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They fill every trial slot without adding a single coordinator.
Single-centre table tennis academy
The challenge
The academy runs coaching programmes out of a single centre — juniors, adults and a competitive squad. Enquiries arrive from a website form, two ad platforms and a phone line that rings through to whoever is not on a table, which during coaching hours is nobody.
Roughly seven in ten enquiries came in between 6pm and 10pm, exactly when the hall was busiest and the two coordinators were running sessions. Those parents got a call back the following afternoon, if at all. By then a good number had already booked a trial somewhere else.
The trial slot was the whole business. A parent who attends a free trial converts at a rate the academy can predict almost to the percentage point; a parent who never books one converts at zero. The bottleneck was never the coaching or the pricing — it was the twelve-hour gap between “I'm interested” and somebody picking up the phone.
The partnership
IntrLume deployed one voice agent trained on the coaching timetable, the age brackets each programme accepts, the squad trial criteria and the fee structure. It answers the inbound line and calls every new enquiry back, whichever channel it came from.
The agent asks the four things a coordinator would ask — the player's age, whether they have played before, which evenings work, and whether they are after coaching or the competitive squad — then offers the trial slots actually free that week and books one. Because it reads the same timetable the coordinators do, it never offers a slot that has already gone.
Parents switch between English and the local language mid-sentence, and the agent follows without being asked. When somebody wants to talk about a bespoke arrangement — a sibling discount, a mid-term start, a player moving up to the squad — the call transfers live to a coordinator with everything said so far already summarised.
Two days before each trial, the agent calls to confirm. That single call was not in the original scope; it was added in week three, after the academy saw how many booked slots were going unattended.
The results
Trial bookings roughly quadrupled within six weeks, on the same enquiry volume and with the same two coordinators. The median time from enquiry to a real conversation fell from most of a day to three minutes, and evening enquiries — the majority — stopped being a category the academy simply lost.
The confirmation call cut no-shows by about three fifths, which mattered more than anyone expected: an empty trial slot costs a coach's hour and a table, both of which had been quietly written off as unavoidable.
The coordinators did not lose their jobs and did not spend the day on the phone. They spent it on the two or three conversations a week that genuinely needed a person, with a summary already written and the enquirer's history already in front of them.
By the numbers
4× — trial bookings per week, same team
3 min — median time from enquiry to callback
62% — fewer trial no-shows
0 — enquiries left uncontacted