Chatbots for restaurants: Benefits, features, and considerations

When your restaurant faces a mealtime rush, you and your team could use some help. Whether it’s taking orders or handling reservations and customer service, chatbots for restaurants can alleviate these common headaches (and more).

Chatbots act as digital assistants,  helping across multiple aspects of your restaurant’s day-to-day operations. Their versatility and ability to boost efficiency have made them a modern staple in the hospitality industry.

Looking to add a restaurant chatbot to your tech stack? Use our guide as a roadmap to discover how to use these solutions to your advantage and what to look for when shopping.

Benefits of implementing chatbots in restaurants

The list of chatbot benefits for restaurants is extensive, and your unique benefits will depend on where you need the most help. Restaurant chatbots can make your life easier by doing tasks like  improving customer service or even boosting sales. .

Here’s a look at some of the core impacts chatbots for restaurants can have on your customer experience — and your bottom line.

Enhancing customer service and engagement

Chatbots let you provide your customers with a more engaging online experience. Not only can restaurant chatbots answer your customers’ questions — including questions about your menu, hours of operation, and online ordering — but they can also provide personalized recommendations on what to order.

Through this digital solution, your customers can access the information they need 24-7 with instantaneous, personalized responses. Chatbots for restaurants can also be helpful in managing a customer loyalty program.

Chatbots can archive and analyze customer data to provide personalized recommendations to repeat customers, automatically send promotional benefits to loyalty members, and promote upcoming events and special offers. From the customer’s end, they can provide chatbots with feedback that will improve the customer experience.

Streamlining operations and reducing costs

Restaurant chatbots make it easier than ever for customers to order online, make a date night reservation, pay through your website, or answer questions. This removes low-value, time-consuming tasks from your team’s plate so they can focus on higher-priority tasks like providing an exceptional customer experience.

A chatbot simplifies processes and reduces costs. For example, if you pay a server an hourly wage to handle in-house orders but then also assign them to handle online orders, you’re reducing their effectiveness at work and their overall value to your company. By employing a chatbot for online orders instead, you’ll avoid spreading your staff too thin all while promoting higher productivity overall.

As a result, chatbots increase employee satisfaction. Instead of handling administrative tasks like answering phone calls, your team can spend their time providing better service — and making better tips.

Increasing sales and efficiency

Having a restaurant chatbot in place also improves your potential sales volume. Rather than turning away orders because you don’t have enough staff available to answer phone calls, your chatbot can automatically process orders and send them directly to your kitchen. This increases your potential output and reduces bottlenecks in your ordering process. Plus, the more efficient your operation is, the more money you can make.

Key features of effective restaurant chatbots

From ways of ordering to collecting feedback, the features your restaurant chatbot offers are central to your decision-making process. With that in mind, a few key examples of the features you should look for in a chatbot include:

• Order, reservation, and payment processing: Chatbots for restaurants can lighten the load of everyday business operations. Many restaurant chatbots primarily serve to streamline functions like ordering online, reserving a table, and making payments.
• Online menu interface: Chatbots help online users navigate your menu, presenting it in a user-friendly setup that streamlines ordering. You can also set up QR codes instead of physical menus and use your chatbot as an in-house assistant.
• Feedback collection: Sending surveys and collecting customer feedback is the best way to improve what your restaurant offers and how it operates. Restaurant chatbots can automatically send surveys to customers after they’ve dined with or ordered from you.
• Order tracking: When customers order online, chatbots can save this information for later. When that customer orders from you again, your chatbot uses this information to let them re-order seamlessly. Your chatbot can even make recommendations based on past orders.
• Recommendations: Chatbots can collect customer preferences over time and recommend new offerings or pairings to show your customers you’re paying attention to their interests, which elevates your customers’ online ordering experience.
• Natural language processing and machine learning: Chatbots with natural language processing and machine learning can perform more advanced tasks than standard versions. These solutions pull keywords and analyze intent in your customers’ messages, so they can provide a more dynamic, personalized service experience.

Use cases: How restaurants leverage chatbots

Consider these real-world examples of how many restaurants use chatbots to their advantage for everything from promotional emails to enhanced customer service.

Ordering

Restaurant chatbots can handle the online ordering process from start to finish. With a chatbot in place, customers easily place their orders online in just a few clicks. For example, a customer goes to your restaurant’s website, opens the online ordering portal through your chatbot, gets personalized recommendations, selects their items, and pays online — all without staff interaction.

Promotions

Chatbots for restaurants help manage events or promote loyalty programs. These solutions can be programmed to send out emails with offers, event information, or other marketing materials to help drive sales from your loyal customers. Simply set up which criteria a customer must meet to receive an email, upload your email, and then your chatbot takes care of the rest.

Customer service

Customer service is central to your business’s success, and chatbots are available 24-7 to answer customer questions and concerns. Restaurant chatbots collect survey information, handle frequent customer questions, and retain customer information for a personalized interaction experience — all without forcing customers to endure long phone wait times.

