Why We Built a Chatbot Service for Restaurants
Today we’re launching Guestfriend, a platform we built to change the way restaurants (and soon, the hospitality industry at large) interact with their guests. At its core, Guestfriend is a personalized chatbot that is individually tailored for each restaurant. It builds itself in seconds, never needs to be updated, and instantly answers guest questions on a restaurant’s website, their Facebook page, and via text.
Our mission is to let any restaurant (and soon, any small business) create and and deploy a fully-customized chatbot for their business in less than 5 minutes so they can interact with their customers in real time.
We’ve been closely following the emergence of the Conversational Economy over the past several years — a rapid shift in the way individuals communicate with businesses, driven by the widespread growth of messaging apps, chatbots, and real-time customer service. According to recent surveys, 89% of consumers prefer to communicate with businesses via text and 64% of people have positive perceptions of businesses that communicate with customers via text. In short, the future of business is conversational.
For the past 20 years, websites have been the best way for customers to find out information about businesses quickly and reliably. However, with the rapid improvement in chatbot intelligence and the ongoing explosion of mobile platforms and messaging apps, we see the traditional static business website as it exists today being augmented by seamless customer service chatbots that can answer nearly any customer question instantly and provide a seamless experience across every platform that a business is active on.
But unlike static social media pages or websites that generally have limited information about a business, chatbots can easily store every single piece of information about a business, whether or not that same information is available on the website or app where a consumer is interacting with the bot.
The problem with chatbots as they exist today is that they’re inaccessible. Most businesses have two options when considering whether to implement a chatbot solution:
- They can hire an agency. Before we started building Guestfriend, we talked to a number of agencies to ask how much it would cost to create a fully-functioning restaurant chatbot. We didn’t receive a single quote under $50k.
- They can use a chatbot authoring tool or even Facebook’s own bot-building platform to create something themselves. However, this requires business owners to spend dozens, if not hundreds, of hours surmounting an incredibly steep learning curve to create something they’re not even sure will work or be worthwhile. We’re huge fans of many chatbot authoring platforms out there, but the reality is that few small business owners are going to create their own chatbot using these tools.
We knew there had to be a better way.
Guestfriend is the first chatbot platform that requires businesses to put in zero manual work to create a fully-functioning chatbot that is completely customized to their business right out of the box. No menu upload, no manual integration to their reservations platform, nothing. All a restaurant owner has to do is type in the name of their restaurant and voila — a few seconds later their bot is ready to be deployed on their website, Facebook page, and even via SMS. We think that the process of creating a chatbot should feel like magic, not a punishment.
We chose to initially focus on the restaurant industry for a few reasons.
First, it’s close to home. Our team is passionate about the world of food, and together we have decades of experience working with and running restaurants. Bo Peabody, the founder of Guestfriend, has been a serial tech entrepreneur for over 20 years and in the restaurant world for nearly as long. He has a unique perspective on the problems that restaurateurs face and set out to build a product laser-focused on helping them solve those problems.
Second, we know how much of an impact a tool built specifically for the hospitality industry can have on productivity, revenue, and overall guest satisfaction for restaurants who use it. In much the same way that OpenTable revolutionized the reservations process for restaurants, we think Guestfriend will revolutionize the customer service experience.
At their core, restaurants are service businesses — they primarily care about providing the best possible experience for guests who visit their physical location. Everything else, from their website to their marketing campaigns to their online customer service, is just a means to achieving that goal.
For this reason, we think that chatbots are perfect for service-based businesses that are so hyper-focused on the in-person experiences. By answering questions automatically and routing guests to real humans only when necessary, chatbots can help restaurants simultaneously improve customer service (thereby driving more customers to their physical businesses) and also free up time for their staff to spend improving their actual in-restaurant experience.
To get a bit more insight into the background and rationale for Guestfriend, we chatted with Bo to hear why he thinks that restaurants stand so much to gain by entering the conversational economy as early as possible:
How did you get involved in the restaurant industry?
My first company, Tripod, was located in a small town. A great restaurant named Mezze opened and we quickly become 50% of their revenue. When the founder Nancy Thomas approached me with some financial difficulties they were having I said, “If you close, I close!” I bought 50% and we’ve been partners (and profitable) ever since. That was twenty years ago.
What do you see as the biggest problems restaurateurs face?
There are the obvious ones like increased rent, staff retention, and waste. What’s less obvious is the importance of an engaged guest. How do you make a guest feel more informed before they arrive at your restaurant? An engaged guest spends more! That is the problem and opportunity we’re tackling with Guestfriend. We think it’s important to engage a guest on whatever platform they prefer to communicate on.
Why did you decide to start Guestfriend?
I started talking to operators about their issues and heard over and over again that they weren’t sure how to deal with texting, both as practical matter (allowing guests to text them) as well as a possible marketing channel to drive business. I realized we had the same problem at Mezze and Allium so set out solving it for my restaurants. And that’s what led to Guestfriend. It was very organic. No business school studies done!
How do you see chatbots being received by restaurant owners?
I think the new generation of operators is more tech-inclined. The arrival of the electronic reservations book really proved to everyone that technology could help business. I think chatbots will have to prove themselves. That’s why we offer a 30-day free trial. I know from what has happened at Allium and Mezze that if you put a Guestfriend chatbot on your website it will increase business and guest satisfaction. Period.
Why do you think Guestfriend is a solution restaurant owners need?
Most small businesses can’t afford to have someone constantly responding to questions via text. And even though 95% of businesses have tools like Facebook Messenger enabled, many businesses ignore the importance of immediacy in customer support, resulting in frustrated customers and lost sales. In a world where restaurants must constantly compete for consumers’ attention, even a few minutes waiting for a response can result in a customer choosing somewhere else to eat.
Chatbots are the best solution for businesses that want to engage with guests in real-time online but who can’t afford to have staff constantly answering incoming inquiries. We need something simple that we can set and forget, so we can get back to making sure guests are having a great experience inside the restaurant. That’s why we built Guestfriend the way we did. Your chatbot is done in seconds! Sure, you can edit and customize it, but you don’t need to.
How do you see the product evolving?
While we’re launching with a focus on restaurants, we plan to grow Guestfriend into the go-to chatbot building platform for businesses across any industry. Our mission is to let any business owner build and deploy and completely personalized customer service chatbot within minutes, not months. By the end of 2018, we plan to expand to spas, hotels, salons, and other service-based local businesses.
The other big evolution will be our machine learning and natural language processing. Every Guestfriend bot will get smarter and smarter everyday. That is why there are huge advantages to using a Guestfriend bot versus building your own. Everyone benefits from all of the interactions on all restaurants as the natural language processing gets smarter and smarter with each conversation.
We’re so excited to be launching a tool to help restaurants grow their businesses, save time, make guests happier, and stay at the forefront of how businesses communicate with their customers. 89% of consumers have said they want to communicate with businesses over text, and with Guestfriend, they’ll be able to do just that with any of their favorite restaurants. We hope you’ll join us on this journey.
Visit getguestfriend.com to create your own Guestfriend chatbot in seconds! If you have any questions or just want to say hi, you can shoot us a note at hello@getguestfriend.com. We’d love to chat!
- Team Guestfriend
