How To Create A Bot For Your Restaurant
A chatbot is the most effective way to power your restaurant. Used well, it can replace most of your current technology and even make your staff more efficient, without needing any new equipment. The entire creation process, from sign-up to having a chatbot your customers can text, only takes about 10 minutes.
This bot acts like any member of your staff, able to engage in a conversation with your customer, but is more efficient. It can do everything from showing the menu to making reservations. If your customer needs a human, the bot texts your staff. It also works with all of your existing vendor services for delivery and ordering since it’s fully custom and uses links.
For now, think of the bot like a robot host of your restaurant, taking care of all the automated requests and directing tasks that require people to your appropriate staff. Everything is written, giving you better records and better understanding of your customers individually over time. This opens up the potential for better service and recommendations later using more advanced conversational AI.
Let’s walk through a sample interaction flow.
When a customer enters the restaurant, they could be given a QR code and instructions to text the bot. This number and code could be easily added to all your printed materials and online links. Try this demo yourself:
Immediately the bot replies with a link to your menu and asks whether DELIVERY, TAKEOUT, OR DINING IN. For DELIVERY, if you have a delivery service, the bot gives the customer a link to your current delivery service. If you don’t have a delivery service, or for TAKEOUT or DINING IN, the customer is asked for the order. The customer types in their order as if messaging a person. If DINING IN, they are asked for their table number. Once this is done, they get an auto-reply confirming their order and your staff is notified of the order by text. If the customer needs to talk with a person at any point, they could text HUMAN and your staff will also be notified.
Below is a screenshot of the whole bot flow.
COST: The only setback with an SMS text bot can be the cost at scale, because the telecom operators charge for every message. However, Messages Improved provides a low (almost free) upfront cost to try your bot out. Ultimately, the cost is negligible compared to other software/platforms or additional staff. At scale, you have the option to use the Messages Improved app to significantly reduce messaging costs.
Messages Improved — Pay As You Go Pricing
- Trial: 10 free user messages with the bot
- Basic: $0.10/message for the next 100 messages
- $0.05/message 101–10,000 messages
- $0.03/message 10,000+ messages
The bot telephone number is yours so long as 100 messages are exchanged a month or can be leased. Monthly subscription and high volume packages are available For info, more advanced capabilities, integrations, or custom packages, contact us at info@messagesimproved.com.
HOW TO CREATE YOUR BOT
- Sign in with your telephone number
- Start a custom bot flow from scratch or clone an existing one
- Name your bot
- Hit “SUBMIT BOT” to create the bot, then “DEPLOY BOT” to assign a telephone number
- Your bot is live and you can test it by texting the number you get assigned
- If you want a QR code, you can set it up here: https://www.qr-code-generator.com/solutions/sms-qr-code/