Every shot on time.Every call on us.

Yes — this is the call Zavo handles best for coffee shops. The agent takes the full order against your live menu, including the fiddly bits: milk alternatives per drink, syrup pumps, an extra shot in the third flat white, a box of pastries if the case has them. It then sends a payment link by text, agrees a realistic collection time based on the buffer you've set for busy periods, and pushes the ticket to your bar however your workflow likes it — printed, on a screen, or as a text to the shift phone. The customer walks past the queue to a labelled order on the counter. No misheard names, no unpaid no-shows, and no barista holding a handset with wet hands.

The morning rush is when these orders arrive and when they used to die. Zavo never gets flustered: it can take a fourteen-drink office round at 8:05 while your team serves the queue, because the call simply doesn't touch the bar. It reads the order back, takes payment by link, and books a collection slot that respects how stretched the bar already is — if you've told it mornings need twenty minutes' lead time, that's what it quotes. For offices that order regularly, it recognises the caller and can start from 'the usual Friday round?'. Many shops find these rounds become standing weekly orders precisely because ordering stopped being painful for both sides.

Yes, and for roasting shops this is often the single most valuable thing it does. When a café, restaurant, or office manager calls about supply, Zavo switches into qualification mode: what's the business, where are they, what volume are they thinking, what machine and grinder do they run, who supplies them today, and when do they want to start. That brief lands with your head roaster immediately — by text, Slack, or your CRM — so the follow-up call happens the same day with full context. A wholesale account is worth thousands a year; the difference between winning and losing one is usually nothing more than which roastery sounded switched-on when the prospect rang round. Now that's you.

Within whatever depth you give it. You maintain a simple list — what's on espresso, what's on filter, the retail shelf, tasting notes, processes, roast dates, and the brew gear you stock — and Zavo answers from precisely that. A caller can learn the Colombia is a washed lot, the decaf is sugarcane process, V60 papers are in stock, and the next roast lands Thursday. If someone asks something deeper than your notes go — the farm's altitude, say — it offers to have a barista call back rather than inventing coffee facts, which your regulars would absolutely catch. Update the list when the menu rotates and every answer rotates with it.

Yes. You publish the schedule — Saturday intro cupping, Wednesday latte-art, a monthly home-espresso clinic — with capacity and price, and Zavo sells the seats. It offers genuine availability, takes payment by link so bookings are real rather than hopeful, and sends a reminder the evening before, which is what keeps a six-seat session from running at four. It also captures the useful extras: whether someone's a complete beginner, a gift booking for a partner, or a barista from another shop sharpening up. Shops that ran workshops on counter-sign marketing alone usually discover the phone fills them weeks out — especially around Christmas, when class vouchers quietly become a product of their own.

Exactly the ones you choose. A common setup: wholesale enquiries page the roaster, complaints and anything heated go to the manager on shift, suppliers and deliveries go through during off-peak only, and everything else — orders, stock questions, hours, class bookings — is completed by the agent without interrupting anyone. During opening hours Zavo can transfer live; outside them it captures details and schedules the call-back. You can also set quiet rules, like never transferring between 7:30 and 9:30 unless it's urgent. The effect is a phone that respects the bar's rhythm: the interruptions stop, but the calls that deserve a human still get one, faster and with notes attached.

No card number is ever spoken on the line — to a human or to the agent. When payment is due for a pre-order or class seat, Zavo texts the caller a secure link; they pay on their own phone through a PCI-compliant page, and the order or booking confirms the instant the payment settles. That keeps your shop entirely out of the business of handling card data by voice, which is both safer and one less compliance worry. Refund and cancellation rules follow whatever policy you set — full refund up to 24 hours before a class, for instance — and every payment is reconciled against its order automatically, so the till count doesn't grow a mystery line.

They're treated like the sensitive material they are. Calls are encrypted in transit and at rest, transcripts live behind role-based access with an audit log, and retention follows the window you choose. Your customers' numbers and habits are never sold, pooled, or used to train models for anyone else — a regular's daily oat cortado is between them and your shop. Zavo operates to GDPR standards with SOC 2 Type II-aligned controls, and subject-access requests are an export, not an archaeology project. If you run a loyalty scheme or Shopify subscriptions, data flows there under the same rules: into your tools, for your use, and nowhere else.

