How Voice AI Is Helping The World's Largest Restaurant Chains

Over the past year, COVID-19 has rapidly changed consumer behavior. Most restaurant executives previously assumed that online ordering was the way of the future and the only channel that really mattered. But COVID-19 changed that perception rapidly.

Restaurants across the country quickly realized how big and how important their off-premise sales were. A recent stat showed that 70% of orders at restaurants are still made over the phone.

Due to restaurants having limited capacity and being shut down phone orders started exploding. For large restaurant chains, they have been experiencing tens of thousands of phone orders per day across all of their locations. If you do the quick math this is potentially tens of millions of dollars per year going towards phone orders.

The problem most restaurant executives have is they have no way of tracking how many missed phone orders they are getting or if their in-store employees are up-selling. Because of the influx of inbound phone orders restaurant's abandonment rates have been skyrocketing which is causing in-store to get frustrated which is translating to high turnover, bad guest experiences, and significant missed revenue.

At Order Solutions, we have operated restaurant call centers for many years and have worked with some of the largest brands but we have noticed some inefficiencies. Restaurants experience huge spikes in call volume and it can be challenging to staff. For example on holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving restaurants can see an influx of phone orders by 500-600% In one day.

This is why we have been working extensively to bring AI to the restaurant space but support it with live human beings. We have developed an AI Voice bot that can take phone orders and is backed by trained live agents who can intercept a call at any time.

This is helping restaurants save a ton of money on labor costs, increase throughput, and virtually eliminate abandon rates even during holidays. Large restaurant chains can generate tens of millions of dollars annually in incremental revenue by implementing an AI Voice bot to centralize and streamline all of their phone orders.

This gives restaurant chains 10x the leverage they would normally have and allow them to process phone orders ten times faster.

The AI Bot uses machine learning on every call and gets better but is backed by live agents who listen to the calls and are ready to intercept if they need to. AI is helping restaurants increase their profitability and off-premise revenue. The AI Bot integrates seamlessly into the restaurant chain's POS and creates a VIP experience by building a database of the customer's preferences as well as their previous order.

The next time the same customer calls in, the AI recognizes the customer's phone number and asks if they would like the same order they had last time. This is called an automatic re-order and makes calls 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes.

To summarize now is the time for restaurants to start leveraging and utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning on their off-premise orders. Restaurants can take advantage of this shift in consumer behavior and not only improve their guest experience but increase their profitability as well.