Restaurant owners are feeling the pinch, through consistently rising costs of ingredients, labor and energy bills.
There is however a less visible profit drain: the silent loss of the phone ringing unanswered as the kitchen struggles to cope.
It’s lost business in disguise, and another area where the customer experience can let down a restaurant in its busiest moments.
CEO and co-founder of Flipdish.
Despite the growth in online orders, phone ordering still happens. But the point is when it occurs: phone orders spike at the exact moment a restaurant is slammed during service.
A quick-service restaurant that faces heavy load during its peak hours is likely to see the greatest inbound volume of calls at the same time: Friday or Saturday night.
The owner is forced to choose between answering the phone and dealing with existing customers and orders.
Neither scenario is ideal, nor does it do anything good for the customer experience.
Why traditional workflows fail to scale
Many solutions deployed in the hope of managing phone orders have failed to scale or were prohibitively expensive. Hiring additional personnel to attend to phone lines is costly, and the employee still cannot take more than one call at a time.
Even in this scenario, callers may have to wait on hold, leave voicemail, or receive a busy signal. Then, it becomes frustrating to try and connect to the restaurant again when waiting in line.
There’s also the question of precision. The most mistakes happen under pressure: misunderstood orders, incorrect delivery locations, allergy-related instructions missed. While some of those mistakes may only constitute bad customer experience, others lead to waste, losses, refunds, and sometimes, lost customers.
Finally, the opportunity cost of having employees talk to customers instead of doing other things is huge: each minute they spend talking on the phone is a minute spent not preparing meals, dealing with issues of in-store customers, or completing deliveries on time.
What do AI voice agents bring to the table?
AI voice systems can significantly improve the customer experience across a few critical use cases:
Availability: the system is available to pick up every phone call, no matter how busy the restaurant may be inside. There’s no on-hold messaging queue, no hold music, voicemail message, and most importantly, no missed calls.
Concurrency: a human agent can focus on one call at a time. The AI system, however, can manage multiple calls simultaneously, which is especially useful during the moments of peak demand.
Accuracy through confirmation: if done right, AI systems repeat the order before confirming it to eliminate errors and mistakes from the process entirely.
Intent-based conversations: not everyone calls in with the intention of placing a new order. Some have questions, want to update their existing order, or do something else entirely. A properly managed implementation will ensure that the phone system knows what the caller intends to do and collects the information necessary to complete the request successfully.
It also guarantees that every interaction with the phone agent goes through the same steps: identifying intent, gathering data, fulfilling the request, confirming its completion, and providing a smooth user experience.
More precise recommendations: AI-powered recommendations are always relevant and consistent throughout the entire conversation. They are not distracting or annoying and help to boost orders’ value.
One useful way to sanity-check the value is simple volume. One recent rollout reported an AI phone agent processing over 4,000 orders in three months, and capturing thousands in orders from the busiest sites.
More importantly, calls were answered immediately even at peak, and concurrency stopped being the bottleneck.
Why is the technology finally practical?
Voice automation technology is no novelty anymore, but the recent advances in the field are all about speed and intent recognition. More advanced algorithms mean fewer misunderstandings. Improved integration with ordering systems helps to implement voice as a channel of communication, allowing businesses to serve more customers during peak times.
Two other changes are making a difference in real deployments: localization of voice, and better menu understanding. This means when a customer does not know the exact name of a dish, the phone agent can still find what they mean without turning the call into a guessing game.
Practical implementation: where to deploy voice systems
The strongest signals here are the number of incoming calls and a complicated multi-site operation. But even the smaller restaurants with a handful of calls per day can be good candidates for voice automation due to the inefficiencies associated with having an employee to attend to the phones. Automation replaces a fixed staffing cost with something you can scale up and down.
The following are the guidelines for responsible deployments:
Structure around intents: not everyone calls in for an order; therefore, the phone agent should handle ordering, updating the order, and answering questions efficiently, offering clear prompts and a consistent user experience at each step of the interaction.
Transparency: the system should notify callers about the automation process and inform them if the conversation might be recorded.
Over time, the most useful systems also get more flexible around how orders are completed. For example, enabling cash ordering where it makes operational sense, or sending an SMS link if someone abandons the order mid-call, with the basket pre-filled so they can finish on their phone. Those are small touches, but they remove friction in the moments where customers typically drop off.
Implementing voice automation in the restaurant operation allows managers to scale easily, provide consistent customer experience, and generate more orders in the process.
Not futuristic, but practical
Framing voice technology as a future-state project does not benefit the hospitality industry. Voice technology is available now and brings a significant ROI from the revenue you are already generating.
The telephone line has become a nuisance in many restaurant operations for too long. Implementing a proper phone management strategy turns it into an operational channel you can manage.
We’ve listed the best POS systems for restaurants.
This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.
The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit
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