You knead.We'll write the orders.

Yes — completely, and more carefully than a busy counter ever could. Zavo works through your actual range: sizes and servings, sponge and filling combinations, icing style, and the dietary versions your bakehouse genuinely offers. It takes the inscription and reads it back letter by letter, which is the step that prevents the heartbreaks — the misspelled name, the wrong age on the board. It applies your lead times so nobody is promised a three-tier bake for tomorrow, agrees a collection slot, and secures a deposit by payment link before the order enters the book. What reaches your bakers is a complete, legible specification with a committed customer behind it, whether the order was placed at noon or at half past nine at night.

You keep it informed the same way you'd brief the counter — except it only needs telling once. Most bakeries give Zavo their standard daily bake list with typical sell-out patterns, plus batch times: the second sourdough bake lands at 2pm, baguettes finish at lunch, doughnuts are weekends only. The agent answers from that, and your team can update it in seconds when something sells through early. For callers who want certainty, it can take a set-aside — two loaves held under a name until closing — which turns a might-visit into a guaranteed sale. It's deliberately honest about uncertainty too: if you haven't confirmed what's left, it says stock is moving quickly and offers the set-aside rather than promising a shelf it can't see.

Yes, and it treats them like the four-figure enquiries they are. When a couple calls about a wedding cake, Zavo books a tasting straight into the baker's consultation diary — only the slots you've made available — and gathers the context that makes the meeting productive: the wedding date and venue, expected guest numbers, style and flavour leanings, and budget expectations if you want them asked. Confirmation and a reminder go out by text, so tastings actually happen. Couples ring several bakeries in one evening, usually after work when your shop is dark; being the bakery that answered at 8pm with a calm, organised booking process wins a measurable share of that work before anyone has tasted a crumb.

It's one of the most valuable things it does. A wholesale enquiry — a deli wanting daily loaves, a café after weekend pastries, a restaurant looking for burger buns — gets qualified on the spot: who they are, where they are, rough weekly volumes, delivery days, and when they'd want to start. That brief goes immediately to your head baker or owner by text or email, so the call-back happens the same day with the numbers already known. Existing wholesale customers are recognised too: a regular ringing to bump Friday's order from thirty loaves to forty gets the change recorded and confirmed, and the amended quantity appears on the right day's bake sheet without anyone transcribing a voicemail at dawn.

Card numbers never travel through the call. When a deposit or payment is due — a celebration cake, a large order, a wedding booking fee — Zavo texts the customer a secure link and they pay on their own phone through a PCI-compliant page. The order confirms automatically when payment lands, and the deposit is recorded against that order, so reconciliation is a glance rather than a hunt. Your refund and cancellation rules are applied exactly as you set them: full refund beyond 48 hours, deposit retained inside it, whatever your policy says. Bakers tell us deposits were the thing they always meant to enforce and rarely did when orders came in mid-rush — the agent simply never forgets to ask.

Only the ones you've asked for. A sensible bakery setup passes through wholesale enquiries, anything about today's collections, supplier and delivery problems, and complaints — and finishes everything else itself: orders, shelf questions, hours, tasting bookings. You can set quiet windows, too: nothing interrupts the bakehouse before 8am unless it's urgent, and nothing reaches your mobile after 7pm except tomorrow's emergencies. When a call is passed through, it arrives with a summary — who, what, and what's already been captured — so you're not starting the conversation blind with dough on your hands. Everything that didn't need you is waiting as a transcript and a tidy order entry whenever you next look.

Christmas is the fortnight the bakery phone goes from nuisance to impossibility — and the fortnight Zavo earns its year. You open your seasonal order book through the agent: mince pie quantities, festive bakes, Christmas cake sizes, final order dates, and collection windows for the 23rd and 24th. It then takes orders around the clock without the counter queue and the phone queue fighting for the same staff, applies cut-offs ruthlessly but politely, and closes lines as you sell out of capacity. Every order carries a deposit, which matters most in the season of uncollected bakes. Your team ends each December day with a clean, collated order list instead of a drawer of scraps — and January's resolution to 'sort the phone out' is already done.

