Restaurants and catering
The phone rings hardest when every hand is carrying a plate.
Six thirty on a Friday is when the reservation, the catering inquiry and the gluten free question all land at once, and it is the one hour nobody can stop to pick up. The agent answers each of them in your voice, books what is actually open in your book, and puts the party of twelve in front of a person while the caller is still on the line.
Demo Restaurant is our demo company, and its prices are invented. The system answering is the real one.
Yours would answer from your tables, your hours and your own large-party rules.
The three leaks
Where restaurant hours actually go.
The rush hour phone
Six to eight is when reservations, catering and the where do I park question all arrive, and it is the same two hours every hand is carrying a plate. The phone rings out and the caller books somewhere else.
The party of twelve behind four easy calls
A large party on a Saturday is worth twelve covers and genuinely needs a person. It rarely gets one, because the four callers ahead of it only wanted the hours.
The catering inquiry that went cold
It arrives by email on a Friday afternoon and gets read on Monday. By then whoever sent it has three quotes and a date already held somewhere else.
One agent, phone to DM
Reservations come by phone, catering comes by email, and the question about gluten free comes by DM at eleven at night. Same agent, same answers, one booking behind all five.
Phone
Website chat
Instagram and Facebook DM
SMS
What the agent handles
Reservations and the waitlist
Takes party size, date and time, offers what is actually open in your book and confirms it. A full night becomes a waitlist entry rather than a dead end.
Hours, location and parking
Are you open, do you take reservations, do you have gluten free, where do I park. The four questions that make up most of the calls, answered the same way at 11am and at 11pm, without anyone putting down a tray.
Large parties and private events
Takes the size, the date and the occasion, quotes only the minimums you gave it, and hands the booking to a person while the caller is still on the line.
Catering inquiries
Captures headcount, date, delivery or drop off and the budget range, then puts a structured inquiry in front of you the same afternoon instead of Monday morning.
Allergen and dietary questions
Answers from the menu notes you gave it and from nothing else. Anything it is not certain of goes to the kitchen or a manager, because a guess here is the one that hurts a guest.
Takeout and order status
Where the order is, when it will be ready and what is on it, read from your own system rather than from somebody’s memory of the ticket.
Reads from your systems
It answers from your book, not from a copy of it.
Table availability, the takeout queue and tonight’s menu are read at the moment of the question. A stale copy is how an agent seats a party of ten in a room you closed at four.
FAQ
Restaurant questions.
Will it answer allergen and dietary questions?
Only from what you told it. It reads back your own menu notes and says plainly what the kitchen can confirm. Anything it is not certain of it hands to a manager or the kitchen instead of guessing, because this is the question where being wrong hurts somebody.
Does it book the table itself, or just take a message?
It books. It reads what is actually open for that party size at that hour, holds it and sends the confirmation. A message is what you get when nobody could reach the book, which is the problem rather than the fix.
What happens with a party of twelve on a Saturday?
It takes the details, quotes only the minimum you set, and gets a person on it while the caller is still there. Large parties and buyouts are exactly where you want a human, and the agent’s job is to make sure one is free to take that call instead of reciting the hours to somebody else.
We are a food truck. Can it tell people where we are?
Yes. You update the location and the hours in one place and the agent answers from that, on the phone, in DMs and by text. It is the same edit whether you are parked on the square or booked at a private event.
More industries
Step through the trades one at a time, or see all twelve on the hub.
Stop losing the six o’clock call.
Fifteen minutes on what arrives during your rush and what happens to it after close. You keep the findings either way.