PolyAI Agents Sweeten Interactions for Hello Sugar

Hello Sugar is a nationwide beauty and hair removal company with more than 160 salons across the country, with plans for 200 locations by the end of this year and 500 a little further down the road.

Known for its sleek, modern aesthetic and exceptional client experience, the company, which is based in Mesa, Ariz., has other aspirations.

“Our goal is to be the most tech-forward company in our industry,” says Austin Towns, chief technology officer and company co-founder.

That wasn’t the case when the company launched seven years ago. With 15 initial locations, it contracted with an offshore contact center operator to handle all its customer communications. As the company grew, executives realized that they either needed to hire far more agents or employ new technology to enable customers to do more through self-service.

Demand had been swamping their 30 receptionists, leaving more than 20,000 calls unanswered monthly.

“About two to three years ago, we started looking at other alternatives that could give better response times and better service to our customers,” Towns recalls. “We started looking at text messaging first because our customer base is young and prefers to text rather than call.”

Artificial intelligence was just starting to emerge, and Hello Sugar originally went with an AI solution that could handle only texts. It worked for a while, successfully handling up to 70 percent of all customer communications. But as the company continued to grow, that solution proved to be inadequate.

The company was receiving 30,000 calls a month in addition to texts.

“It’s impossible for us to be a national franchise and not take phone calls,” Towns says. “Most of our negative reviews were a result of that.”

So the company sought an AI-based solution that could handle voice calls as well as texts.

Hello Sugar executives explored several options and eventually landed on PolyAI. “PolyAI is the best in the business. We wanted our customer experience to be the best in the business,” Towns says.

Partnering with PolyAI, Hello Sugar launched a 24/7 lifelike voice system now handling bookings, payments, and FAQs, all while keeping its personal brand identity intact. Now all calls are handled within Hello Sugar’s home state of Arizona.

PolyAI’s voice agents are designed to create seamless, humanlike interactions. They are built on a conversational AI architecture that includes generative AI, natural language understanding, dialogue management, automated speech recognition, and natural speech synthesis.

PolyAI’s development process includes training the agents on extensive datasets from real-world conversations so they can handle complex, open-ended dialogues.

Towns adds that one competitor that Hello Sugar initially considered had very robotic-sounding automated voices. By contrast, customers can talk to the PolyAI solution for a minute or two before they realize they aren’t speaking with a human.

After vetting the PolyAI solution for six months, Hello Sugar signed with PolyAI in February of this year, then went live four months later. The integration of the solution took that long because Hello Sugar has a complex AI infrastructure.

“We initially went live with one location and saw instant success,” Towns says. “We were seeing 30 percent to 40 percent automation right out of the gate. Now we’ve hit a 55 percent automation rate.”

Prior to the rollout, the company was only booking about 5 percent to 10 percent of clients through automation

Many of the current automated bookings are new clients who would likely have been lost if re-directed to text as they were in the past, according to Towns. “This gives them a better experience overall.

Another key metric for Hello Sugar was the drop in escalation tickets, leading to an increase in positive customer sentiment.”

As excited as Towns is to have up to 55 percent of all interactions handled through self-service, he hopes to push that figure to 80 percent within the next year. He thinks it can be accomplished.

The Payoff

Since going live, PolyAI agents have done the following for Hello Sugar:

• answered 100 percent of calls in Hello Sugar’s home state of Arizona;
• achieved 56 percent containment, with complex calls transferred to human agents; and
• booked 50 percent of appointments in less than three minutes.