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.
In plain terms
A text-and-phone assistant that answers parent enquiries, follows up on leads, and books trial classes on its own — live and handling real enquiries.
Handles the front desk
It replies to parents by text or phone, matches their child to the right class and campus, and books a trial class — no reception team needed.
Stops leads slipping away
When a call is missed or a parent doesn't book right away, it follows up automatically, so the founders get those hours back instead of chasing admin.
It's yours to keep
The system, your customer records, and every conversation belong to the academy — we tune it on retainer, but you own it, not a subscription that ends when the bill does.
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
A 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 trial class via a Squarespace deposit link. Falls back to Claude Haiku if Sonnet is unavailable.
Voice agent
An ElevenLabs-powered voice agent connected through Twilio. Inbound calls are registered with ElevenLabs, which returns TwiML that connects the caller to the agent over a real-time WebSocket media stream, with a voicemail fallback if the agent is unavailable. 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
Around 23 documents dynamically generated from the database — one per program, one per region, plus term dates and per-region timetables. 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.
How it fits together
One backend, every channel routes through it
Read it as a wheel: the academy's own backend sits at the centre, and every parent channel and connected service hangs off it as a spoke. Nothing on the outside talks directly to anything else on the outside — every enquiry, booking and CRM update passes through the middle, where the same knowledge and rules apply.
Academy backend (the brain)
Every channel shares one knowledge base and routes through one backend, so a parent gets the same answer by text, by phone, or in the portal.
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. It responds to a parent within minutes of their first contact — whether by phone, missed call, or web form — matching children to classes by age and location, answering from the knowledge base, and booking trials via a Squarespace deposit link. The AI agents are live — handling real parent enquiries by text and phone against the academy's own numbers — while paid billing and the broad parent-portal rollout are still to come. The agents run a soft-launch on the migrated family roster across all sixteen campuses. And it is the academy's own — we tune the prompts and the pipeline on retainer, but the system, the CRM data, and the conversations belong to them.
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