Just like other industries, chatbots are not new to the restaurant industries. With technology developments, a well-designed website is not the only thing that describes your online presence. Chatbots have also become an essential part of high-level brands.
Especially in this pandemic, where people don’t want to go out unnecessarily, chatbots are of great help.
Also, when we talk about the food, people show more eagerness to get it delivered as soon as possible. Chatbots can be of great help whatever be the situation restaurants help in improving their customer experience.
Now it’s become the trend to order food online rather than going out. Customer can easily order the food online at valuable discounts and offers using chatbots by just sitting at their place.
Also, there is no need for them to install the application of a particular brand. Chatbots you can use on websites, social media platforms, and many other platforms.
Chatbots have made the delivery process easy for both the restaurants and the customers. There are various ways you can use restaurant chatbots.
Consider, for example-
Finding the nearest restaurant, reserving a table in your favorite restaurant, ordering and tracking your food, and many more in just some simple steps.
Chatbots can also help the restaurant understand the preference, inclinations, and other details that help notify customers with offers and discounts in their favorite restaurants and others that can trigger their interest.
In short, restaurant chatbots are the magical mantra for restaurant owners and managers to achieve their overall business objectives.
That may include any of the following:
- Making customers engaged with your brand
- Improve customer experience
- Remind customers about their table bookings
- Advertising promotions and events in restaurants
- Bring more customers to the doors
Overall, chatbots hold the capabilities to provide personalized experience to the individual experience. As a result, improved customer loyalty and revenue can increase.
As per a recent survey, 89% of customers prefer interacting with businesses via text, and 64% of people have positive understandings of businesses that interact with customers via text.
In a few words, the future of every business is conversational.
Let’s discuss here the various insights of restaurant chatbots in detail.
Let’s get started!
How to Use Chatbots in Restaurants?
Chatbots are just simply a fantastic tool for businesses to grow their business and reach their end goals. Using chatbots, you can perform many actions.
It’s your choice what functions you want your chatbot to perform that best helps your business.
You can simply use it as a productivity tool, customer support, and for many other purposes. You can use your chatbot as a marketing tool to promote and boost your business across various marketing channels, as chatbots have a multichannel presence.
Also, it’s easy to monitor its progress through analytics tools. You can assign some objectives to your chatbots, analyze the growth, and redesign your bot to work on challenging tasks.
Let’s discuss here-
Best Use cases of Restaurant Chatbots
Take Online Orders
People with the current situation are inclined more towards ordering online foods than going for takeaway to order their foods.
Chatbots can access any of the platforms they are more active in, it maybe Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, website, or any other platforms.
Let’s consider an example of WhatsApp chatbots for restaurants.
Chatbots make the overall process for the customers at their fingertips. They can pay the order amount online from their saved credit or debit card details.
It’s a one-time process with no need to enter the details again and again by just entering the password.
Taking online orders is also error-free, and it resolves the misunderstanding that happens during ordering foods.
Manage Reservations
Gone are the days when people needed to visit restaurants even for booking a table. For restaurant owners also, it will be easy for them to keep track and manage the reservations.
Even customers will get to know how many and which tables are available for them. It helps in minimizing misunderstandings between the management and customers. That, in turn, reduces the loss of customers and improves customer experience.
Promote Deals & Offers
Chatbots with machine learning capabilities can hold the details and chat history of the customers based on those details; they can get good insights about a particular customer and offer the same to them.
It helps restaurant owners to bring more business to their customers. It promotes offers and discounts on the customer’s most preferred channels or platforms.
Better Presentation of Menu
Having good dishes is not enough for the restaurants; it must attract the customer’s eye and attention. Otherwise, customers ignore the dishes even if they are of their interest. It’s difficult for the waiters to recommend the dish to the customers based on their preference all of a sudden.
On the other hand, chatbots can have the capability to understand the behavior of the customer from their chat history and recommend things based on that. In addition to that, chatbots can represent the menu in a more presentable and conversational way.
Engage With Your Customers Better
These are very easy to access wherever the customers are, whether you’re at home or sitting in the hotel. It can offer them the right recommendations and reduce the need to hire an additional workforce.
It can recommend, take orders, offer deals, and answer customer queries. All these can be done interactively through a conversational interface.
Track Feedback
For an online business, having a good review is crucial to add value to your business. Getting review and tracking of customers is an additional task for the restaurants to perform.
Chatbots become easy; they can automatically notify the customer to review or leave feedback on their website. Even take consent from the customers to send offers, discounts, promotions, and events happening via mail.
Chatbots with machine learning capabilities can perform all these functions automatically without the need for human intervention.
