Customers screaming for ice cream (or gelato)? #JustAsk Alexa
It sounds like a great problem for a restaurant to have — daily calls asking about the gelato flavors of the day. But with up to 24 flavors and dozens of calls every day (dozens and dozens of calls in the warm-weather months, which, in South Carolina, is most of the year), Luna Rosa Gelato Cafe needed another way to communicate with its customers.
The cafe in downtown Greenville, SC, had been an early adopter of restaurant tech, mostly because it was forced to be clever and scrappy. It opened in 2007 and enjoyed a nice honeymoon before the restaurant-killing recession set in. Luna Rosa experimented with several mobile loyalty rewards solutions, but they were designed to solve a different problem — getting people to visit frequently. Luna Rosa was in a high foot-traffic area, it quickly earned its reputation as the best house-made Italian gelato south of the Mason-Dixon and west of Naples, and its owners’ timing was clutch, making them one of the leaders in Greenville’s F&B renaissance. What co-owner Jose Ortiz soon realized was that once his customers got hooked on a particular flavor, they wanted to know when that flavor was freshly made and in the case. And he needed a way to get the word out that didn’t involve his staff answering the phone all day.
Luna Rosa updates its website with the daily flavors, and also sends out a Facebook update. But who looks there anymore?
Texting seemed like a natural communication channel, but getting customers to hand over digits involves some friction. (What are they going to send me? How often are they going to be texting me?) What Luna Rosa needed was a less intrusive, customer-driven solution, one that Amazon created when it opened its Alexa voice skills platform to developers.
Just in time for spring, Luna Rosa arrived in the Alexa skills store this week. In a second bit of great timing, Amazon has put its Alexa voice assistant right into its app, so now you can shop and track packages, get weather and news updates, and even find out if your favorite gelato flavor is available — all by talking to Alexa on your phone; no Amazon-purchased hardware necessary. You can ask Alexa whatever you need, on the go, without having to be home in range of your Echo device.
Open the Amazon app, tap the microphone in the upper righthand corner (under the shopping cart icon) and say, “Luna Rosa, what are today’s flavors?”
The Alexa skill also gives listeners the store’s hours of operation. Luna Rosa might add lunch specials to its daily Alexa update, but the gelato update solves is its biggest need.
A companion Alexa skill allows the truly gelato-addicted can add Luna Rosa to their news feed, so they get the gelato flavors right along with their TechCrunch news or NPR updates.
Luna Rosa updates its flavors late in the morning, so as long as you’re checking after 11 a.m., you can hear a full list of available flavors of the best gelato in one of the cities the New York Times says you absolutely must visit this year.
EDITED July 21, 2017: Alexa has now arrived on Android. Until this week, Alexa was only available on iOS. Now you can ask Alexa, whichever phone you have, whether home or on the go. This article now reflects that change by Amazon.
EDITED April 11, 2017: Amazon no longer requires the“enabling” of Alexa skills when using the Amazon iPhone app. You can now skip that step and go right to asking Alexa. This article now reflects that change by Amazon.
