The four pillars for the working of any restaurant are food, ambiance, price, and technology. Without these pillars standing strong together, it is difficult for a restaurant to sustain itself. In addition to ensuring that you bring unique food items on your menu and keeping the marketing strategies in place, you must also provide to make the most of technology! One such technique that restaurateurs have just been introduced to, is a Chatbot. In this blog, we talk about how a Chatbot is revolutionizing the restaurant marketing for you, and how you can use it to increase your restaurant sales!
What we include in the blog post:
- The four pillars of restaurant operations -food, ambiance, price and now technology
- Strategic examples of how various brands use multiple chatbots
- Sound bite from Bhavesh, owner of Smugglr, a chatbot company.
- Impact of using new technology for restaurant sales!
Unveiling The New Trend In Restaurant Marketing- The ChatBot!
With the immense competition in the restaurant industry, restaurateurs are continually trying to come up with newer strategies for marketing and increasing their restaurant sales. Chatbots and automated messengers have brought a revolution in the F&B industry. This way, the restaurants can make more sales and enhance their customer retention. Let’s see how!
i) Does Chatbot Help For Restaurants To Increase Sales?
The idea of a Chatbot is to get results very quickly. For instance, if a user visits a restaurant’s website to check their menu, and he wants to only look at the non-vegetarian dishes, the Chatbots gives him a clear category to select right after he searches for the menu. It’s effortless for a user to chat with the bots, instead of landing on a page and spending time looking for what he wants.
“Chatbots help the customer to narrow down his choice quickly. Instead of asking the user to select options, the Chatbot shows the user various categories to make it more interactive and targeted”, says Bhavesh Dhupar, founder of Smugglr.
Therefore, the conversion rate of Chatbots is better than landing pages. For a restaurant, whose revenues depend majorly on their websites, or online orders, it’s a good idea to have multiple Chatbots instead of landing pages. This not only saves time but also helps the user with various types of information quickly.
Ii) Better User Experience
For instance, Swiggy Chatbots can help answer frequently asked questions of the customers like ‘Where is my order?” or take customized instructions s like ‘Please don’t put capsicum on my pizza.’ This gives the customers overall comfort and freedom to order as per their convenience. The same can not be achieved through a landing page.
iii) Multiple Platforms For Chatbots!
Most restaurateurs limit their Chatbots to their websites or landing pages. Whereas, there are many more platforms where your Chatbot can earn you more profits.
Facebook Messenger Bot is a marketing strategy rather than merely an order-taking method. Some dishes can be pushed from your brand. Since these are acquired leads, restaurants can try to make more money from them by targeting new deals and offers. All you have to do is push different messages to your customers based on the campaign you are running.
When we talk about a WhatsApp bot, it’s for businesses that want to capture their leads’ contact numbers and continue their marketing campaigns through personal messages!
iv) Impact On Sales:
According to Dhupar, there can be a 12-20% increase in restaurant sales by incorporating a Chatbot. That is the average they saw across multiple commerce businesses.
v) Increasing Customer Engagement Through Your Chat Bots
Many restaurants and food businesses have started to incorporate Chatbots into their operations, and have seen a positive impact. The same could be said for larger restaurant chains as well. Not every Chatbot can engage the customer equally well. You might come across a few Chatbots that don’t click with you instantly, which is why you move on to the next best option.
This is why we wanted to gather some tips for restaurateurs to use their ChatBots innovatively.
- The first intent for a restaurant ChatBot is pretty clear. It should present the menu or segmented menu right upfront for the customer. As soon as the bot talks to you, the first two things that the bot should do is welcome the customer and tell them about the brand a little. Your bot must also say right at the start that this is a bot, to keep the customers’ expectations to the minimum.
- The second question a bot should ask is the category where the customer wants to move to. These categories could be food ordering, menu bifurcation, etc.
- The third and final communication a Chatbot should ideally have is a Call to Action, where the customer is sent to a separate landing page for giving his order or making a purchase.
All in all, using a Chatbot can prove to be quite advantageous for a restaurant, especially for the ones who are majorly dependent on online orders for revenue generation. Apart from these, you can also enhance your customer retention by asking relevant questions in the first 8 seconds itself!
