Voice Agent for Hospitality Industry
EFS DevOps built a conversational voice AI system for a multi-location hospitality brand handling 15,000+ customer calls daily — reducing call abandonment by 78%, saving ~1,000 labor hours monthly, and improving customer satisfaction by 28 points.
About the Customer
Industry: Restaurants & Service Operations
A multi-location hospitality brand with overloaded customer service lines during peak hours (lunch and dinner rushes). The operation received approximately 15,000 calls daily through 12 call centers with 180 full-time agents, yet suffered frequent missed calls and order errors.
Status: Full production since Q1 2025 with 24/7 operation handling live customer interactions.
The Challenge
Peak-hour call volume overwhelmed the 180-agent team. Customers abandoned 23% of calls, directly impacting reservations, orders, and customer satisfaction. Hiring additional agents was not cost-effective given variable call volume patterns. The brand needed an intelligent voice agent for inbound calls with human escalation for complex issues.
AWS Technology Stack
- Amazon Transcribe Streaming + Amazon Polly — Real-time bidirectional speech processing
- Amazon Bedrock (Claude 3 Sonnet) — LLM-powered dialogue management
- AppConfig Safety Policies — Keyword detection triggering automatic escalation (allergies, large parties, complaints)
- Amazon Connect + Step Functions — Intelligent call routing and escalation workflows
- S3 + OpenSearch Serverless — Transcript archival and semantic analytics
- SageMaker Pipelines — Weekly call-topic summaries for operations team
Safety & Compliance
- Guardrails prevent unsafe recommendations (food allergens, medical advice)
- Fallback to human agent within 1 second of trigger detection
- All calls logged and audited under GDPR-compliant retention policy
- Full transcript archival for quality assurance
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average call handling time | 6 minutes | 3.1 minutes | ↓ 48% |
| Call abandonment rate | 23% | 5% | ↓ 78% |
| Intent recognition accuracy | — | 0.90 F1 | — |
| Human handoff rate | 100% | 17% | ↓ 83% |
~1,000 labor hours saved monthly. Customer satisfaction improved by 28 points.
AWS Services
Amazon Bedrock (Claude 3 Sonnet), Amazon Transcribe Streaming, Amazon Polly, Amazon Connect, AWS AppConfig, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3, OpenSearch Serverless, SageMaker Pipelines, Step Functions.
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