Regain Your Old Customers With Messages
Maybe your old customers stop engaging with you. The reason might be any. But, to regain your customers, you need to keep some effort, chatbots can help you with this.
Chatbots, based on the details and other activities of the customers, can understand the customers’ preferences and approach them with new offers and discounts to regain their attention.
Consider an example- if last time, if they have ordered food on the birthday of their spouse or a valentines day or women’s day, you can take this as an opportunity to remind them to celebrate the same in this year. You can remind them of the special offers available currently in your restaurants.
Easier Delivery & Takeaway
If your restaurants have a takeaway and online delivery facilities, then you no need to hire additional staff to maintain the whole process.
Chatbots are enough to take orders, track, take feedback, and arrange calls for any further information with the manager.
It’s also easy for the customers to order food on any of their preferred platforms; if they are active on Messenger, they can order from there no need to install an app or switch to another platform to order food. This overall process will become a highly engaging conversation with the chatbot.
Nurture Customers
Chatbots help take orders online; restaurant owners can use chatbots to guide and assist them in solving all their queries. Like the best restaurants, which dish is famous in which hotel, sharing menu and pricing, availability of tables, comparing ratings of the service or food delivery and many other things.
All these chatbots can perform pleasingly and engagingly to the customer. It can perform the entire conversation in a friendly way that improves the customer experience and retain ability.
POS System On Chat
For billing, no need to change the interface; customers can order and pay through the same interface. A chatbot can be integrated with a significant point of sale(POS) system to be easy for the customers.
Benefits of Restaurant Chatbots
A chatbot became a must-have marketing strategy for every developing company. It has so many benefits that reduce the overall costs of the restaurants.
Even it facilitates the workforce required to handle the tasks.
With the customer’s demand and instant response from brands, chatbots can be of great help.
A chatbot is mainly deployed to improve the presentation rate, engagement, performance, ease the customer journeys, and overall customer experience and retention rate.
Chatbots can be deployed in any platform or channel, and for ordering foods or for queries, they don’t need to change the interface; they can interact by being in their comfort zone. It’s the best option for the customers to interact with brands easily and comfortably.
Let’s discuss its benefits in detail-
Available to Your Customer 24/7
It’s the most prominent benefit of chatbots that attracts brands to deploy chatbots in their business. The customer executives can’t be available to customers anytime customers visit them.
Also, handling a large number of queries is a daunting task for the customer executives.
Chatbots can be the right solution for that, at night time or at times of pandemic going out is not possible, or customers will not opt for this option.
Chatbot at these points of time can be of great help to them to order online from their place and enjoy the food at any end of time or situation. It helps you improve your brand loyalty and satisfaction rate.
Understand Market Demand Better
Chatbots with AI and machine learning capabilities can save the chat history in their databases. They can analyze, segment, and take action on the collected information from the customers.
Chatbots can understand the preference of the particular customers from the details they have provided before and from their chat history and suggest the food of their choice.
Chatbots can also analyze the demand of the customers, such as which dishes are more popular and which are not based on that.
They can change their menu and add dishes that attract most customers or add dishes they often inquire about. It will increase sales and satisfy customers.
Customers feel more privileged when they get the food items of their choice in a single restaurant.
Cost Efficiency
In restaurants, they generally get repeated queries that are frustrating for the customer executives to answer.
Chatbots can answer all the repetitive questions to multiple customers at the same time without getting distracted from their other tasks. It satisfies the customer in getting their queries resolved.
Customer executives also get a good time to solve only the complex questions such as queries why food is not delivered yet, and work on fixing them.
It saves time and the restaurant’s owner’s cost on the customer executives to solve repetitive queries.
As per chatbots, a magazine study states that deploying virtual assistants can save 30% of the company’s customer service costs.
Multi-Language Support
Using Chatbot, you can interact with your customers in the language of their choice. Generally, the food items they want to pronounce in their mother tongue.
With this service, you can’t provide your customers with human agents. Chatbots help customers to provide personalized support.
TakeAway
Restaurant chatbots are already gaining significant popularity among customers. It’s a quick solution to fulfill their hunger in a couple of minutes.
Chatbots are already a well-known platform for customers; they use chatbots in their daily lives to perform their various activities.
Hotels/Restaurants can take this advantage to improve and run their business even in this pandemic as normal days.
But the primary task here is to select the right restaurant chatbot vendor for your business by seeing the limitations and challenges of chatbots. Generally, you can find various chatbot vendors in the market. The significant task here is to find the right vendor that suits your business needs, The functionality you need for your business must be present in that chatbot features.
To suggest you, SmatBot is a customized chatbot available for you. It has pre-defined templates and many more features that can trigger your customer to engage with you.
Don’t wait; try a SmatBot 14-day free trial now!