking works
A guest calls and Aila answers
Aila takes name, contact details and party size
Notes, allergies and dietary needs are captured
The booking is live in TableFox as the call ends
From contract sign-off to go-live took two weeks.
Before committing, Daniel and his team ran a structured demo, making test bookings to check both the quality of the conversation and the TableFox integration. What struck them was how natural it felt, and return on investment followed within weeks rather than months.
1.
Test
Test bookings made through a structured demo to prove the conversation and the integration.
2.
Integrate
A bespoke TableFox integration built around how the restaurant takes bookings.
3.
Go live
Live within two weeks of sign-off, answering every inbound call.
In its first three weeks, Aila delivered a 5% uplift in bookings and around £7,400 in additional gross revenue, an ROI of over 3,400% in month one.
About 60% of the time previously spent on front-of-house call handling has been recovered, so staff on the door at busy weekends focus on seating guests. Booking errors are eliminated, and allergy and dietary information is captured and passed on every time.
Every caller gets the same warm, unhurried experience, whether it’s a quiet Tuesday afternoon or a Saturday night during a major sporting event. The business expects Aila’s booking uplift to reach 10% as the deployment matures.
A party of 28, end to end.
Aila took card details, captured birthday notes and confirmed the booking without any human involvement. The party came in.
Viva Brazil's AI already answers order questions on its own. The next step is helping before customers even ask.
AI adoption isn’t one big switch. With the agent acting on live order data, the next gains come from bringing it earlier into the customer journey.
Reliable foundations
Systems and teams joined up
Data improving how work gets done
AI acting, not just reporting
Where the next gains could come from
Sell more before guests arrive.
In-call upselling is already in discussion: offering wine packages and booking extras on the call, using the TableFox integration that’s already in place.
From 5% towards 10% of bookings.
The business expects Aila’s booking uplift to reach 10% as the deployment matures.
Hear what every caller wants.
Patterns across every call, from popular questions to busy times, could help shape service and staffing.
Give the team even more time back.
More of the common enquiries that still reach staff could be handled on the call, end to end.
