What is the restaurant’s problem?
Timing. The moment a restaurant is busiest is the moment the phone rings with tomorrow’s booking, and nobody can answer it without leaving a table. The enquiry either goes to voicemail or gets a hurried “yes, fine” that never reaches the book. The customer who wanted Friday at 19:30 books the place down the road that had a booking widget.
How bad are no-shows for a restaurant?
A table of six that does not arrive on a Saturday is a table of six that was turned away. The appointment research puts the average no-show rate at about 23% across 105 studies, driven by long lead times and a history of missing 1; a restaurant booked a fortnight ahead by a large party is in the highest-risk band. The two fixes with evidence are a reminder and a commitment. The Cochrane review of eight randomised trials found text reminders increase attendance at a lower cost than phone calls 2. A small deposit does the rest: a party that has paid something has decided.
| Covers a night | Missed at 23% 1 | Missed at 8% with reminders and deposits | Covers recovered a week (6 nights) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 | 14 | 5 | 54 |
| 120 | 28 | 10 | 108 |
| 200 | 46 | 16 | 180 |
The 8% is a working assumption for a restaurant that reminds and takes deposits on large parties, not a measured restaurant figure; the studies are healthcare studies.
What does the chatbot answer?
The forty questions a day that are not bookings. Are you open on Monday, is there parking, do you do halaal, is the deck under cover, can we bring a cake, do you have a high chair. All of it is on the restaurant’s website or in the manager’s head, and a chatbot trained on the first does not need the second.
What about the website?
Most restaurant websites are a slideshow and a PDF menu, and Google’s research found 53% of mobile visits abandoned above three seconds 3. A diner on a phone outside another restaurant, deciding, is the visitor to design for: the menu as text, the hours at the top, the booking in the chat. That is how our restaurant sites are built, and why the chatbot sits on the page rather than in an app nobody installs.
What about the reminder text?
Short, and with the policy in it. “Table for six, Saturday 19:30. Reply YES to confirm or CANCEL to release it. Tables are held for fifteen minutes.” The trials that stated the cost of a missed slot in the reminder cut no-shows further than a plain reminder; a restaurant’s version of that sentence is the deposit policy, stated once, in the message the party reads the afternoon before.
What about orders?
For collection, the same conversation works: the chatbot takes the order from the menu it was trained on, takes payment through PayFast on the plans that support it, and tells the kitchen. It does not deliver and does not pretend to; delivery is a platform’s business.
What does it cost?
The booking system starts at R1 299 a month; the website chatbot from R299 a month plus R250 setup, with the booking-and-payment plans from R1 199. Month to month, no contract, and a free chatbot trial of fifty messages over seven days.
Questions people ask
Can it take a deposit for large parties only?
Yes. The deposit rule is yours: none, a flat amount, or only above a party size.
Can it hold a table for fifteen minutes?
It books the table; the hold policy is a house rule you set in the reminder text and the confirmation.
Does it show the menu?
Yes, from your website. If the menu is a PDF we turn it into text first so it loads on a phone and the chatbot can read it.
Sources
- Dantas, Fleck, Cyrino Oliveira & Hamacher, “No-shows in appointment scheduling – a systematic literature review”, Health Policy 122(4), 2018 (105 studies)
- Gurol-Urganci et al., “Mobile phone messaging reminders for attendance at healthcare appointments”, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2013 (8 trials, 6,615 participants)
- Google / SOASTA, “The Need for Mobile Speed” (2017): 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds
Where we do this
We build AI for restaurants across South Africa. Cape Town, Paarl and Knysna each have a page covering what is different about doing it there, down to the suburbs and the languages.