How restaurant chains can modernize the online customer experience with chatbots

The way that people communicate with businesses is changing. Gone are the days of customers who will leave detailed voicemails, wait patiently for replies to emails, or search across a restaurant’s websites and social profiles to find answers to their specific questions.

In an age where more and more businesses offer live chat support, customers expect to be able to get answers to their questions in real time, whether they have a question about making a reservation or want to ask about booking a private event. And more importantly, they expect to be able to get this support via text message.

A recent poll indicated that 90% of consumers would prefer to text businesses rather than call. And consumers look positively on brands that offer the ability to get quick answers via real time messaging channels — an astonishing 77% of people have a positive perception of companies that offer texting as a customer support channel

In the hyper-competitive restaurant world, providing real time support to consumers learning about your restaurant is more important than ever. According to a recently OpenTable study, more and more diners are making reservations within 24 hours of arriving at a restaurant, and nearly 30% of customers are searching for restaurants within an hour of their meal. In short, restaurant guests have an increasing number of ways to discover and book restaurants in real time, and restaurants that hope to capture customer attention in this ever-shrinking window of discovery need to be able to answer their questions instantly wherever the customer is online.

The Age of Responsiveness

Restaurants are already starting to adapt to this shift. Some of the best restaurants in the world are abandoning landlines in exchange for modern, real time customer communication via SMS and other digital channels. This is particularly relevant for restaurant chains, where a complex combination of customer support phone numbers and location-specific landlines make it even less likely that a potential customer will be able to quickly get in touch with someone who can answer their questions.

It’s not surprising that the largest restaurant discovery platforms in the world, from Facebook and Instagram to Google and Yelp, are actively rolling out tools to let restaurant chains be active, responsive, and easily messaged on all these platforms. Restaurants’ profile pages on these platforms now clearly show how long it takes for businesses to reply to customers who message them, in an attempt to remove the layer of frustration that comes when a customer reaches out to a business with no idea when or if they’ll ever hear back.

In short, the “black box” of customer-to-business communication is disappearing, and in its place businesses can now allow customers to message them directly and tell customers exactly how long it will take before they can expect a reply. Whereas reviews used to be one of the primary ways that a restaurant brand’s reputation was determined, “responsiveness” and “activeness” are emerging as the newest factors that affect a brand’s online reputation.

To encourage messaging adoption, platforms like Facebook and Yelp enable the messaging function by default, meaning that restaurant chains that don’t have an active strategy for handling these incoming messages will show up as unresponsive or stagnant. Showing up as “responds in more than a day” on these platforms where new customers are discovering restaurants can be enough to kill a potential sale right off the bat. On the other hand, chains that do have a plan in place to respond quickly appear as “instantly responsive” and therefore get more bookings from people making immediate dining decisions.

But how can national restaurant chains easily manage customer messages in real time and in a scalable way when more and more major platforms are adding messaging functionality every month? In this article, we’ll outline four simple ways that restaurant chains can enable messaging without adding headcount, costs, or complex new processes to their existing customer engagement strategy.

Google Messaging

More than any other platform, Google is where the most people are learning about restaurants. Sites like OpenTable heavily promote their value as discovery platforms, and Google is no different. Here’s a snapshot from the Google My Business listing for Mezze Bistro, a Guestfriend customer. Nearly 75% of the people who found Mezze on Google were discovering them for the first time, rather than searching for them directly.

So if your restaurant chain is already being discovered by a massive number of people on Google every week, you should do everything you can to ensure that those potential customers can easily get all the info they’re looking for without having to go searching on competitor-laden platforms that are outside of your control.

Google is investing heavily in its Google My Business platform to ensure that customers can easily discover any restaurant, learn everything they could possibly want to know about that restaurant (from exploring a menu to finding out specific details like dress code), and book a table without ever having to leave the Google ecosystem.

For restaurants, the value of this is undeniable. Up until now, a diner might discover a restaurant on Google, but if they wanted to explore the menu, make a reservation, or find some other specific detail about the business, they’d need to go offsite to a platform like Yelp or OpenTable to get answers to their questions. And once someone leaves the restaurant’s controlled environment on Google, the chance of them discovering a competitor and deciding to eat there instead goes up significantly.

But how do you let people make reservations, browse your menu, and answer more difficult questions that Google doesn’t support, without making them leave your Google page or call your restaurant?

Solution 1: Enable messaging on Google

Even if you keep your business info up to date on Google, there are still a lot of things that guests can’t do on Google. Previously, they’d need to go to another site or call your restaurant to do things like make a reservation. That is, until now.

Google now lets you enable Messaging within your GMB account. Many small business connect their actual phone number to this feature in their GMB account. This is obviously not possible for most chains, but it doesn’t change the fact that Google added this feature because guests want to be able to text businesses.

Currently the only way to enable Messaging on Google and ensure that your guests are receiving real time replies without any extra work by your team is to use an automated messaging solution (like the one we built at Guestfriend). Connecting a “virtual host” to Google will let your guests get real time answers to their questions in their preferred messaging format, without forcing them to call your restaurant or go searching for answers off site.

