How Z&A Management Replaced a 10-Person Call Center and Cut Costs 75% Across Three Aquariums
Z&A Management runs three aquariums and wildlife centers across the US. They retired a Monday-to-Friday call center floor, moved to 24/7 AI coverage that holds up through the weekend rush, and embedded tracked promotions into every conversation.
“We cut our cost by about 75% to achieve the same level of revenue, if not grow it even higher. The hesitancy I thought I would have, the things I was worried about going in, they were nothing.”
Customer interview
How Z&A Management Cut Call Center Costs with AI Frontdesk
At a glance
Organization profile
Company
Z&A Management
Industry
Retail · Aquariums & Wildlife Centers
Location
Layton, Utah
Coverage
Three sites: Northern California, Layton (Utah), and New Jersey
Highlights
- ~75% lower cost for the same or higher revenue
- 8-10 reps and 40+ weekly hours replaced
- 24/7 coverage that holds through the weekend rush
- Tracked promotions embedded in every call
AI workforce
One workforce across the customer journey
Frontdesk connects the channels, systems, and repeatable workflows this team uses to serve customers and keep work moving.
Products deployed
- Voice AI
- CRM
- SMS Texting Agent
- Outbound Sequences
- Dashboards & Reporting
Narrative
Challenge, deployment, and outcomes
Summary of what the customer faced, how Frontdesk was applied, and what they report measuring afterward.
Challenge
- Z&A Management operates three separate aquariums and wildlife centers (Northern California, Layton in Utah, and New Jersey) and runs the front office for each. They staffed a call center floor of 8 to 10 reps working 40-plus hours a week.
- Quality was inconsistent. Reps varied in their language, their process, and whether they surfaced promotions to callers researching a visit. A rep having a bad day meant the sale did not happen.
- As a retail business, the load peaked Friday through Sunday, exactly when the Monday-to-Friday model broke. Peak days brought 400 to 500 calls, with bursts of a hundred calls inside ten minutes.
- Callers hit queues and voicemail. The "leave your number and we will call you back" promise often ended with the caller hanging up and not converting.
Deployment
- Deployed Pearl, an AI Frontdesk receptionist, across all three sites with consistent language and process on every single call.
- Turned on 24/7 coverage so the Friday-to-Sunday rush is fully answered instead of overflowing a weekday-only floor.
- Removed the call queue entirely. Simultaneous calls are all answered live, so a hundred calls in ten minutes is no longer a backlog.
- Embedded special promotions directly into the conversation flow, sent as a follow-up text with a tracked link for direct revenue attribution and return on ad spend.
Outcomes
- Roughly 75% lower cost to handle the same call volume, with revenue held flat or growing.
- Weekend coverage that matches the retail load, with no dropped calls during peak Friday-to-Sunday windows.
- Every caller gets the same promotion offer, with tracked attribution feeding a clear revenue-versus-cost model.
- Consistent, friendly service on every call. Pearl thanks every caller and wishes them a great day, regardless of how the call goes.
Full interview
Transcript
The complete interview is lightly edited for readability. Timestamps correspond to the video above.
My name is Aaron Nielsen. I'm the CEO of Z&A Management. We own and operate three separate, unique aquariums and wildlife centers across the U.S. We have one in NorCal, California. We have one in Layton, Utah. We have one in New Jersey. They're all separate entities, but as the management company, we help run each of those sites. We used to have a call center floor. We had eight to ten reps. Their ability to be consistent in their language and their processes, ensuring that they were bringing up opportunities to the people or potential clients that were calling in to learn
more about the aquariums, the sites, was just really inconsistent. And the emotion behind a person is part of what makes us great, but in a call center, it's also their weakness. And so, you know, if someone's having a bad day, they just don't do sales. We have to cut our cost by like 75% to achieve the same level of revenue, if not grow it even higher. When you look at hours-wise, you had eight people and 40-plus hours easily. The Monday through Friday call center model for us was great on those days, but it broke over the
weekend. And we're a retail business, and so that Friday, Saturday, Sunday is where the majority of our mode was. And obviously, AI front desk can be offered 24-7. So that was a massive solution for us as far as coverage goes. In a call center for us, it was very linear. The calls were there, they came in, they had to be answered sequentially. We constantly had backlogs where we had peak times where you would have 400 or 500 calls a day easily, and they would all come, you know, 100 would come in within 10 minutes. What do you do? Like, that's not a problem anymore, obviously. And so, you always get annoyed. It was like, hey, leave your number, and you'll be next in the call queue. We promise to call you back. And
then they hang up on you, right? And it's like, that just never happens with AI front desk. One thing that's worked out really well for us is being able to embed some of those special promotions into the conversation flows consistently every time to where every time we get someone calling in, we're sending them a text with an embedded promotion that obviously we track and we can see that direct attribution and come up with a revenue versus cost type model, our ROAS, our return on advertising spend. The things of a human, a personal perspective that comes into a conversation,
good or bad, all those kind of things have been eliminated. Even if you get the obnoxious caller, you know, Pearl, our avatar is always going to be a sweetheart. And regardless of what you say to her, she's going to thank them for calling and having, and wish them a great day at having a call. I'm a big relationship guy, right? So the first time I met your team and was talking with them, we were talking to other companies too. I sense the passion behind AI front desk and the willingness to listen to my specific needs and get creative with me. The only thing starting in life has changed,
right? And so AI is just part of it and you can either erase it or you can avoid it. There's the hesitancy that I initially thought I would have or things that I was worried about going into this, I, they were nothing.
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