Those are its two best shifts. At peak, every caller is answered simultaneously and instantly; the queue at the till and the queue on the phone stop competing for the same pair of hands. The 8:15 caller ordering for their team doesn't hear an engaged tone because someone else rang about filter papers at 8:14. After close, the shop keeps a working phone: evening callers book Saturday's cupping, check Sunday hours, or leave a wholesale enquiry that's qualified and waiting when you cash up the next day. Early birds calling before open hear when the doors unlock and what's on espresso this week. None of it needs a rota — the agent's whole personality is that it's always on shift.

Yes, with each shop keeping its own character. Every site gets its own greeting, hours, menu, and rules: the flagship with the brew bar takes class bookings, the kiosk by the station is takeaway-only and says so, the suburban shop does weekend brunches. Calls to each number are answered as that shop, with that shop's facts. When it helps, the agent can cross-refer — the kiosk caller wanting a workshop gets pointed to the flagship's Saturday cupping. You see the whole estate in one dashboard: orders, leads, and call volumes per site, which makes it obvious where the wholesale enquiries cluster and which location's phone was the leakiest before.

Count three streams against one flat fee. First, orders: office rounds and pre-paid collections that used to ring out — even nine a month is a few hundred pounds. Second, events: class seats sold by phone with deposits, which for many shops turns a marketing exercise into real revenue. Third — the heavy one — wholesale: a single weekly-beans account won because the right call was answered and qualified can be worth more annually than the agent costs over several years. Zavo's dashboard logs every answered call, order, and lead, so a month in you can see precisely what the silent handset had been costing. Most owners find the office orders alone settle the argument.

No — and in speciality coffee that discipline matters, because your customers know their stuff. Zavo answers only from what you've configured: your menu, your stock list, your tasting notes, your policies. It will not improvise an origin story, guess a roast date, or agree that you definitely stock something you might not. Asked something outside its brief, it says so plainly, offers a call-back from the team, and logs the question — which doubles as a tidy list of what your customers wish your shop told them. Transcripts of every call mean any answer that reads slightly off gets reworded once, and the correction holds on every call thereafter. It's your knowledge, delivered consistently; never a confident guess.

Yes — the follow-through is automated and quietly valuable. Pre-orders get a confirmation text and a ping when the order's ready on the counter. Class bookings get a reminder the night before, which is the difference between full and half-full sessions. Beyond logistics, you can switch on gentle commercial touches: a back-in-stock text when a customer's favourite origin returns, a nudge when their usual monthly bag of beans is probably running low, or first word about a new workshop to people who attended the last one. Everything is opt-in and unmistakably from your shop, not a marketing platform — the tone is 'the Kenya's back', not a newsletter. You choose how much or how little of this runs.

About as long as a thorough deep-clean of the machine. Forwarding your number takes minutes and changes nothing for callers. Then you load the essentials: menu with milks and modifiers, current beans and retail stock, hours, class schedule, and your routing rules — who hears about wholesale calls, what happens to complaints. Most shops do this in under an hour and are answering by the same afternoon. The first week, skim transcripts during the lull and tighten any phrasing; shops with strong voices usually tweak the greeting until it sounds properly theirs. After that the maintenance is just keeping the stock list current, which takes less time than updating the chalkboard.

Yes. Zavo reads your Shopify catalogue so phone answers about retail stock match what the website says — if the natural Ethiopia sold out an hour ago, the agent already knows. Callers can ask it to set a bag aside for collection, get pointed to the right product for a gift, or hear how your beans subscription works and what the current rotation is. Order-status calls — 'has my subscription shipped?' — are answered from live data rather than bounced to email. If you run something custom alongside Shopify, a roast-scheduling sheet or a homegrown wholesale portal, we connect that during onboarding too; unusual stacks are normal here. The result is one consistent answer across your counter, your website, and your phone.