Chatbots can also better serve customers who speak a different language. Plus, a lot of chatbots offer multilingual support, which reduces confusion and issues caused by miscommunication.

Reservations

Your hosts and hostesses are busy handling the in-person clientele visiting your restaurant, so they don’t need to handle reservations over the phone as well. That’s why chatbots are so useful for streamlining your reservation process. Customers simply open the chatbot, find a time that works for them, and confirm their spot at your restaurant. Then, your database automatically updates so your team can be ready for them when they arrive.

What to consider when choosing a restaurant chatbot

Aside from having the features you need to achieve your goals, there are some less obvious factors you should take into account when selecting a chatbot solution that will work for you and your team. Here are a few:

• Ease of use: The restaurant chatbot you choose must be easy for both your team and customers to use. Frustrating interactions will cause more problems than they solve, which is why the best restaurant chatbots have a simple design.
• Customization options: Your restaurant is unique, so your needs will be too. Your chatbot should be able to function and look exactly as you need it to. Check if your restaurant chatbot selection offers features like custom branding and artificial intelligence (AI) training to ensure you get your money’s worth.
• Customer support: Problems are inevitable whenever you start using a new tool. The right restaurant chatbot for your business will come with customer support to help you work through those issues when they arise.
• Scalability and future proofing: Ideally, your chatbot will help your business grow. Your solution should be able to scale alongside your business. An AI chatbot for restaurants may be your best bet in terms of scaling, as AI can adapt and learn as your business grows.

Many solutions on the market provide a fraction of these capabilities, but you need an option that covers every base. That’s why a solution like Jotform AI Agents may just be the best fit for your business.

Jotform AI Agents will turn your restaurant’s forms into dynamic, conversational chatbots — without writing a single line of code. You can train these agents with internal data to provide the services you need, like asking questions and answering your customers’ queries.

Using Jotform’s AI-powered tools, your restaurant can collect information more intuitively. Through a few simple steps — selecting a form, training the AI with documents or URLs, and customizing it using the Agent Builder — users can create and personalize their AI agents to fit their needs, streamlining the data collection and interaction processes.

If you’re not interested in building a chatbot from scratch, you can also use one of the 1,000-plus AI agent templates available in the Jotform AI Agents directory. Using this directory, you can pick out common agent templates, such as an order AI agent or a booking AI agent, to streamline your chatbot creation process with pre-built functionality.

Calculating return on investment for restaurant chatbots

Ultimately, adding a chatbot to your restaurant workflow is an investment in improvement. Understanding whether your restaurant will receive a return on investment (ROI) from this solution depends on your goals. However, there are a few factors you can monitor before and after implementing a chatbot to measure success, such as

• Cost savings per order
• Monthly revenue generation
• Customer satisfaction metrics
• Average resolution time

You can find your estimated ROI by weighing the costs of your chatbot against the benefits and capabilities you receive from it. If you find that your chatbot isn’t functioning as you originally intended, you may want to consider a more effective solution. 

Future trends in restaurant chatbots

Although restaurant chatbots are already revolutionizing how many restaurants do business, more and more advancements are happening every day. The core driver of these advancements is the use of AI. An AI chatbot for restaurants has far more capabilities than standard automations — and those capabilities continue to expand as time goes on.

Here are a few examples of what this could mean for the industry:

• Improved online experience: As natural language processing continues improving, chatbot solutions will become better at interpreting customer messages. This lets your customers ask questions easily without following strict rule-based conventions.
• Optimized in-house operations: As AI chatbots continue playing a role in the everyday restaurant operations, they can provide new benefits, such as an AI reservation system to update your table management system and show you how you can optimize your seating for maximum efficiency and capacity.
• Automated upselling: Through machine learning, AI chatbots for restaurants can analyze customer data and identify upsell opportunities based on past behavior. This increases your per-order profit and improves the customer experience.

AI will also likely continue being integrated into other essential restaurant solutions. For example, AI can be added to point-of-sale (POS) systems to reorganize menu combinations for reduced food waste and optimized price points.

Chatbots could also be integrated into the Internet of Things (IoT) — the combination of digital solutions and physical technologies to create tools like smart appliances. These AI solutions can optimize kitchen devices, operational technology, and more to create the ideal workflow for your team.

Implement a restaurant chatbot to elevate your restaurant

Never face another dinner rush alone. Chatbots for restaurants help your business run more smoothly by providing better service and reducing the burden of everyday operations. Choosing the right restaurant chatbot will depend on your business needs, goals, and planned use cases. 

Whatever your goals are, it’s important to keep in mind that these tools are likely the future of the hospitality industry and can provide your restaurant with long-term value. Try investing in one of these products (or try one for free with Jotform AI Agents) to see firsthand the difference these solutions make in your day-to-day operations.