How Can Restaurants Increase Their Revenue and Lower Costs Using Chatbots?
Big chains such as Dominos, Wingstop, TGI Fridays and many more are killing it with Facebook (FB) messenger chatbots.
Before we get into details how these big chains are leveraging chatbots and you can too, let’s take a step back and understand what are messenger chatbots and why are they so successful?
What are FB messenger chatbots?
A chatbot is a computer program designed to have a conversation with human beings. Messenger chatbots are chatbots that converse with humans in the Facebook Messenger.
Why are FB messenger chatbots so important for your business?
How can restaurants increase revenue?
1. Acquire new customers
Restaurants can run contests and giveaway coupons using messenger bots. Because of their higher open rates and click through rates, they result in tremendously high response as compared to traditional ways.
2. Reserving a table
Reserving a table using messenger bot is a breeze and it increases customer experience a lot.
3. Alerts and reminders
Restaurants can leverage messenger bots to send reminders to people don’t miss their reservations. Not just that, bots can also send alerts whenever a new offer is up and running or a coupon is expiring.
4. Loyalty points for customers
Messenger bots can be used for loyalty points and its super easy compared to other solutions. Combined with alerts and reminders this increases retention rate a lot
5. Get feedback, reviews and testimonials
Messenger bot can nudge customers to give feedback, reviews and testimonials at the right time. This will help in bettering you service and increasing social proof on sites such as Yelp, Google Reviews, Zomato, etc.
Apart from these, the personalization we can achieve with bot will greatly please customers. we can also segments customers based on their usage and behaviors and send exclusive offers and promotions. There are endless opportunities here.
How can restaurants lower cost?
1. Reduce manpower
Bots work 24&7 tirelessly unlike people and they also don’t cost much. Bots can be used to answer standard queries such as open and close times, booking tables, etc thereby greatly reducing manpower.
It also increases the customer experience as they are available 24&7 and answer immediately in a medium of their choice (Texting)
2. Replace mobile apps
Recent survey by ComScore says that people are hardly downloading apps. Messenger bots can easily replace apps as they can do everything app does and much more. More importantly, messenger bots cost less than <10% of what an app costs and is also easy on maintenance.
3. Replace other expensive software
Restaurant bots can replace several other expensive software that are used for loyalty points, sending emails etc. Not just that, it also increases customer experience in the process.
Is this the right time to leverage the messenger bot?
Every technology has a adoption curve.
Right now, messenger bots are still in the early stages of the adoption curve. If you a visionary restauranteur this is the right time to jump on the bandwagon and leverage the bots to the maximum extent to grow your business!
