For the past two years I've been building retrieval-augmented chat systems for enterprise clients — the kind that handle wellness-supplement support, medical-product navigation, technical documentation. The work is interesting, but most of the value lands at scale. A bigger company gets a bigger savings line.
DeskRelay started as a side question: what if the same approach was packaged for a single-location business? Activity-leisure operators answer the same fifteen questions all day, and most enquiries land outside the hours they can answer them. The widget would pay for itself if it handled even a quarter of that traffic.
The first client was Social Climbing in Bristol — they had the right shape of enquiry volume, an operator willing to share real numbers, and a booking system that made it possible to track the outcome. Six weeks after the widget went live, online revenue had run at 2.5× the previous year's baseline. When they relaunched their site without the widget, online revenue dropped £80/day in nine days. That second figure — the drop — is the strongest evidence that the widget itself was doing the work.
DeskRelay is the productised version of that build. One person operates it, one rate, one CTA. If the call doesn't feel like a fit, I'll tell you that on the call — no hand-off to a salesperson who'll keep emailing you for six months.