How to Use a Restaurant Chatbot to Engage With Customers

With the bot on the other hand, the customer knows exactly what to do. No AI involved but still feels like you are talking to someone. You’ll find out why conversational commerce is still beneficial without AI in the next section. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is slowly enabling us to shift back to a paradigm where the user does chatbot restaurant less on their own. An ideal AI travel assistant would be able to take your travel requirements and book all the flights and hotels you need in one bundle like a travel agent. Unlike a travel agent though, they could do it instantly like an app and for cheaper because there is no human that needs to be paid sitting at the back.

With the widespread use of digital by consumers, chatbots can be used in almost every retail environment. Restaurants are arguably the pioneers of conversational commerce. One of the only reasons I still use my smartphone to make calls is when I am ordering food. But even this basic use case could stand to be improved significantly by new technology. The primary new channel through which conversational commerce can occur is chatbots.

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Panda Express’ messenger-based chatbot is capable of helping customers place their orders swiftly and efficiently. It also allows the restaurant chain to collect customer feedback in the chatbot. The ‘My Starbucks Barista’ provides voice assistance in addition to text-based support to the customers. The chatbot provides customers with the ability to modify and customize their orders based on their preferences. According to Drift , 33% of customers would like to utilize chatbots for hotel reservations. People like dining out – And most, if not all, like to make reservations ahead of time in order to not worry about table availability, even on busy days.

This is important because it helps the restaurant build trust and credibility among its customers. Chatfuel, also focuses solely on Messenger and it also has a bunch of content and templates, but it’s approach to chatbots is more like ours at TARS. We don’t support Messenger chatbots so if you are trying to engage customers on that platform, we aren’t the builder for you.

Introduce the menu and prices

Conversational commerce is the process of conducting business by talking to someone. The vast majority of business conducted in human history has been conversational commerce. Del Taco, a regional Mexican fast-food chain based in Southern California, said in January that it would expand the use of conversational-AI voice assistants after a successful test.

Also, in my personal experience of using bots everyday, I have found that the best bots tend to be those which do one or two tasks really well. Add too many tasks and the user can get easily confused because you have to run through far too many menus. I wrote a whole other piece on this that you should check out for a better understanding (Chris Messina recommended it so I promise it is good).