AI agents that convert enquiries into trial bookings
A children's performing-arts academy running programs across 16 campuses needed a way to handle parent enquiries, follow up with leads, book trial classes, and recover missed calls — without hiring a reception team.
The problem
Enquiries arrived via phone, web forms, and social media. Missed calls went unrecovered. Interested parents who didn't book immediately were lost. The founders — both creative directors — were spending hours on administrative follow-up instead of running their programs.
The business needed a system that could have natural conversations with parents both ways — answering inbound questions and proactively following up on leads — understand their children's ages and campus preferences, suggest appropriate classes from the timetable, and book trial sessions, all without human intervention.
What we built
An AI-powered growth platform with SMS and voice agents that handle both inbound service and outbound lead follow-up, a parent portal, and an admin CRM — built as a Turborepo monorepo with three applications and five shared packages.
SMS conversational agent
Claude Sonnet carries on natural text conversations with parents — asking about their children, matching them to the right program and campus from the live timetable, answering questions about schedules and pricing, and guiding them to book a free trial via Calendly. Falls back to Claude Haiku if Sonnet is unavailable.
Voice agent
An ElevenLabs-powered voice agent connected via Twilio SIP routing. Inbound calls are registered with ElevenLabs, which returns a SIP endpoint streamed back through Twilio's TwiML. The agent accesses the same knowledge base as the SMS engine and can book trials, answer campus questions, and hand off to a human.
Missed call recovery
When a call goes unanswered, a Twilio webhook triggers an automatic SMS follow-up. The AI agent picks up the conversation naturally, recovering leads that would otherwise be lost.
Knowledge base
Over 18 documents dynamically generated from the database — one per program, one per region, plus term dates and timetables per campus. Synced to ElevenLabs for the voice agent and queried directly by the SMS engine for class matching.
ActiveCampaign CRM integration
Every conversation syncs contacts, custom fields, deals, tags, and notes to ActiveCampaign in real time. 54 custom fields mapped — covering parent details, up to four children, program interests, campus preferences, and conversation outcomes.
Admin dashboard
A dedicated admin interface giving the founders complete visibility across all 16 campuses. Includes a pipeline board tracking leads through qualification stages, full conversation transcripts for every SMS and voice interaction, timetable management with capacity indicators, enrolment tracking, conversion analytics, and a knowledge base sync tool that pushes updated content to both AI agents.
Parent portal
A separate portal for enrolled families with magic link authentication — no passwords. Parents see their children's weekly schedule, manage family profile details, book trial classes through a guided 4-step wizard, re-enrol for upcoming terms, view their communication history, and share referral codes.
The outcome
The platform spans three applications: an API backend powering both AI agents, an admin dashboard giving the founders visibility across all 16 campuses, and a parent portal where families manage enrolments and bookings. Parents receive a response within minutes of their first contact — whether by phone, missed call, or web form. The SMS agent matches children to classes by age and location, answers questions from the knowledge base, and books trials via Calendly.
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