Simple handles 78% of Omaha Steaks’ sales calls
Simple started with one sales line, learned the catalog alongside the team, and grew into a trusted sales and service channel.
Retail · Inbound sales and service- 78%
- of sales calls contained, 72% of all calls
- 30%
- upsell rate, against 22% for seasonal agents
- 5,000 → 692
- planned seasonal hires
- 8 days
- from signed pilot to live calls
“Simple has become a trusted member of our sales team.”
Half the year’s calls, in one month
Omaha Steaks has sold premium steaks and seafood for 109 years. From the week before Thanksgiving to mid-December, call volume runs 12 times higher than the rest of the year, because everyone wants to send steaks as a gift.
For years the answer was people: around 5,000 seasonal hires each September to end up with roughly 2,000 taking calls by December, with supervision stretched from one supervisor per 20 agents to one per 212. An in-house virtual agent took six months to build and reached 20% containment on a single use case.
12× normal volume, every holiday season
One line, one job, done end to end
The team started narrow on purpose: the dedicated phone numbers printed on Omaha Steaks’ mailers. A caller on one of those lines is almost certainly ordering that package, so Simple could take the order and place it in the order system with no human touch.
Simple was live in eight days, working on site with the team: the pilot was signed on June 2 and took its first live calls on June 10, including new APIs on Omaha Steaks’ homegrown order and CRM stack. The agent, Simone, is named after the founding Simon family.
- June 2Pilot signed
- June 10First live calls, mailer lines
- Day 150% contained
- Month 361% contained
- September100% of traffic, about 100 products
Fewer people waiting, more orders placed
Today Simone contains 72% of all calls and 78% of sales calls. Abandonment fell from 16% to 2%.
Simone’s upsell rate runs at 30%, against 22% for seasonal agents, and callers who order with Simone match the average order value of tenured agents. Seasonal hiring went from 5,000 people to 1,500 trained last holiday, with 692 planned this year.
- 78%
- Containment, sales calls72% across all calls
- 30%
- Upsell ratevs 22% seasonal agents
- 692
- Seasonal hires planneddown from 5,000
- 16% → 2%
- Call abandonmentsince launch
Why it worked
Revenue, not deflection
The inbound line is where Omaha Steaks sells, so the goal from day one was completed sales, not contained calls.
A real partnership
A year in, the teams still meet two to three times a week. Omaha Steaks gave the project engineers and decision-makers; Simple put dedicated agent engineers on the account.
One use case at a time
One contained use case, proven end to end, then the next. Nobody flipped a switch on day one.
“Last Christmas season, the AI agent actually beat the humans at the upsells and the add-on items. And if I’m being honest, it was not even really close.”
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