For thousands of laundromat owners and operators across the United States, the day never really ends. Deliveries drivers come and go. Customers call around the clock asking if the store is open, where it's located, or whether pick-up service is available. When machines break, refunds are needed immediately. When a customer wants to place an order, someone has to answer, or the business loses revenue.
Cents, the leading vertical SaaS platform in the laundry industry, sits at the center of this daily chaos. They power 4,000+ laundromat brands across all 50 states, helping operators run everything from in-store self-service to pick-up and deliverys.
But one friction point had always been painfully clear.
Operators needed customer support, yet many could not afford a full-time front desk attendant.
“Most of our operators are scrappy small-business owners,” says Francine Dong, Head of Growth Product at Cents. “They are hiring drivers, managing machines, optimizing routes, but they do not have the capital to hire someone to sit by the phone all day.”
For years, that gap created stress on both sides. Owners were drowning in calls. End customers with simple questions often had no one to answer them. Cents wanted a way to fix that imbalance without forcing operators to add headcount.
That search led them to Retell AI.
When voice AI surged in 2024, Cents saw an opportunity to bring modern technology into an industry that had been traditionally offline. If they could deliver a reliable, human-like voice agent, every operator could offer professional 24/7 phone support without hiring additional staff.
They explored building an in-house solution by combining LLMs, speech models, and telephony logic, but the complexity, latency challenges, and maintainability made it clear they needed a dedicated voice automation platform.
Retell AI emerged as the clear fit.
“But Retell was the most advanced,” Francine recalls. “The capabilities, the UI, the workflow editor, the API, it was clear they were ahead.”
Within four weeks, with one engineer working part-time, Cents launched Assist, their AI-powered voice receptionist built on top of Retell AI. Almost immediately, Assist became one of the most popular features in their product suite.
Before Assist, operators handled calls themselves, or calls simply went unanswered. Larger operators relied on patchwork solutions that offered little more than basic routing.
Across the customer base, the same questions appeared over and over:
More than 75 percent of these calls could be resolved without a human. What operators lacked was a scalable, affordable, and consistent way to handle them.
Assist changed that dynamic. Operators began describing it as a relief, something that finally gave them breathing room in their day-to-day operations. End customers also welcomed the immediate response and often commented on how natural and human the agent sounded.
Voice AI is something operators need to experience. At the industry’s largest trade show, Clean Show, Cents set up a booth with noise-canceling headphones and a live Retell-powered demo.
They built a landing page with a list of sample questions and invited attendees to call the agent.
Operators were stunned.
“Multiple people told us, ‘I thought this was a real person,’” Francine says. “It was the clearest way to show the value.”
The booth became the turning point. Prospects who had been hesitant immediately understood the impact. Existing customers expanded their usage. Afterward, Cents created a dedicated demo environment that they now send to interested operators, significantly improving conversions.
Assist delivers immediate value in the moments that matter:
Operators describe the experience as more reliable, more professional, and more consistent than what they could achieve with limited staffing.
Assist has also become a strong growth engine for Cents:
“We are building toward a future where Assist does not just answer questions,” Francine says. “It operates the business.”
When asked what matters most in the partnership, Francine highlights two things.
“Visibility and speed of updates. Retell ships improvements that directly solve problems we are facing. Every time a feature releases, we say, ‘We were just thinking about building that ourselves.’”
Cents relies on Retell’s pace: new speech and LLM models, emerging QA tools, better analytics, and soon A/B testing for voice flows. These capabilities allow Cents to scale quickly without stitching together multiple tools.
Cents sees Assist evolving into core infrastructure for laundromat operations. The roadmap includes deeper automation to reduce manual workload, tighter integrations for order placement and refunds, voice analytics and QA dashboards, A/B testing for flows, continued improvements in latency and accuracy, and fully self-serve onboarding.
“I hope every operator uses Assist,” Francine says. “We are early, but the feedback is clear. This is the future of how laundromats run their business.”
From a crowded booth at Clean Show to thousands of stores across the country, Assist is already reshaping what is possible for laundromat owners. With Retell powering the voice layer, Cents is helping operators deliver faster service, reduce stress, and run laundry businesses that feel larger and more professional without hiring additional staff.
This is more than automation.
It is access. It is reliability. It is a virtual team member for every laundromat in America.
And it is only the beginning.