Restaurant chatbots are playing an increasingly valuable role in hospitality, helping businesses deliver customer service around the clock while saving both time and money. In this article, you can learn more about these chatbots, how they work, why they are used, and how they can be beneficial.

Table of Contents:

What is a Restaurant Chatbot?

A chatbot is a name given to a software application or service replicating human-to-human interactions. This is usually achieved through artificial intelligence and machine learning, which allows the chatbot to interpret communication from a human user and respond seemingly intelligently.

With this in mind, a restaurant chatbot is a service that allows customers to ask questions or make requests without requiring a human staff member to respond. Restaurant chatbots are specifically designed with restaurant customers in mind so they respond appropriately to the most common queries.

Video: Restaurant Chatbot Preview

 

What Can You Use Restaurant Chatbots For?

Restaurant chatbots can automate various customer service tasks within the restaurant industry. Some of the most common examples of restaurant chatbot uses are outlined below.

Table Reservations

One of the most significant potential uses for restaurant chatbots is to allow customers to reserve a table without communicating with a staff member. This is most commonly achieved by providing an automated chat feature on the restaurant website, but it may also be achieved through social media integration.

The primary benefit of accepting table reservations through chatbots is the ability to process bookings anytime, even if staff are unavailable or preoccupied with other tasks. Chatbots can improve accuracy by eliminating human error when integrated with high-quality booking engines.

Ordering Food

The main way restaurant chatbots are deployed to allow customers to order food is by having them process takeaway orders on restaurant websites and social media channels. This can be advantageous compared to other approaches because specific requests can be made, and orders can be placed in advance.

Chatbots may also be used in other ways, however. For instance, a restaurant may opt to use chatbots to allow customers to place sit-in restaurant orders in advance, while a growing number of restaurants are also adopting chatbots inside the restaurant itself, allowing orders to be made without waiting for service staff.

Live Chat for Customer Support

Another crucial way those in the hospitality industry can utilize restaurant chatbots is to deliver live customer support via a chat function. Again, this can be delivered via the restaurant website or social media channels, and it is common for chatbots to be deployed on messaging apps.

Using a restaurant chatbot for customer support can be ideal for handling some of the more simple queries you may receive, such as questions about the menu or the restaurant itself, special requests, or queries about food allergies. This also frees up customer support staff to spend more of their time on more complicated issues.

What Are the Benefits of Restaurant Chatbots?

For those involved with restaurant management and delivering customer service, the potential benefits associated with the use of restaurant chatbots are numerous and include the following:

Saving Time and Money

Perhaps the single most significant benefit of using restaurant chatbots is their ability to save businesses time and money. A chatbot can engage with customers instantly, at any time of the day, which means it can contend with modern demands for swift response times on a 24/7 basis.

On top of this, a high-quality, carefully designed chatbot can deliver quality answers, does not need to be paid, does not need to rest, and can pass on more complex tasks to human staff members when necessary.

Upselling and Promoting Special Deals

Modern restaurant chatbots can assist businesses with upselling to guests who are placing orders. This could mean highlighting the option to order a large portion instead of a small or medium-sized portion or suggesting side orders that are regularly ordered alongside what has been ordered so far.

Additionally, chatbots can collect contact details for those who interact with them. This can help restaurants and others in the hospitality industry to get in touch with those individuals who have expressed an interest and target them with relevant and tailored promotional content, such as special offers and discounts.

Follow Up and Reputation Management

Another crucial way that those in the restaurant industry can benefit from using chatbots is for follow-up and reputation management. With follow-up, a restaurant chatbot can communicate with customers and ask questions about their experience, their views on the food, and what they liked and did not like.

This follow-up can also be part of a wider reputation management strategy. Restaurant chatbots can send communications to customers, asking them to write reviews or submit feedback, which can then help influence other customers, who seek out reviews before booking a restaurant table.

Food Recommendations

Restaurant chatbots also can learn from previous interactions with customers. This can be extremely valuable for customer service because it allows customized recommendations.

For example, a restaurant chatbot that has previously taken food orders from a customer may be able to intelligently recommend meals that are similar to what has been ordered before. Alternatively, it could suggest meals previously enjoyed by other customers who ordered the same menu items.

Voice Ordering as the Future

Although most restaurant chatbots are text-based, chatbot restaurant technology can also utilize speech recognition and voice-to-text technology, delivering exciting business opportunities.

This follows wider trends, which have seen voice technology become more popular thanks to voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. For customers, voice recognition technology can allow them to carry out tasks like booking a table, or making a food order, even if they are busy with other things.

For this reason, restaurants increasingly use voice technology and chatbots to allow for automated voice ordering, which can drastically reduce waiting times and free up staff to focus on other tasks. At the same time, it can also provide accessibility benefits for people with disabilities or physical impairments.

Restaurant Chatbot: Why Hospitality Businesses Need This Technology

Restaurant chatbots form a wider trend of increasing chatbot usage within the hospitality industry. Hotels, restaurants, and similar businesses use this technology for several reasons, including the 24/7 availability of customer support, the potential for upselling, and efficiency benefits.

Within some businesses, chatbots can also help deliver greater personalization and reduce the burden on staff. To learn more, read the article “10 Reasons Why Every Hotel Needs a Hotel Chatbot”.

Exploring the Advantages of Restaurant Chatbots

The use of restaurant chatbots and similar technology within the travel industry has several advantages, ranging from improved marketing potential and rapid responses to customers to multilingual functionality, increased direct bookings, and a variety of other benefits besides.

To explore the topic of chatbots within the hospitality and travel industry and find out about their specific benefits, take a look at the “AI Chatbot: What Are the Advantages for the Travel Industry?” article.

Restaurant Chatbots: Voice Search for the Tourism & Travel Industry

The voice control element of restaurant chatbots links to another similar topic: the rise of voice search within the travel and hospitality industries. Businesses that optimize their website content with voice search in mind can benefit from greater visibility while delivering a superior overall experience for users.

However, the uses of voice search and its benefits still extend further. To explore the topic in more detail and find out more, read “Voice Search for the Tourism & Travel Industry: All You Need to Know!”

Selecting the Right Food Ordering System

Restaurant chatbots are a great example of modern restaurant technology and they should be used in combination with other technology solutions. For instance, a good food ordering system can help to transform your restaurant, increasing your reach and revenue, while boosting the customer experience.

In the “Food Ordering System: How to Choose the Best One for Your Property?” article, you can learn more about how food ordering systems work, why they are beneficial and how you can select the right option for your restaurant.

Restaurant chatbots are an automated services allowing customers to interact with an artificially intelligent live chat feature at any time. These benefits are wide-reaching, including improved efficiency, the ability to upsell, swifter response times, and the capacity to enhance the customer experience.

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This article is written by:

Martijn Barten

Hi, I am Martijn Barten, founder of Revfine.com. With 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry, I specialize in optimizing revenue by combining revenue management with marketing strategies. I have successfully developed, implemented, and managed revenue management and marketing strategies for individual properties and multi-property portfolios.