Pour the tea.The line is covered.

Yes — sittings are the heart of what it does for a tea room. You define how your room actually works: which sittings you serve, how many covers each can take, how much notice the full afternoon tea requires, and when final numbers are due for larger parties. Zavo books strictly inside those rules, writing each reservation into ResDiary, OpenTable, or the calendar you keep behind the counter, complete with party size, occasion, and dietary notes. If a caller asks for a sitting that's full or too soon, it offers the nearest alternative rather than a flat no — and if you still keep a treasured paper book, it can simply send each booking as a text or a printed morning list instead.

It will enforce it more reliably than a busy human ever could. Notice rules exist because your bakers need time — the sandwiches cut fresh, the scones baked that morning, the gluten-free stand prepared separately — and one sympathetic exception made on a frantic phone call can throw a whole service. Zavo applies your notice windows consistently and explains them charmingly: a caller wanting tomorrow's full tea hears why the kitchen needs the time, gets offered the next available sitting, and is told a cream tea is possible sooner if they'd like it. You can set different rules per menu — same-day cream teas, two days for the full tea, a week for parties over ten — and the agent honours each without ever sounding like a rulebook.

With the care those bookings deserve. When a caller mentions an occasion, Zavo gently gathers what your team needs to make it special: the celebration itself, the guest of honour, whether it's a surprise, the numbers, the sitting they'd prefer, and any candles-and-cake arrangements you offer. It records dietary swaps at the same time, so the coeliac aunt is catered for from the start rather than discovered at the table. For parties above your threshold it takes a deposit by secure link, which turns hopeful bookings into committed ones. Everything lands in your diary as a tidy note, and if it's a surprise, that's flagged — so nobody on your team innocently mentions the party when the guest of honour happens to call.

Yes, with the seriousness food allergies demand. You configure exactly what your kitchen offers — gluten-free scones with a day's notice, vegan cream as standard, no nut-free guarantee because of the bakery next door, whatever is true for you — and Zavo communicates precisely that, never an optimistic improvisation. Crucially, it captures requirements at booking time, attached to the reservation, so your kitchen preps the right stands before the party arrives instead of improvising mid-sitting. For anything outside its configured knowledge, it takes the question down and promises a call-back from the kitchen rather than guessing. Many tea rooms find this alone justifies the agent: the awkward, error-prone allergy conversation at the table mostly disappears.

Those calls get treated as the prize they are. Tour operators, WI branches, and probus clubs plan months ahead, ring during weekday office hours — often exactly when your room is in full service — and simply move to the next tea room on their list if nobody picks up. Zavo answers, takes the full picture (date, headcount, arrival window, menu preference, coach parking needs), and escalates it to you immediately rather than burying it in a message book. You ring back the same day with the details already in hand, which is usually all it takes to win the booking. A single thirty-five-cover coach party on a quiet Wednesday can match a weekend's takings; not missing that call is the point.

Of course — you decide the rules and the agent follows them. A typical tea room setup passes through group and coach enquiries, suppliers calling about deliveries, anything about today's sittings, and any caller who is upset or confused, while bookings, menu questions, voucher sales, and opening-hours calls are completed without interrupting the room. During service Zavo can transfer live to the counter phone or the owner's mobile; after hours it captures everything and lines up the morning's call-backs in order of importance. The practical effect is that your phone stops crying wolf: when it does ring through to a human, it's a call genuinely worth putting the teapot down for.

Yes, end to end. Voucher callers are the easiest sale a tea room ever gets — they've already decided, they just need someone to take their money — and they're routinely lost because the phone rang during a sitting. Zavo describes your options (cream tea for two, the full afternoon tea, champagne upgrades), takes payment through a secure link sent by text, and has the voucher delivered by email, ready to print or forward. It handles the December surge without breaking stride, which matters because voucher season and party season are the same fortnight. Card details are never spoken aloud — payment happens on the buyer's own phone through a secure page — so the sale is as safe as it is effortless.

