From missed calls to measurable growth - how Viva Brazil recovered revenue, reputation, and staff time with Aila.

Viva Brazil needed to fix a structural problem that was hurting its reputation and its revenue. Here's how Aila and TableFox solved it in two weeks.

Calls were being missed

Viva Brazil is a well-established Brazilian restaurant in Cardiff with a loyal customer base and a reputation for high-qualityservice. Like many hospitality businesses, it has faced sustained cost pressure over the past two years. Rising nationalliving wage obligations and increased business rates forced the business to take a hard look at where it could operatemore efficiently without compromising the guest experience.

Reception was the first casualty. Hours were reduced and responsibility for inbound calls was distributed across themanagement team. On paper, it was a workable solution. In practice, it created a problem that quickly became visible atevery level of the business.

Customers unable to get through were emailing head office directly to request bookings. Mystery diner reports, used bythe business to assess its own operational standards, were returning consistently poor scores on the reception category,with third-party assessors simply unable to reach anyone on the phone.

Mystery diner assessors were consistently unable to reach Viva Brazil by phone. Reception scores were failing across every assessment. Not because of the team, but because the structure made the problem unsolvable.

The problem had nothing to do with the quality of the team. Hospitality staff in the middle of a busy service are focused entirely on the customers in front of them, as they should be. Asking them to simultaneously manage inbound calls placed them in an impossible position. When a call came in during a packed service, the caller experience suffered regardless of how capable the person answering was. The environment worked against them.

"During peak service periods, balancing guest interaction with answering incoming calls became extremely challenging. Prioritising excellent customer service on the restaurant floor often meant calls could not be answered promptly."
Daniel, Operations Manager,
Viva Brazil

Their existing telecoms provider couldn't support the one capability the whole system depended on: live call transcription. The ability to read a caller's words mid-conversation and generate an AI response in real time. Without it, calls still had to be handled by human agents. And as long as that was true, RoboReception couldn't scale - and the dental practices relying on it couldn't either.

It was a different proposition to anything the business had tried before.

Viva Brazil had previously used a third-party phone booking tool as a stopgap. It was robotic, inflexible, captured limited booking information, and had no meaningful integration with the restaurant's booking system. It was a tool the business tolerated rather than trusted. Before committing to Aila, Daniel and his team ran a structured demo process, making test bookings to validate both the quality of the interaction and the integration with TableFox.

What struck them was not just that it worked, but how natural it felt. Aila handled each call with a level of fluency and conversational ease that left the team questioning whether they were listening to AI at all. Callers were engaging with it, following the conversation, and completing bookings without any friction or hesitation.

Built to fit the way the business operates, not the other way around.

Many AI voice solutions come as pre-packaged products with fixed functionality and limited scope for customisation.What Focus Group delivered for Viva Brazil was a bespoke integration between Aila and TableFox, built to fit the specificway the business operates rather than asking the business to work around the technology.

Aila answers inbound calls, handles bookings, captures customer information, and manages common enquiries, all witha conversational, natural tone indistinguishable from a human interaction. Every booking Aila handles flows directly andsecurely into TableFox in real time, complete with customer name, contact details, party size, booking notes, and anyallergy or dietary information shared during the call. Nothing sits in a holding queue. Nothing requires manualintervention. The booking is live in the system the moment the call ends.

For a restaurant where allergy and dietary information has real safety implications, the reliability of that integration is nota nice-to-have. It is a functional requirement, and it is met on every call.From sign-off to go-live, the full deployment was completed within two weeks. The challenges Viva Brazil had beenmanaging for months were addressed quickly, and return on investment was being realised within weeks rather thanmonths.

Fifty hours freed. Thousands in incremental revenue. Every call answered.

Viva Brazil did not set out to buy an AI product. It set out to solve a problem that was hurting its reputation, its mystery diner scores, and its revenue. Aila, integrated with TableFox, addressed all three.

Within its first three weeks, Aila contributed approximately £7,400 in additional gross revenue, representing an ROI ofover 3,400% in month one. The largest single booking handled by Aila to date was a party of 28, who provided card details, left birthday party notes, and came in.

Since deployment, Viva Brazil has recovered approximately 60% of the time previously spent managing front-of-housecall handling. Staff on the door at busy weekends are now focused entirely on seating customers. Every inbound call isanswered with the same tone, the same patience, and the same standard of engagement, whether it is a quiet Tuesday afternoon or a Saturday night during a major sporting event.

The next phase is already in discussion. In-call upselling, offering wine packages and booking extras at the point of thecall rather than waiting until guests arrive, follows the same logic TableFox already applies to its online booking flow. Ailawill apply it to every inbound call.

"With Aila managing phone enquiries and fully integrated with TableFox, the booking journeybecomes far more seamless. It allows our team to focus on what they do best, which is workface to face with guests. That's the way it should be."Andy, Managing DirectorViva Brazil
Andy, Managing Director
Viva Brazil