Yes. Order details, names, numbers, and call recordings are encrypted in transit and at rest, access is restricted to your team and logged, and your customer list is never sold, shared, or used to train systems for anyone else. Zavo operates to GDPR standards with SOC 2 Type II-aligned controls, and you decide how long transcripts and order histories are retained. The agent also only discusses what you've approved — your products, your prices, your policies — so there's no risk of it speculating about anything else. If a customer asks what you hold on them, it's an export away. In practice: the data lives in your order book, works for your bakery, and goes nowhere else.

Both, and that's rather the point. A bakery is occupied at hours no other shop is and closed on days the public forgets, and the phone punishes you for both. Zavo answers during the early bake, so the 6:30am caller asking whether there'll be pastries for an office meeting gets a yes and a set-aside instead of ringing the supermarket. It answers on your closed Monday, takes Wednesday's order, and explains the closure without you ever knowing the call happened. And it answers in the evening, when most celebration cakes are actually ordered — by people who remembered after work. The order book fills around the clock; the bakers find out at a civilised hour.

Yes. The agent answers your main line with full knowledge of both operations: the shop with its hours and shelf, and the stall with its market days, pitch location, and the shorter range you take along. Callers asking where to find you on Saturday get the market answer; orders for stall collection are flagged separately on the bake sheet so the right trays go in the van. The same applies to a second shop, a weekend pop-up, or a seasonal kiosk — each location keeps its own facts, hours, and collection rules under one roof. You see one consolidated order book and one call log, sorted by where the customer is actually picking up, which is what prevents the right cake waiting at the wrong counter.

Tally three things against the flat fee. Cake orders first: most bakeries find around ten extra a month, placed in the evenings and during rushes when the counter couldn't take them — at typical celebration-cake prices, that alone covers the cost. Then waste avoided: deposits and reminders all but end the uncollected bake, and every set-aside is a sale that would have walked. Wholesale is the multiplier: even one new standing account a year, won because the enquiry was answered and qualified properly, is worth thousands. Zavo's dashboard shows every call, order, and deposit it handled, so after a month the question answers itself from your own figures — most owners stop debating it the first time a 9pm wedding enquiry appears in the morning's book.

No — it sells from your catalogue and nothing else. Zavo offers only the products, sizes, flavours, and dietary versions you've configured, applies your lead times to every promise, and quotes your prices exactly. If a caller asks for something outside the range — a flavour you don't do, a gluten-free version of something that can't be, a three-day turnaround on a tiered cake — it says no gracefully, offers the nearest thing you do make, and logs the request so you can spot demand worth adding. It never invents an answer to keep a caller happy, because in a bakery an invented yes becomes a real disappointment on a real birthday. Transcripts let you verify every promise made in your name, any time.

Yes — the evening before, every time. Each cake and large order triggers a reminder text with the collection day and time, which is the cheapest insurance a bakery can buy: the customer who genuinely forgot now remembers, the one whose plans changed tells you while there's still time to act, and Saturday morning's handovers run off a list of people who all know they're coming. Order confirmations go out at the moment of booking too, with the full specification — so any mishearing is caught days early by the customer themselves, not at the counter. For wholesale, the agent can confirm tomorrow's quantities each afternoon, catching the bumped order before it's baked wrong rather than after.

Less than a wedding consultation. You forward your existing number — customers notice nothing — and give Zavo the essentials: your range and prices, lead times per product, opening hours, collection windows, and who gets woken for what. For most bakeries that's an hour, much of it copying from the price list you already have. There's no hardware, nothing new at the till, and nothing for the counter team to learn; their experience is simply that the phone stops ringing at them. Spend the first week reading the odd transcript and adjusting phrasing — the way you'd correct a new Saturday hire, once — and after that the only maintenance is telling it when the range or hours change.

Not remotely — that's the standard bakery stack, and Zavo is built to respect it. The agent can deliver the day's orders exactly the way your bakehouse likes them: a single emailed or printed bake sheet each evening, sorted by collection time, with inscriptions and dietary flags highlighted. If you'd like it to write into the spreadsheet directly, we'll connect it during onboarding; if the wall calendar is sacred, the morning sheet simply gets pinned beside it. And if you ever move to Shopify or a till-based ordering system, the agent moves with you — same phone number, same voice, new plumbing underneath. The system adapts to how your bakery already works; the only change you should feel is a fuller order book.