Quietly and properly. Booking details, phone numbers, and call transcripts are encrypted in transit and at rest, access is limited to your team and logged, and nothing about your guests is ever sold or used to train anyone else's systems. Zavo works to GDPR standards with SOC 2 Type II-aligned controls, and you choose how long records are kept. Discretion gets special attention in a tea room: surprise-party notes are visible to staff but never disclosed on a call, so when the birthday lady herself rings to confirm directions, the agent gives her the time and the postcode and not a word more. If a guest asks what you hold about them, producing the answer takes minutes.

That's the day Zavo was practically built for. On peak occasions — Mothering Sunday, Easter weekend, the run-up to Christmas — every caller is answered at once, in parallel, no matter how many ring together; nobody hears an engaged tone while your team is buried in trays. The agent books the sittings that remain, offers alternatives when a slot fills, and can keep a waitlist so cancellations are refilled within minutes rather than lost. It also holds the line on your rules under pressure — no over-booking the 2pm sitting because a caller was insistent. Owners tell us these peak days used to be equal parts triumph and missed calls; now the room is just as full, and the phone log shows nothing got away.

Yes. Zavo can treat your spaces as distinct bookable areas, each with its own capacity, character, and rules: the main room for standard sittings, the upstairs room for private parties with its own minimum spend, the garden bookable only in season and weather-permitting with a polite caveat. Callers can ask for a specific space and the agent books it if it's free, or explains the difference if they're unsure which suits. Private-hire enquiries for the upstairs room can be routed to you as high-value calls rather than booked automatically. If you operate a second site in the next town, the same setup answers both — each in its own name, with its own diary and menus.

Tea rooms are seasonal, but the phone's value concentrates in exactly the season you can't answer it. Work the sums on your own pattern: a celebration party is several hundred pounds, vouchers run hot for six weeks a year, and one coach party can be a quiet day's entire takings. If Zavo rescues a handful of those a month in season, it has paid for the year — and through January it still sells vouchers, takes February half-term bookings, and answers the are-you-open calls without you standing by the phone. The dashboard logs every answered call and every booking made, so after one busy month you can judge it on your own figures rather than our argument.

No. The agent's entire knowledge of your tea room is what you've approved: your menus, blends, prices, hours, policies, and your preferred phrasing. It doesn't scrape the internet, repeat an out-of-date listing, or invent an answer to be helpful — the three ways wrong information usually reaches your guests today. Asked something you haven't covered (whether the garden is open this week, say), it says it will check and flags the question for your team, and you can add the answer in a minute. Every call is transcribed, so you can read exactly what was said in your tea room's name. Most owners skim the first week's transcripts, adjust a phrase or two, and then stop checking — because it keeps sounding like them.

Yes — and in a business of pre-ordered baking, this is quiet gold. Every booking is confirmed by text immediately, and each party receives a reminder the day before with a simple way to confirm numbers, mention a forgotten dietary need, or cancel in time for the table to be resold. Larger parties can be nudged for final numbers on the schedule your kitchen works to. The effect on no-shows is dramatic: the table of eight that would have silently shrunk to five either firms up or frees space while you can still fill it. After a visit, Zavo can also send a brief thank-you with a nudge towards booking the next occasion — switched on or off entirely at your preference.

If you can write out your sittings and menus, you can set it up — and most of it is exactly that. You forward your existing number (nothing changes for callers), then spend an hour telling Zavo your sittings, capacities, notice rules, menus and blends, voucher options, and who should be interrupted for what. No new hardware, no software for your team to learn, no change at the till. Most tea rooms are answering by the next morning. The first week is gentle tuning: read a few transcripts with your morning cup, soften a phrase here, add a missing answer there. After that, the only upkeep is telling it when the menu or the hours change — less effort than re-chalking the board.

This worries every tea-room owner, and it's where Zavo most pleasantly surprises. The agent speaks clearly and unhurriedly, never talks over a caller, repeats anything asked of it without a hint of impatience, and doesn't mind a story about the last visit before the booking gets made. There are no menus to dial through and no 'press one' — callers just talk, as they always have, and are answered in kind. For guests who genuinely prefer a person, you can keep a pass-through rule so anyone who asks is transferred or called back. In practice, most owners find their older regulars judge the experience by whether the phone was answered kindly and the booking was right — and on both counts, it now always is.