During a recent company offsite in Miami, I proposed integrating ChatGPT into our product to help our customers save time when replying to clients. At first, the team was a bit skeptical as every startup these days seems to be “slapping some AI” on their product to keep up with the latest trends.
However, when we started discussing our use case more, we realized that AI could actually help our customers with one of their most time-consuming tasks - replying to clients. As a CRM for restaurants to manage private events, our customers spend most of their time replying to guest emails. Furthermore, the questions guests are asking, such as “Are you available on this date?” can be answered by the data already in our system as our customers manage their venue availability with our system.
When it comes to winning a new client, few things compare to quickly responding to that client while they are considering different options. By replying quickly, the sales representative can help the client quickly decide if their business is the right fit for the client. However, replying quickly is time-consuming, especially when you’re trying to send personalized responses while juggling other clients and tasks.
Getting Started
After some discussion, we decided to build a prototype. While the Perfect Venue sales team was hard at "work" making cold calls by the pool, the engineering team got to work building an “AI Reply” feature that would help our customers send fast, but personalized responses.
Here are some of the key steps we took:
- Understanding Tone: One of the challenges with Generative AI tools is that they don’t match the tone of the author, so the author is forced to go back and heavily edit the text. We solved this by incorporating the author's tone into the process.
- Intelligent Responses: Using real-time, accurate data within our application, the AI provides intelligent answers regarding event space availability, capacities, and more.
- Refined Re-phrasing with GPT 3.5: While we use GPT 4 to generate the initial draft, we decided to use GPT 3.5 for our “rephrase” functionality as it is faster and cheaper than GPT 4.
Feature Overview
With the “AI Reply” feature now out, we are getting customer feedback to keep improving it further. We’re excited to continue helping the local businesses we serve compete with big chains by providing them easy to use and affordable software for their most profitable revenue stream - private events.
One of the things I love most about building software at Perfect Venue is that we are a small, nimble, and collaborative team. Whenever I have a new idea I'm able to quickly share the idea with the team, discuss if it's a good idea, and ship the feature. It has been awesome to be at the ground floor of a startup where I get to have such a large impact on our customers every day and build an awesome engineering culture from day 1.
Join Us
As the #1 rated product on G2.com for our category, we are always growing our engineering team to be able to keep up with demand and continue improving our product. If you're a foodie that loves to code, click here to see our open roles.
