How many phone calls is your restaurant missing while you’re handling other customers? How many potential customers get impatient while sitting on hold and just hang up? How many callers are reaching out to your restaurant after closing hours and getting no answer at all?
If you don’t have a restaurant AI phone system, there’s a good chance you don’t know the answers to any of these questions. But here’s one thing you can know for sure — you’re missing out on revenue. These calls represent dollars and cents that could be spent at your restaurant. So when you fail to field these calls, you’re straight up missing out on growth potential.
On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for restaurant owners to feel a little nervous about implementing an AI phone answering service for restaurants. Many owners still fear that relying on an AI agent could create a robotic, impersonal, and ultimately alienating customer service experience.
But Rebecca Evanhoe, Conversation Design Strategist for AI phone answering service Slang.AI, explains that the right voice AI for restaurants should be able to both drive growth and improve the customer experience.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of AI phone answering for restaurants Rebecca wants to make one thing perfectly clear. She explains, “For anybody who still thinks that it’s like a ‘press one, press two’ system, that has radically changed.”
So what can an AI system like Slang.AI do?
“It books reservations, it can change your reservation, and it can cancel a reservation, it can help people who are running late, it can answer any question about the restaurant,” Rebecca explains. “It handles a lot of the basic things a host can do so the host is a lot more free to be present in person.”
A growing number of restaurants are adopting this technology, especially as the hurdles to implementation become fewer. Rebecca notes that restaurant AI phone system setup, customization, and integration have all become quite easy to do.
As she points out, “You can set up our product really quickly and have it answer questions specifically about your restaurant. And we integrate with reservation providers like Open Table, SevenRooms, and Yelp…and we're always adding more integrations.”
So what can AI phone answering do for your operation? First and foremost, says Rebecca, this type of technology can offset the labor demands on your in-house team.
“Our customers are restaurant operators who are struggling to answer the phone, which is really all of them,” Rebecca observes. “If you’ve ever called a restaurant and the phone rings and rings and rings — it’s because there's so much going on in person. It’s difficult for the restaurant team to get to every phone call.”
AI phone answering for restaurants eliminates that demand and frees your staff up to focus on the customer experience. Rebecca describes AI voice answering as “a super host that can answer hundreds of calls at once, all day, 24/7.”
The results are typically improved service efficiency, better staff morale and, in the best case scenario, improved employee retention. These improvements can all indirectly improve your bottom line and drive growth. But there is also a more direct and obvious opportunity for growth with AI phone answering.
“When we capture revenue that a host could have gotten anyway, we’re just saving your staff time,” Rebecca points out. “But we also capture revenue that you might not have gotten, whether that’s because you can’t answer coinciding calls [calls that come in at the exact same time] or because calls come in after hours.”
As Rebeeca explains, “If somebody calls for a reservation tonight and you don’t have any open tables, our AI answering system will offer to book a reservation on another night for the customer. So we do a lot of different things to plug leaking revenue.”
By way of proof, Rebbecca shared the recent results for the Chicago-based restaurant group, DineAmic Hospitality. In the two months following implementation, Slang’s restaurant AI phone system fielded more than 30,000 calls for the client. According to Slang’s data, the answering system saved DineAmic more than 750 hours of staff labor while converting more than $105,000 in reservations.
Rebecca points out that the vast majority of reservations booked directly by the restaurant AI phone system were either coinciding calls or calls that occurred in after hours. In other words, it’s clear that the restaurant AI phone system is capturing revenue that would otherwise have been lost.
Securing that lost revenue is obviously important, but of course, you don’t want that revenue to come at the expense of happy customers. Fortunately, you can have both if you choose the right restaurant AI phone system. In fact, the right voice agent should ultimately make it possible for you to capture that revenue while actually improving the customer experience.
But here are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind as you try to strike that balance.
Rebecca stresses the importance of balancing between AI that is friendly and conversational, but that is also “very clearly not human.”
“You want a system that sounds realistic, but you never want customers to falsely believe they're talking to a person,” Rebecca explains. “Every single AI company has guidelines that say, ‘Do not use AI to deceive.’ So we want people to know they're talking to a system, but we have to convince them it's really, really smart.”
Effective AI phone answering for restaurants should feel natural to the ear. The conversation should flow in a way that doesn’t feel robotic. But there should also be clear guidelines about differentiating between human and AI voice answering.
As Rebecca explains, “It's our AI's job to build the caller’s trust. You want there to be a quality to the voice where you don't ever mistake it for a human. We also want behavior that has boundaries, so that if people ask, ‘Wait, is this a person?’ The AI will always say, ‘No, I'm not a person. I'm AI, but I can absolutely help you.’”
