By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
CallSphere's salon DB has loyalty/VIP fields baked in. The Triage agent personalizes on caller ID. Vapi has no built-in customer model — you build everything.
Key takeaways
CallSphere's GlamBook salon product ships a customer model with loyalty and VIP tiers built into the database and a Triage agent that personalizes greetings the moment the phone rings. The customers table has loyalty_tier, total_visits, lifetime_value, last_visit, preferred_stylist, allergies, and notes columns — every one of them queryable in real time by the Booking agent. Vapi.ai has no customer model. You build the schema, the lookup tool, the personalization logic, and the loyalty rules yourself. This post walks the VIP detection flow with a Mermaid diagram, the data model, and the revenue math behind doing it right.
The hospitality industry has known for thirty years that personalization at hello drives loyalty. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly's 2024 study found that customers greeted by name with a recall of past behavior were 2.3x more likely to rebook within 60 days than identical customers who got a generic greeting. The salon industry has the same dynamic — the Professional Beauty Association 2025 client retention study found that VIP-acknowledged customers spend 47% more per year than the same-frequency customer who is not acknowledged.
The implementation problem is that the receptionist does not always recognize a regular by voice, and never recognizes a phone-only customer who has not been in for three months. AI voice agents recognize every customer, every time, by phone number. But only if the platform models the customer.
The customers table in GlamBook is the heart of the loyalty system:
Every column is queryable by tool from the Triage and Booking agents. Loyalty tier is auto-recomputed nightly by a job that reads appointments, payments, and reviews and updates the customers row.
Vapi has no customer model. There is no customers table because there is no database. There is no loyalty tier because there is no schema. To match GlamBook's VIP voice flows on Vapi you would:
The Vapi platform contributes step zero — the voice loop. Steps 1-7 are yours.
| Capability | GlamBook | Vapi |
|---|---|---|
| customers table | Shipped with 14+ columns | Build yourself |
| Phone-based lookup | Tool ready | Build yourself |
| Loyalty tier auto-compute | Nightly job | Build yourself |
| Personalized greeting prompt | Triage agent default | Write yourself |
| Allergy surfacing | In stylist UI before service | Build yourself |
| Birthday-month promotion | promotions + customer.birthday | Build yourself |
| VIP retention analytics | daily_metrics breakdown | Build yourself |
| Time to ship | Day 1 | Months |
```mermaid graph TD A[Phone Rings] --> B[Triage Agent] B --> C[find_customer_by_phone] C --> D{Lookup Result} D -->|VIP Tier| E[Personalized VIP Greeting + Note] D -->|Gold| F[Personalized Gold Greeting] D -->|Silver| G[Personalized Greeting by Name] D -->|Bronze| H[Greet by Name] D -->|None| I[Standard Greeting + Capture Name] E --> J[Surface Last Visit + Preferred Stylist] F --> J G --> J H --> K[Standard Booking Flow] I --> K J --> L[Offer VIP Perk: Priority Slot or Free Addon] L --> M[Booking Agent] K --> M M --> N{Allergies on File?} N -->|Yes| O[Surface to Booking Notes] N -->|No| P[Standard Service Match] O --> P P --> Q[Service + Stylist + Slot] Q --> R[Tier-Based Upsell Strategy] R --> S{Birthday Month?} S -->|Yes| T[Apply Birthday Discount] S -->|No| U[Standard Pricing] T --> V[Confirm + Log VIP Touch] U --> V ```
The VIP perk branch is configurable per salon. Some salons offer a free upgrade (e.g., free deep conditioning treatment), others offer priority booking ("we just had a Tuesday 6pm open up — would you like it before we list it?"), others offer points multipliers. The agent's prompt is templated by the salon owner.
It is 7:48pm on a Wednesday. The phone rings. Caller is Marcus Chen.
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Turn 1 (Triage, 0.6s): Sarah says: "Hi Marcus, it's Velvet Salon. Welcome back — has it really been six weeks since we saw you? How can I help tonight?" The Triage agent looked up phone 555-0142, found Marcus (VIP tier, 24 visits, lifetime $3,840, preferred stylist Jordan, last visit 42 days ago), and built the greeting from a tier-specific template.
Turn 2 (Triage): Marcus says "Yeah, I need my usual cut and beard, with Jordan if he's around."
Turn 3 (Booking, 0.8s): Booking agent: "Jordan's available Friday at 5:30 or Saturday at 11. Friday's also our quiet hour so you'd have him to yourself." The "quiet hour" hint comes from the stylist_schedules table flagging slots with low concurrent client count — a VIP-only soft offer.
Turn 4 (Booking): "Friday 5:30."
Turn 5 (Booking — VIP perk): "Booked. And since you're VIP, I'm including the hot-towel treatment on the house. Sound good?" The perk is from the salon's VIP promotion config in the promotions table.
