How we increase appointments for martial arts school by 212% with AI

Oh no... not another article telling me how to grow my school with AI.

I know, there has been a lot of hype around AI recently, and honestly, when ChatGPT 3 was blowing up 2 years ago, I was skeptical.

Trust me, I had many friends who went out selling the idea of using AI for automation in business, who, in my humble opinion, don't even fully understand what AI is.

I questioned whether it's good and if it's going to replace humans and generate amazing results. But like any good scientist, I tested it and found the results were mediocre at best.

The responses from ChatGPT were wrong or just outdated, but I was still impressed at what it could do. It's just not as game-changing as what most people are led to believe.

Fast forward a few months and a few friends of mine were telling me about using AI to build chatbots to book appointments.

And I thought that's kind of cool. One of the biggest challenges that most martial arts schools have is not getting leads but rather following up.

You're busy teaching class, you miss a lead or a call, and there goes that opportunity to your competitor.

Wouldn't it be cool if AI could help Monstro's customers book appointments automatically?

So I went on and dug deep into AI, I mean deep. Understanding models, how LLM (large language model) works, how to train AI models, etc...

And started building our first AI appointment booking bots, and after a few weeks, our first appointment booking bot was up and running, except there were some problems.

First of all, it's more of a chatbot but it doesn't book any appointments. It would respond and sometimes send a booking link.

Second, we were using ChatGPT 3.5-Turbo, so the responses were hit-and-miss and the instructions were not always followed.

Lastly, many challenges come specifically with Martial Arts schools that AI couldn't solve.

For example, how to deal with someone who sends multiple messages at once, a lead who is busy right now, a lead who is angry, dealing with prospects who we're not sure if they're looking for adult or child programs, etc...

Regardless, it was somewhat working and most of our customers were happy with the bot, but we often got complaints about the AI not responding right or the AI giving out the wrong info, or how do I get the AI to spot when needed.

This continued for a few more months, and one day during a Zoom call, they were showing off their AI bot conversations, which were good and human-like.

I was wondering, what the heck. How are they getting these responses while our bot responses were lackluster?

It turns out they were using ChatGPT's latest AI model, GPT-4.0, which is far better at generating human-like responses and following instructions. And just like that, I began to configure our model to use ChatGPT-4.0 instead.

But there were still some problems; AI models by themselves do not have any memory and do not retain any history of the conversation unless you build a memory for the AI.

That's exactly what we did. We began to use the latest vector database technology and started storing and building "long-term memory" for our AI so it knows exactly what was said before and responds accordingly. Awesome… another major improvement.

But even with all these improvements, our bots were still not booking appointments by themselves, and that was kind of the whole point, right?

Having AI automatically book appointments for you on a specific day and time.

So, I set out to resolve this issue, and boy was it a challenge.

Not only did I have to figure out how to take the available slots from the calendars and tell the AI to provide only 2 - 3 available slots in a human-friendly format without stating the wrong day (yes, AI can mistake the days of the week as it may not have a reference to what day today is).

I also needed to figure out when the AI should ask for an appointment, whether the user is ready to book an appointment, and how the AI should handle objections such as a prospect asking for the price.

And... whether they're seeking an adult or kids program because the schedule might be different.

On top of that, how do I get the AI to know what day the prospect requested if the prospect simply replies "Monday" and matches it to the correct day and format so the appointment can be automatically booked?

But after countless hours and thousands of prompt engineering and testing, changing logic here and there, we finally got the bot to book appointments automatically 96.5354% of the time.

Not 100%, you may ask.

Unfortunately, no. AI, like a child, doesn't always come back with the responses you want.

Even after we carefully adjusted a version of ChatGPT-4.0 using our data.

The point is, if you're looking for that perfect AI bot, it's not there yet. But if you want an amazing human-like AI bot that can help you book appointments and increase your appointment rate by up to 212%, then Monstro is the platform you will want.

But don't believe me, here are examples of our AI booker at work.

Look, I'm not going to feed the hype and tell you AI will revolutionize your business. And you don't have to do anything as the AI will do everything for you.

Far from that, you will still have to run your school and still jump in to respond to the lead from time to time.

What I will say is that AI can drastically reduce your time, and reduce missed opportunities from that time when you just cannot get to the phone or during dinner time and a prospect is requesting more information about your classes.

So, if you're looking for a robot that will run your business 24/7 for you and you just collect money, this is not it. But if you want the AI to help drastically improve your appointment rate, and save you hundreds of hours every month then book a free demo to see how Monstro can put our AI to work for you.