At six in the evening the phones at Luxury Flooring went quiet. Its customers kept calling. Someone ready to order a floor would ring, reach a voicemail, leave a message, and hear nothing back, because nobody played the messages.
Andrew Afonin wanted those calls answered, and turned into something his team could act on the next morning. So he put an AI voice agent on the after-hours line.
Luxury Flooring is a UK online flooring retailer in Leeds. It replaced a dead-end after-hours voicemail with CloudTalk's AI voice agent, which answers, looks up orders, and opens a HubSpot ticket, and the company now manages two to three percent more customers as a result.
About Luxury Flooring
Luxury Flooring is a UK online flooring retailer based in Leeds, part of UK Trade Furnishings. It sells to homeowners and trade customers across the country, and its small team handles a high volume of customer calls every day.
Andrew Afonin, Head of Digital Innovation, leads the company's work to automate and connect its systems.
My main aim is to implement the proper framework and infrastructure within the company for the efficient automation of the business processes.
That runs across every department, and through how the company talks to its customers.
Problem
Luxury Flooring's phone lines went quiet at the end of each working day. Its customers carried on calling. Anyone who rang after hours reached a voicemail, and Andrew is blunt about where those messages went: "No one listened to the voicemails," he says.
For an online retailer, those missed calls were not only support questions. Many were people ready to buy. With no one to pick up, a real sales inquiry became an unheard voicemail, and the customer moved on. Andrew wanted after-hours calls answered, logged, and turned into something his team could act on the next morning.
Evaluation
Andrew had looked at other AI voice tools before choosing CloudTalk, and one thing set it apart: the people behind it. He'd already walked away from another platform over exactly this.
To be absolutely honest with you, the response time is one of the reasons I rejected another platform. When I ask something, I send a message, and they reply a day or two later. It doesn't work like that.
CloudTalk also fit the systems he already ran, with order and product lookups from the company's e-commerce store and tickets in HubSpot, and it let the team keep their existing phone setup by forwarding after-hours calls through to the voice agent.
Solution
Luxury Flooring put CloudTalk's AI voice agent on their after-hours line. When a call comes in outside working hours, the agent answers, looks up order and product details from the company's store, and handles the caller's question. When it can't fully resolve something, it collects the details and creates a ticket in HubSpot, routed to customer support, or to a sales rep when the caller wants to buy.
When people want to buy something, they leave a message with the voice agent. It asks questions about what they need, and we create a ticket for the sales reps.
The effect is that every after-hours call survives the night as a structured, actionable ticket in the system the team already works in.
Results
Calls that used to disappear now turn into customers. The payoff shows up where it matters most.
We can see now a growing number of customers thanks to this voice assistant. It's like a two or three percent, which is great.
Those are buyers who, before, were lost the moment the office closed. Now they're captured, qualified, and waiting for the team every morning.
The agent earned the team's trust by doing exactly what it should.
I can see that the voice agent creates tickets, those tickets are being processed, and I don't have any complaints from customer support. It means it does the job.
His customer support lead was won over early on.
There is really good feedback from customer support. The head of customer support likes it.
Nothing slips through overnight anymore. After-hours calls once hit a voicemail nobody played. Now every one is answered, the caller's details are captured, and a ready-to-action ticket lands in HubSpot by morning.
The rollout is just starting. Luxury Flooring is early in what Andrew sees as a much bigger programme, and the company is moving onto a unified Microsoft environment.
As we move onto a unified Microsoft environment, CloudTalk will become a part of that infrastructure.
Next on his list:
- A daytime pilotSo the agent also handles calls during business hours, not only after them.
- Deeper store integrationSo customers can place orders by voice.
- A richer knowledge baseSo the agent answers even more on the first try.
- The group's other brandsLuxury Flooring is one of several under UK Trade Furnishings.
