How Smaller Restaurants Can Take Advantage of Voice Ordering in Restaurants

Both voice search and voice ordering have recently seen significant increases in popularity.

And while adoption of restaurant voice ordering technology has so far been limited to major chains such as Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks, there is no intrinsic reason why smaller restaurants shouldn’t benefit from what now. appears to be irreversible. trend.

In a highly competitive market, the bottom line is that if your customers want it, you have to offer it.

Here are some tips to help business owners get started with voice ordering in restaurants.

Choose the right technology

A custom-designed system is probably not inexpensive for smaller outlets, but there are a number of third-party AI platforms that make voice ordering technology accessible to restaurants of all sizes.

The key is choose one that easily integrates with both popular systems like Alexa and Google Home as well as your own restaurant POS system. It is essential that your POS system can receive and process voice orders without friction, in exactly the same way as any other online order

You also need to make sure that your choice of AI platform uses machine learning to develop your understanding of your customers’ wishes. There is little advantage to a voice-operated “if this happens then do this” chatbot style so give the system some “intelligence”.

Make sure it appears correctly in voice search

It seems logical to assume that customers interested in using voice order will also be the most likely to use voice search. So if you don’t get a head start on voice search, you probably won’t get much benefit from voice ordering.

The key to success is to make the content of your website or listing online (eg, Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor) reflect as closely as possible the conversation style of voice search, and use the long tail keywords, which most of us naturally use when speaking.

Use your voice to interact with customers

Voice is not just another ordering option, but also a powerful marketing opportunity that smaller restaurants in particular cannot afford to ignore.

Like when a customer places an order in person at a table, the voice order should not be viewed as a one-way process, but rather as an opportunity to engage and increase sales.

While the technology has so far been used primarily to facilitate ordering, it is advancing rapidly and should be used in the future to entice customers to add side dishes, drinks, etc. at your request, in the same way as when it is collected by a person.

Similarly, the voice order technology Multi-step can also be used to motivate customers to visit your website and social media platforms, and to promote particular events and promotions.

Use the data

Despite being such a new restaurant technology, voice is already producing vast amounts of useful data on customer habits and preferences.

So choose restaurant technology that provides timely information on your popular and unpopular items, your most profitable and loss-making dishes, at your peak and trough times.

This data can be crucial to improve both your marketing orientation and your customer service.

The type of restaurant you run and the demographic profile of your customers will largely determine how significant restaurant voice ordering becomes to your business, but there will be very few outlets that can completely ignore it.

This is a rapidly developing field and now is the time to start exploring the possibilities.