I advised him against it. No digital concept is going to beat that customer experience.
I get emails on a daily basis and people take that moment to give positive feedback, occasionally bug reports, and I get to see their email signature to get a sense who my customers are.
It’s genuinely enjoyable interacting with customers and most people are so easy to get along with if you just listen and show respect.
They had a basic website that outlined their general terms and bikes on offer etc, but then actually arranging the booking dropped into WhatsApp which allowed me to outline my specific needs and get a useful steer. Throughout the trip I was able to continue messaging as things came up and it felt more like I was borrowing a bike from a mate than renting one from a business.
At a higher level, this small business offered multiple channels and was able to meet me where I wanted to communicate. This is an advantage small business have because the volume is manageable. At larger scale it becomes more tricky to do economically and so you need to focus on self serve journeys (which may include chat bots, etc)
Spur-of-the-moment phone calls and meetings (especially camera-on ones with some uncaptured visual elements that the blind can't follow) tend to foul that up. And trigger the autistics who are likely hiding amongst the rest of you. We are legion. Treat us gently and we will likely do all manner of scutwork, refactoring old nasty untouchable code, and pager duty. i love debugging!
[Edit to add: Never trust a manager who likes to give directions in impromptu, unrecorded/unrecordable sessions. That means for some reason they want to be off-record. Or don't understand management. Either one of those is trouble.]
I'll add "they're functionally illiterate" to the list of reasons managers and other awful-to-work-with people default to "a quick huddle". I have no data but I suspect this is a big reason and will be getting bigger as we start seeing more employees who went to school in the AI era.
This is also the real reason managers are so enamored of AI: reading and writing are, to them, the biggest obstacles in a typical day at work. Any machine that can help with this is welcome, and they don't have any experience what precise communication is actually like to understand how poor a replacement it is.