A live chat alternative built for how furniture actually sells
Live chat assumes someone is always at the desk and knows your 4,000-SKU catalog cold — in a real furniture store, neither is ever true.
ShowroomOps replaces the staffed-chat model with a furniture-trained AI concierge that answers instantly at 11pm on a Sunday, searches your actual catalog, quotes your actual policies, and brings your real staff in exactly when they add value.
Free · a 30-minute walkthrough with the operator who built it, not a sales rep
Store Concierge
Answers from your catalog, policies, and floor inventory
Hartley Performance Sectional
112" · L-shape
$3,295 $4,695
In stock — on the showroom floor
See productMarlow Chaise Sectional
108" · reversible chaise
$2,850
In stock — ships in 5–7 days
See productEverett Track-Arm Sofa + Ottoman
104" combined
$2,390 $3,190
Custom fabrics — 4–6 weeks
See productThe real problem
Where live chat breaks down in furniture retail
Live chat isn't a bad idea — it's an understaffed one. The economics of covering it properly never work for an owner-led furniture store.
Coverage is the whole game, and you can't win it
High-intent furniture browsing peaks evenings and weekends — exactly when your floor is busiest or closed. An unanswered chat is worse than no chat: the shopper asked, and you visibly didn't answer.
Your floor team has better things to do
Pulling a commissioned associate off a $6,000 in-person sale to type answers about throw pillow dimensions is a bad trade every time. So chat gets ignored, and the widget becomes a broken promise.
Outsourced agents don't know furniture
Third-party chat agents work from scripts. Ask them whether a sectional's chaise can be reversed or how white-glove differs from threshold delivery, and you get 'let me check on that' — then silence.
Nothing connects chat to revenue
Most live chat tools report chats handled and response time. None of that tells you whether chat produced orders, showroom visits, or design appointments — so it's managed like a cost center and staffed like one.
What we install
What replaces the chat desk
Instant, accurate, always-on answers — with your humans doing only the work that actually needs a human.
Instant answers, around the clock
The concierge responds in seconds at any hour, trained on your catalog, inventory, delivery matrix, and policies. No queue, no 'an agent will be with you shortly.'
Product search that agents can't match
It searches every SKU with the shopper's constraints and answers with product cards — image, price, availability, link. No human agent holds a 4,000-item catalog in their head.
Escalation to the right person, not a queue
When a conversation earns a human — a design consult, a five-figure order, an unhappy customer — it routes to the specific right person with full context, during hours you define.
A staff console your team will actually use
Your team watches conversations, takes over live when they choose, and flags wrong answers for correction. Ten minutes a day replaces a staffed chat desk.
Full module walkthrough on the product page.
First implementation
Built and proven inside a real furniture store
We ran the staffed-chat experiment in our own store first — and then replaced it. Here's what the replacement did.
ShowroomOps was built inside our own high-end furniture store — one large destination showroom, a deep new-and-consignment catalog, and a sales floor that closes most of the revenue. Live catalog, real policies, real customers. We share the store's identity and full detail privately, on the teardown call.
- outsold in one, at pace
- 5 yrs
- 2026 store revenue is pacing past the previous five years of sales combined.
- June revenue, year over year
- 4.05×
- $628K in June 2026, with July projected near $765K.
- chat-assisted revenue in 14 days
- $27.5K
- Orders matched to concierge conversations after auto-answer went live — chat volume roughly doubled, and matched revenue ran at a ~$60K/month pace.
How we count: We report the store's numbers as the store's numbers and assisted revenue as matched orders — never claimed lift from any single tool. The growth came from the whole operating stack working together: buying, marketing, catalog, concierge, and measurement. We'd rather under-claim and show you the methodology.
Read the full case study →Engagement
How retailers work with us
This is a managed replacement for your chat operation, not another tool your staff has to babysit — implementation, launch, and weekly tuning included. Full pricing detail here.
Custom
Done for youfrom $75K setup
+ $15K/month
We build and run the whole operating stack for you — scoped per engagement, scaling up for multi-location and multi-brand operators.
Self-Setup System
You implement it$25K one-time
+ $500/month software
The same system we run in our own store, handed to your team to implement in logical order with our complete self-setup guide.
The 90-day launch guarantee
“If we do not launch your concierge, ingest your catalog and policies, train it on your top questions, and generate the agreed qualified sales conversations or showroom/design leads within 90 days, we work free until we do, up to two additional months.”
This is an implementation guarantee, not a revenue guarantee — nobody can honestly guarantee revenue in a seasonal, omnichannel business. What we can guarantee is that the system gets built, launched, and producing the agreed conversations and leads, or you stop paying the retainer while we finish the job.
The launch guarantee applies to Custom, done-for-you engagements. The Self-Setup System is a one-time purchase your team implements with the guide.
Questions
Frequently asked
How is this different from live chat with a chatbot fallback?
Fallback bots are support scripts that catch overflow. ShowroomOps inverts the model: a furniture-trained concierge is the first responder — searching products, quoting policies, recommending pieces — and humans handle only conversations that genuinely need them. Your team stops being a chat desk and starts receiving qualified handoffs.
What happens to our existing chat tool?
We replace it as part of implementation, including the widget install and any conversation-history migration that's useful for training. If you have routing rules or saved replies that work, we fold that knowledge into the concierge's training material.
Can customers still reach a real person?
Always — and faster than before, because the concierge routes them to the right person instead of a shared inbox. Design questions reach designers, purchase-ready buyers reach sales, order problems reach support. You define escalation hours and who's on call.
Won't customers be annoyed they're talking to an AI?
Shoppers are annoyed by slow, wrong, or scripted answers — from bots and humans alike. The concierge is upfront about what it is, answers with real product results and precise policy detail, and offers a human at every step. In our first implementation, customer chat volume roughly doubled after instant answers went live: people ask more when answers actually come.
What does replacing live chat cost?
Custom, fully managed, runs from $75K setup plus $15K/month. If your team would rather build it themselves, Self-Setup is $25,000 one-time plus a monthly software fee, using our full setup guide. Compare either against real staffed coverage — roughly three shifts of a person who knows your catalog — plus the high-AOV conversations an empty chat widget quietly loses every week.
Retire the chat desk. Keep the conversations.
We'll audit your current chat setup and your site as a shopper experiences it — what goes unanswered, what gets answered wrong, and what a furniture-trained concierge would do differently that same night.
The teardown is free and delivered live on a 30-minute call by the operator who built the system. We onboard a small number of retailers at a time — each system is built from real catalog and policy data.