Facebook Messaging

95% of businesses have the “Message Us” button enabled on their Facebook page, but most don’t even realize it. While smaller restaurants may only get a few messages a week from potential diners, large national brands with millions of followers need a plan to answer all of these messages at scale. From our research, the average response time for chain restaurants is several hours at best and never in many cases. Based on the fact that more and more diners are making decisions within a few hours of dining, lack of responsiveness is a major reason why restaurants are losing potential customers.

Solution 1: Enabling messaging on Facebook

Even if your restaurant chain has a plan in place to periodically reply to customer messages on Facebook, it probably isn’t fast enough. So how do you automate messaging so that customers get intelligent answers to their questions in real time and then only get routed to a real person for complex questions?

Facebook provides a variety of tools to create your own automated replies, but your development team will need to devote extensive resources if you hope to create anything that is even remotely flexible. Alternately, you can build your own solution on a chatbot authoring platform, which can take several months, or use a custom virtual host built specifically for your restaurant chain, which you can customize and deploy within a few hours.

Solution 2: Submit Your Business to Facebook Discover

If you have a chatbot or “virtual host” connected to your brand’s Facebook page, then you should be using Facebook Discover. Discover is a product that Facebook launched on Messenger last year, which lets its users easily discover new chatbots that are either relevant to their interests or geographically close to them.

Being featured on Discover opens up your restaurant to an entirely new audience of potential customers. And the best part is that it takes two minutes to submit, and you’ll be one of the only restaurant brands in the world using it! It’s an effortless way to get more people organically discovering your business with no marketing spend required. We wrote more about this here.

Automated text messaging

Phones and landlines for restaurants, particularly large chains, are dying. In most scenarios, when someone tries to call a chain restaurant, they either go straight to voicemail, have to spend 5 minutes in a call tree, or get connected to a host during busy hours and can’t hear anything. Any way you slice it, phones for restaurant chains are largely pointless and archaic, only delivering negative experiences. Texting is the future.

Like we mentioned earlier, 90% of people want to message businesses instead of calling. But outside of enabling messaging on platforms like Google and Facebook, how do you quickly set up the infrastructure to let your guests text an actual phone number and receive real time replies to their questions?

Solution 1: Enable automated texting

If you have an automated messaging solution in place, anytime someone texts your restaurant’s corporate or local SMS numbers, they’ll get real time answers and be able to have a natural language conversation with your virtual host, with no work required by your team and full control over the exact responses guests receive.

At Guestfriend, we provide local SMS numbers, automatically connected to your brand’s custom virtual host, that can be promoted on your social media pages, across your website, in your phone voicemail recordings, and more.

Voice Platforms

Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana. Every major platform now has a voice-based personal assistant that will give you instant answers to nearly any question. Voice is exploding and it’s going to change the way that people interact with restaurants. Some reports estimate that nearly 50% of searches will be voice by 2020. Search results and search marketing are going to be heavily affected by this shift to voice and Google is actively figuring out how to handle things like SEO in a world dominated by voice searching.

It remains to be seen how restaurant chains will be able to affect and/or sponsor voice search results, but it seems more and more likely that voice technology will simplify the way people learn about businesses and then allow them to take specific actions. It’s not hard to imagine that in the coming years, you’ll be able to discover, learn about, and book a table at a restaurant within a few seconds, all with your voice.

Since there are currently no good ways for restaurants to control how their business appears in Voice search results or for people to ask specific questions about your restaurant and receive comprehensive responses, the best way to experiment in the voice ecosystem right now is to start to build your brand presence through a custom “app” or “skill” on Amazon and Google’s marketplaces.

Solution 1: Create a custom voice app

Creating a unique skill for your restaurant chain on these platforms is difficult. The most common way is to hire an agency for tens of thousands of dollars to build a custom voice skill for your brand. The faster and cheaper option is to leverage an existing restaurant messaging platform that has already created your restaurant’s virtual host on text-based platforms like Google, Facebook, or SMS.

While voice apps may currently be better suited as marketing tools than an actual channel to drive incremental bookings, it’s a good idea to start to experiment in the world of voice now so that once the major players roll out strategies to sponsor listings and optimize your SEO position in voice search results, your team will be well-versed in how to leverage voice technology to position your chain for success in the world of voice search.

Conclusion

There’s never been a more exciting time to be involved in the digital customer experience side of the restaurant industry. The tools to engage guests across a huge number of platforms are readily accessible and easy to use, and the shift from an asynchronous customer experience to a real-time one is well underway. And brands that are able to leverage these tools to their fullest get to shape what “customer experience” in the modern restaurant world actually looks like.

Every month, more and more platforms roll out messaging features (Google being the most recent and Instagram coming very soon). While the growing number of platforms that customers can use to get in touch with your business might seem daunting, there are finally tools built specifically for the restaurant industry that let you manage and automate customer communication for the first time. And undoubtedly, allowing your customers to get in touch with you in their preferred medium is the best way to differentiate yourself and capture more business.

We mentioned “virtual hosts” several times in this article. To recap briefly, a virtual host (sometimes called a chatbot) is a tool that lets your restaurant interact with your customers in real time across all of your online channels. Most virtual hosts, like the ones we build on our Guestfriend platform, can answer 95% of guest questions instantly, and then seamlessly route guests to your normal customer support channels for specific questions that you identify.

If you’re looking for an automated messaging solution built specifically for growing restaurant chains that lets you handle customer messaging online in a scalable way, check out what we’ve built at Guestfriend. We’d love to chat.