Restaurant Chatbot 101: What They Are & Why You Need Them
Chatbots have exploded in popularity lately. Why? They save you money and enhance the customer experience. Developed with smart technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, chatbots have shown great potential in enhancing the guest experience. A restaurant chatbot is a potentially great resource for restaurateurs looking to quickly and efficiently answer guest questions. Is a restaurant chatbot the right fit for your operation?
On-demand food delivery apps have gained attention as they allow guests to order food online at their convenience. While various third-party delivery platforms have established themselves in the market, restaurateurs build a strong digital identity to remain competitive. To keep up, owners and operators leverage modern technologies such as AI-powered restaurant chatbots to communicate with their customers.
Why Use a Restaurant Chatbot?
You can see the benefits chatbots offer to businesses. More than 83% of the shoppers need assistance during purchases. Chatbots are designed to interact with users and assist them in their journey without drawing from your existing staffing resources.
The following are the major benefits of a restaurant chatbot offers:
- Enhanced guest experience
- 24/7 patron support
- Frees restaurant staff to pursue other details
Every day, guests increasingly embrace restaurant chatbots. For guests, chatbots offer the opportunity to save time on commonly asked questions. Now, let’s see what a restaurant chatbot can do for restaurateurs.
Why Restaurant Chatbots?
More than half the global population is online, and that number is growing. According to Grand View Research, the global chatbot market is projected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025, with an annual rate of 24.3%.
Restaurateurs can take advantage of chatbots to capture a growing market. As such, chatbots are affordable alternatives to expanding your staff. These tools have gained popularity globally because they offer a new and swift way to communicate with consumers in this competitive world.
Key Benefits Of Using Restaurant Chatbots
A few years ago, more than 80% of online businesses planned to use chatbots by 2020. While chatbots are typically employed for customer service, they have a variety of uses. In addition to guest relations, restaurant chatbots can be used to place orders, and reservations, and table management, to name a few.
Reducing Operational Costs
Restaurant chatbots can cut-down operational costs by up to 30%. Chatbots can interact with guests anytime and can guide them to updates, offers, and weekly specials. You can even use a restaurant chatbot to promote your customer loyalty program, which has the potential to pay off down the line.
A chatbot can handle multiple questions simultaneously, solving their queries quickly and efficiently. If that doesn’t work for your guest, the query will be forwarded to the appropriate parties, including the staff, to answer your guests’ questions or your restaurant IT. Keep in mind that if a chatbot fails to answer a question, that information can be used to enhance the artificial intelligence behind the tech. In doing so, you turn today’s problem into tomorrow’s solution.
Providing Advanced Personalization
Restaurants benefit from having a website, with 77% of guests likely to check your site before making their choice. Just as you would in your restaurant, you want to ensure a good guest experience. Given the importance of off-premise channels, restaurant business owners embrace delivery app solutions and take their business online. Integrating a restaurant chatbot into your website strategy personalizes the customer experience.
By collecting guest information, restaurant chatbots evolve to become more efficient. Restaurateurs can utilize guest data like a customer’s location, browser history, previous purchases, email replies, etc., to help streamline and target ads.
Converting Visitors into Customers
Every visitor to your restaurant site or social media page is a potential guest. Chatbots help break down potential barriers in converting your visitor to a guest by providing fast access to the information they need. Restaurant chatbots are designed to mitigate these concerns by directing your guests to the information that they might not have even realized that they needed.
Do you have a current sale or special going on? Using geofencing and chatbots, you can promote that information to casual visitors to your various web pages. The same information can be shared for months to come through targeted email or social media campaigns through data collection. Restaurant chatbots save time and help management to make strategic decisions.
Conclusion: Unlocking Other Benefits With Restaurant Chatbots
A restaurant chatbot is an excellent lead-generation tool that drives more revenue along with excellent customer service. By integrating restaurant chatbots into your web presence, you can reap many benefits and hopefully drive revenue. Have you had any experience with restaurant chatbots? Tell us about it in the comments below. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Subscribe to the blog for more interesting restaurant content!
The article is awesome and able to follow up your thoughts.