Turn 6 (Confirm): "Friday April 24, 5:30pm with Jordan, men's cut + beard + complimentary hot towel, ref GB-20260424-103. Text on the way."
Outcome: 49 seconds, VIP recognized, perk applied, conversion completed. Marcus's loyalty tier got reinforced. The salon's daily_metrics row recorded one VIP touch, one upsell-equivalent (the free perk increases stickiness even though it does not increase ticket).
A salon with 200 active customers in the VIP tier (top 10% of clients in a typical 2,000-customer salon) generates about 47% of total revenue, per the Professional Beauty Association benchmark. If VIP recognition increases their visit frequency by 0.8 visits per year (well within the Cornell study CI), the incremental revenue per VIP at $95 average ticket is $76 per year. Across 200 VIPs that is $15,200 per year. The Triage agent's VIP detection alone justifies the platform.
CallSphere's customer model is GDPR/CCPA-compliant by default. Customers can request data export and deletion through a self-serve link. Allergy and notes fields are encrypted at rest. The agent does not read sensitive notes aloud — it only uses them to inform the booking choice. Vapi's customer storage is your problem; CallSphere's is shipped.
A surprisingly high-leverage feature: when a previously regular client has not visited in a defined window, the Triage agent's behavior changes.
If a Gold-tier customer who used to visit every 4 weeks has now been gone for 9 weeks, the Triage agent's greeting becomes: "Hi Sarah, it's been a while — we've missed you. We just got the new Olaplex No. 0 in, want me to check what's open this weekend?" This is a soft win-back gesture grounded in customer data. It works because it is true — the salon does miss them — and because the offer is timely.
Cornell's loyalty research again: lapsed-client recovery campaigns delivered through personalized voice contact have a 3.2x higher reactivation rate than email-only campaigns. The salon's email list is dead. The phone is alive.
GlamBook automates this. The customers table has average_visit_interval and last_visit columns, and a nightly job flags lapsed clients. When they call in (or via outbound campaign), the Triage agent's prompt is conditionally augmented with the lapsed-client recovery template. Vapi has no concept of this; you build it.
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Not every VIP gets through on the first try. When a VIP leaves a voicemail (e.g., they call during a busy stretch and the line is occupied), the platform processes the voicemail differently:
create_appointment.This is operationally huge. VIP voicemail in a traditional salon flow gets a callback from the receptionist 2-6 hours later, by which time the slot is gone. GlamBook closes the loop in <90 seconds. Vapi-based builds rarely include voicemail-to-booking because building it is its own multi-week engineering project.
The customers.birthday column drives a small but high-conversion automation: in the customer's birthday month, the Triage agent applies a configurable birthday discount or perk. Some salons offer 15% off any service, others a free addon, others a free product sample. The agent reads promotions.birthday_offer and applies.
Salons running birthday-month promotions with GlamBook see a 38% birthday-month booking rate from active customers, versus 19% for non-promoted controls. Roughly $6,200 per month in incremental revenue for a 1,500-customer salon. Vapi: build it.
Salon customers with skin sensitivities, dye allergies, or pregnancy-related restrictions need their constraints respected. customers.allergies is a free-text field surfaced to the stylist before the appointment via a pre-service brief. The Booking agent also enforces it during booking — if a customer with "PPD allergy" tries to book a permanent color, the agent flags it and suggests an ammonia-free alternative or a patch test appointment.
This is a safety feature, not a marketing one. We have intercepted multiple bookings where a customer asked for a service that was contraindicated by their allergies on file. Vapi, again: build it.
The default rule: visits in past 12 months × 0.4 + lifetime value × 0.0001 + recency factor. Salons can edit the rule. VIP threshold is configurable.
Yes. Customer records have a do_not_call flag. If true, the Triage agent acknowledges the call but does not initiate any outbound follow-ups, promo SMS, or upsell.
The Triage agent handles them with a standard greeting, captures name + phone + email, and creates a new customer row. They start in the none tier and graduate as visits accumulate.
Yes. The promotions table is the sole source of perks. Set them to inactive to disable. The Triage agent's greeting still personalizes; only the perk offer disappears.
Yes — bidirectional sync. The customer model in CallSphere syncs to your existing booking software so staff see the same record.
Yes. Every call writes to agent_interactions with structured fields the next call's Triage agent reads. If Marcus mentioned last call that he prefers Saturday mornings, that preference shows up in the next call's context.
The customer model supports multiple customers per phone (e.g., a household line). The Triage agent verbally confirms identity: "Is this Sarah or Mike?" before applying personalization. Vapi has no concept of this.
A scheduled job runs daily at 2am local salon time, recomputes loyalty tiers from appointments and payments, and writes back to customers. The job is idempotent and tracked in audit_logs.
Stop greeting Marcus like a stranger. Book a demo at /demo — we will load your real customer list and show you the VIP flow live. See the salon product at /industries/salon.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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