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8 Reasons to Invest in a Restaurant Chatbot

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Subhasish Nanda

When it comes to food, we all want it fast. Whether you’re ordering a special meal for your family or just enjoying some weekend takeout, you always want it to come quickly.

Consider another instance. Do you love going out to eat but hate the hassle of reserving a table, or waiting in line? Well, now there’s a solution. With a restaurant bot, you can order takeout, reserve a table, explore the menu and order food in with just a few clicks.

As a restaurateur, your primary goals are to draw in new patrons and keep them returning. Creating a seamless, enjoyable customer experience is key to achieving these objectives. Other important facets of successful management include promoting your establishment more widely and gathering leads for catering and events.

Bots can help you automate all sorts of tasks, from providing personalized customer service to increasing loyalty and revenue. With a chatbot by your side, you can provide an engaging and convenient experience for your patrons that will keep them coming back for more.

8 reasons why you should invest in a restaurant chatbot

More businesses have been turning to chatbots to help them engage with customers 24/7 and offer a personalized experience. Let’s look at some ways restaurants can leverage chatbots to boost sales and loyalty.

1. Revamp Reservations
Reservations and recording orders can be time consuming, especially with the wide variety of choices available online, making things more difficult. Orders can and will go wrong occasionally because of human errors.

With a chatbot installed on your website, app, social media accounts, or phone system, you can interact with your customers quickly. These tedious tasks can be handled by chatbots with 100% accuracy.

2. Save time
If you provide a takeaway service, you can use a chatbot for restaurants to minimize customer inconvenience by providing updates on deliveries with real-time alerts. Chatbots are also great for saving employees time – because calculating pending orders and updates takes up most of their day.

3. Promote special discounts
Your email list has great potential. Chatbots can rejuvenate it by engaging customers that haven’t visited you in a while with new deals and special offers. Chatbots are also able to recognize regular customers and give them incentives to keep coming back through emails, Facebook Messenger, or text messages.

4. Nurture customers
It’s important to remember that not everyone visiting your website or social media has the intention of buying your products. They may be interested in offers, menu comparisons, and so on. But this presents an opportunity for you to communicate with them through a chatbot. Provide assistance to help them get to where they need to go quickly, share your menu and pricing information, and collect their personal data. Providing a good user experience will prove that you care about them as a potential customer by building affinity with them.

5. Simplify takeaway and delivery
Customers find ordering takeaway difficult. But with a chatbot, they can place an order and have a conversation with your restaurant all through Facebook or your website’s chat window. It’s an excellent alternative to having to call or move over to an app in order to make the order.

6. Simplify table service
As a customer, you’ve probably experienced that sense of frustration when your waiter or waitress forgets about you. But chatbots will eliminate that frustration. No matter what the customer needs, chatbots can take care of it with a speedy response. Imagine how helpful chatbots are for restaurants; for example, the chatbot for this restaurant is collecting orders automatically, so customers should get their food quickly and without any hassle.

7. Personalize food recommendations
Younger generations are always looking for brands that understand their preferences, and they’re not shy about sharing their disapproval if those expectations aren’t met. A big part of making sure your restaurant provides a great service is by understanding your customers and what they like about your business. If you figure out their food and drink preferences, you can use them to delight your customers and make the perfect recommendations for them.

Chatbots are a natural solution for restaurants that are short on time and resources. With previous purchase information, chatbots can offer customers suggestions of dishes they might not know about, which builds their affinity with your restaurant.

8. Feedback follow-up
Reviews are a crucial way modern consumers make their dining decisions. Receiving reviews on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor is an important part of this, but manually following up with customers is inefficient and time-consuming. Chatbots can send automated reminders to customers that encourage reviews. They can also provide an efficient way to ask for permission by emailing them following their visit during the booking process.

Advantages of using a restaurant chatbot

Benefit of restaurant Chatbot

A chatbot offers an omnichannel user experience. Omnichannel refers to the same user experience across multiple touchpoints. Let’s look at other reasons why chatbots have become an asset for businesses in this digital day and age.

Understand market demand better

One of the advantages of restaurant chatbots is that they can help to collect data that is valuable for both businesses and consumers. For a food brand, your chatbot could collect data to let you know which dishes are your most popular. This will help you create a more effective marketing strategy. The goal of collecting this type of information from restaurants is to better understand market demand and how to optimize their productivity in the best way possible.

24/7 availability and quick responses

Nobody likes to wait for a long time for an operator to pick up the phone and explain whether they can order additional cheese on their pizza. With chatbots, this becomes simple. When somebody contacts your support center, it’s easy for them to have chats with a bot right away. They’ll always be able to get help at whatever time of day or night- because bots can work on 24/7 bases. That way, you can increase brand loyalty by always being able to take care of your customers quickly and effectively at any time of day or night.

Reducing operational costs

Data gathered by IBM Researchers has shown that companies each year receive 265 billion requests worldwide. They spend $1.3 trillion to process these questions and interact with their customers. The most significant part of this expenditure is allocating 50% to pay customer service representatives. 50% of all inquiries are routine. Chatbots will be able to process such queries efficiently and it frees up your customer support executives to deal with complicated issues. Chatbots also allow food delivery businesses to reduce the number of necessary customer service employees, which can save them up to 30% of their customer service costs, according to data from Chatbot Magazine.

Restaurant chatbot examples

Let’s look at 5 restaurant chatbot examples that you can refer to when making your own bot.

TGIF

TGI Fridays use a chatbot that can help visitors with several different tasks, including placing an order, finding their nearest location, and contacting the company. These tasks are available in the form of buttons on the website’s homepage. Other options include more information about the restaurant or contact details for food chains around the world. This company provides simple interactions to make sure visitors think the website is easy to use and gives them a high chance of making a purchase.

Panda Express

Panda Express uses a Messenger bot to show their menu and help place an order via the chatbot. Customers can also locate the restaurant and check opening hours. The bot is on their social media for faster communication with customers. This helps clients to leave feedback on the bot for quick data collection.

Domino’s Pizza

Domino’s Pizza is another example. The bot allows customers to ask questions, place orders, and track their delivery directly via the bot. This works best for customers who don’t like calling the business, and it also results in sales. The bot doesn’t have many options to choose, making it clear and simple for the users to interact.

To sum up

The easiest way to build a restaurant bot is to use a template provided by your chatbot vendor. This way, you have the background pre-built, and you only need to customize it to add your diner’s information. Finally, remember to go through the examples and gain some insight into how successful restaurant bots look like when you’re starting to make your own.

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