Just as importantly, says Rebecca, callers need to know that they can reach a human being when one is available. As she acknowledges, “Restaurants want hospitality. They don’t want their guests to feel like they're stuck in a robotic system, like you would at the bank or the airline. If you say you want to talk to a person, you can talk to a person.”
The goal is to find that balance between personality and proficiency. And that’s because at the end of the day, speed is still the name of the game. Yes, customers want humanity and hospitality. But they also want immediate service. Anything less, and they could just as easily spend their money elsewhere. This is especially true when it comes to large party bookings, where time is of the essence.
“People who are booking private events or corporate luncheons or bridal showers, anything like that, they're calling around and they're going to go with the person who gets back to them the fastest,” Rebecca points out. “That’s why Slang.AI entered into a partnership with private event booking service Tripleseat. If staff is not available when somebody calls, our AI system can say, ‘Let me get your information. I'll get it to my staff.’”
With Tripleseat, that request for contact results in an immediate alert. This can be a huge difference-maker when it comes to locking down big parties. In fact, this approach often produces faster response time than a purely human interaction. As Rebecca explains, “With the AI voice agent and Tripleseat, an events team sees that lead as soon as it hits their books and they can jump on it right away.”
When you miss customer calls, you’re missing out on more than just an opportunity for revenue growth. You’re also missing out on a vast amount of information about customer preference and behavior.
Rebecca notes, "A lot of operators don't even know how many calls they're missing. They have no visibility into how many calls came at the same time. How many calls went unanswered? How many people got transferred to voicemail and hung up? It's completely behind a curtain.”
As Rebecca tells us, with AI voice answering, ”We can show restaurants tons of data about how many coinciding calls we’re handling and what topics the callers were calling about. Of the calls where people called to change, book, or cancel a reservation, how many were successful? If they weren't successful, why? What happened?”
With AI voice answering, you get a complete picture of your callers and what happens to each one during the process of attempting to book a reservation. If a caller doesn’t ultimately book a reservation, you can use this information to figure out why.
“Was it because it was 7pm on a Friday and you were fully booked, or was it because they wanted to come in at eight, but we only have 9:15 and they declined?” explains Rebecca. “We give that level of detail — all the different reasons why it didn't get booked. So it really helps operators target any missed revenue opportunities.”
Rebecca also points out that with many AI voice systems, you can customize your AI agent to answer with the same tone and messaging every time. For instance, Slang offers a feature called branded greeting, which allows you to choose exactly how your AI agent answers the phone every single time.
This is actually one area where your customer experience can benefit from the absence of human variables. As Rebecca explains, “AI is never going to get frustrated. It’s never going to be snarky. AI never has a bad day. So there's a consistency there.”
That consistency also creates all kinds of opportunities to boost your revenue.
“We upsell so our restaurants get more reservations. Our restaurant AI voice system uses all kinds of conversational nudges,” Rebecca explains. “People will call and they'll ask about the menu, or they'll ask about brunch, or they'll ask, ‘Can I get a table as a walk-in customer?’ We'll answer their question, and then we'll say, ‘To guarantee a table, I can book for you from start to finish.’”
For restaurants that are skeptical of AI-powered answering services, Rebecca explains that the technology has truly come a long way.
As she points out, “Every kind of technology that's involved, from the synthetic voices to the generative AI — everything has completely gotten better, easier to use, more effective, and not just in the last 15 years, but in the last year-and-a-half.”
As the technology has improved, so has the level of acceptance among both restaurant owners and their customers. In just the last few years, Rebecca observes, “Restaurant operators went from being like, ‘What's AI?’ to coming to us and saying, ‘We want to make sure that the AI will do this or that.’ We’re seeing a very rapid change in sophistication and understanding among restaurant operators.”
Customers are also becoming more and more comfortable with AI-powered conversation. Rebecca notes, “Caller tolerance for AI is also getting a lot better. And we also see callers who we can tell are skeptical at the beginning of the call. They may ask, ‘Is this a robot?’ and sometimes you can hear that they’re not happy to be talking to a robot.
“But when callers stick it out, we build that trust, and we confirm that reservation, we can watch people go from skeptical to, ‘Wow! It works. I can't believe it.’”
Of course, it has to work. That’s really the key. If you want to achieve growth and ensure a superior customer experience, you need to choose a restaurant AI phone system that is actually up to the task. As Rebeccas notes, “We really see everybody getting more used to it. But it has to work, it has to be a really good experience to make that happen.”
So how can you create that experience in your restaurant and capture all that revenue you’ve been missing? It starts with the right technology.
To find out if an AI voice agent could be right for your restaurant, reach out today and schedule your free, personalized consultation with one of our restaurant tech experts.