When it comes to digital marketing for restaurants, there are various avenues to explore. One of those avenues is Chatbots. Restaurant Chatbots can converse with customers without the need for human labor. Customer interaction points can range from mobile apps, third-party food aggregator apps, social media, and chat apps.
Why Do Chatbots Play a Role for Restaurant Businesses?
Most large F&B brands know the power of messaging apps to respond to customer queries. But many small restaurants haven’t yet adopted emerging restaurant technology for customer communication. Messaging and chat apps can play a significant role here. Besides answering customer inquiries, Chatbots help funnel sales in an efficient manner.
Chatbots level the field for digital interactions. Faster customer response drives customer engagement and increases business conversion. It can be difficult to employ a great customer service team. Automating this with Chatbots allows restaurants to build a stronger digital bond with their customers.
Moreover, these customer conversations can help businesses personalize food offerings and services per customer demands. This will ultimately help restaurants retain loyal customers.
How Can Chatbots Be Used by Restaurants?
Here are various ways Chatbots can be effectively used.
1. Streamline Reservations and Order Management
Restaurant employees devote a lot of time to reservation management and customer orders. That changes when you use a conversational chatbot on the website, mobile app, or social media. The bot can take the responsibility of interacting with customers. The bots ensure optimal accuracy and precision. Chatbots are less time consuming, more efficient, and less erroneous than humans in performing such tasks.
2. Promote Offers
Chatbots can email new deals and offers to your list of current customers. They can also send such promotional offers on social media, your website, and the app. Thanks to machine learning, restaurant chatbots can easily recognize customers and their motivations. Creating data-insight-driven promotions for customers is a great way garner sales and boost the ROI of your marketing efforts.
3. Showcase Your Menu
Many restaurants can’t highlight all their delicacies to the customers, Often, to promote some, other important ones are not showcased at all. This often leads to lost sales opportunities. Moreover, restaurants are often in the dark about customer preferences. This is where intelligent Chatbots play a vital role. They’re able to assess customer references and accordingly suggest food items they will prefer.
4. Provide Personalized Food Recommendations
Customers like being addressed in a personalized manner. For example, if you are vegan with a preference for continental delicacies, you prefer your food choices be suggested accordingly.
While most restaurant employees make recommendations based upon popularity of certain items, Chatbots can be more precise and specific to the customer choices. They can even engage in conversation to request specific customer preferences. Personalized food recommendations will help cultivate better customer satisfaction.
5. Follow-Up for Reviews
Consumers read online or social media reviews before making a purchase. In fact, reviews, ratings, and recommendations from peer groups shape buying decisions for most. It’s critical for reputation management to monitor online reviews and respond accordingly.
Many restaurants fail to monitor and leverage this. They don’t get customer feedback in the form of positive reviews and ratings because they don’t have an automated system to do so. This is where Chatbots can play an effective role. Chatbots can send customers automatic reminders to encourage them to leave feedback. Chatbots can also ask customers for their email addresses to send offers and promotions from time-to-time.
6. Make Delivery and Takeout Easier
Customers may face difficulties when ordering delivery or takeout. Chatbots, in this respect, can make the process speedier and simple. Thanks to Chatbots, after ordering a food item on Facebook, the customer can engage in conversation with the Chatbot on the web. Chatbots can make conversation supple and fluid across multiple channels while ensuring efficiency in delivery and takeaway process.
Conclusion
The best thing about the restaurant Chatbot is that it can nurture the customer relationship and continuously stay in touch. Intelligent Chatbots analyze customer details and interactions. They can reply with options that are more suitable. All these capabilities make Chatbots an invincible part of modern restaurant and food chain businesses.
Author Bio: Nathan McKinley is a Business Development Manager at Cerdonis Technologies LLC, a chatbot development company. He has accumulated knowledge of various technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Chatbot, Internet of Things, Big Data, Blockchain, and Voice Techs.