Taking restaurant orders on WhatsApp without losing your evening

Between seven and nine your phone is the worst tool you own. It buzzes while you are plating, it buzzes while you are on the till, and every buzz is either a customer worth money or a question you have answered ninety times this week. Most of them are the second one.

This is what an auto-reply is actually for in a restaurant, and it is a narrower job than the pitch usually suggests.

The messages that eat the evening

Look at a night’s inbox and the traffic sorts itself into four piles.

Menu questions. “Do you have the biryani tonight?” “Is the paneer starter veg?” “What is in the seafood one?” These are the largest pile and the easiest to answer, because the answer is written down somewhere already.

Logistics. Hours, address, parking, “are you open on Monday”, delivery radius, how long a takeaway will take. Also written down. Also asked constantly.

Availability. “Is the special still on?” This one changes hourly and is the reason a fixed away message annoys people: the honest answer at 7pm is different from the honest answer at 9pm.

Actual orders. A list of dishes, a time, a name. This is money, and it is the pile that must reach a human.

An auto-reply that handles the first two piles well gives you most of your evening back. One that tries to handle the fourth pile on its own will eventually confirm a table you do not have.

What to give it before service

The setup that matters takes twenty minutes, once.

The menu, as a PDF or a photograph of the printed one. Not retyped.
Hours, including the days you are closed and the kitchen’s last order time, which is not the same as closing time and is the thing people get wrong.
Delivery, if you do it: the areas, the minimum, the rough wait at a busy hour and at a quiet one.
The questions you are tired of. Allergens, whether you take card, whether you do the set menu on a Sunday, whether the terrace is covered.
How you talk. If your regulars get “boss” and a smiley, say so. A reply that sounds like a chain restaurant when you are a family kitchen reads worse than no reply.

Everything the app learned from those documents should come back to you for approval before it is used. A misread price on a menu photo is a small problem on a settings screen and a large one in front of a customer.

What it should do at 7:40pm

A customer asks whether the biryani is still on. The good version of this answers from what you told it this afternoon, in your voice, and does it in the same app the customer wrote in. The customer gets an answer while they are still deciding, which is the entire commercial point: a question answered at 7:40 converts, and the same question answered at 10:15 does not.

A customer sends an order. The good version does not confirm it. It should stop and put that in front of you, because your kitchen’s capacity at 7:40 is not something written in any document you uploaded.

That distinction, between answering and committing, is the one to hold onto when you evaluate any of these tools.

What it should never do

Message people who did not message you. Sending tonight’s specials to everyone who ever ordered is the fastest route to a blocked number, and it is not a grey area. The mechanics are in what actually triggers a WhatsApp ban.
Invent availability. If it does not know, it should say it will check.
Take a booking on its own. See above.
Answer a complaint. Somebody who is unhappy about last night’s order needs you, and a smooth automated reply makes it worse.

The Sunday-lunch test

Before you trust it with a Friday, test it on a quiet Sunday. Send it, from another phone, the five questions you get most and one you have never had. Read the five answers as a customer would. The unexpected question is the interesting one: a rule-based app will match nothing or match wrong, and an app that reads the question will either answer it properly or tell you it cannot. Either of those is fine. What is not fine is a confident wrong answer, and twenty minutes on a Sunday is how you find out which one you bought.

What it does not fix

It does not fix a menu that is out of date, because it will answer from whatever you gave it. It does not fix a kitchen that is over capacity. And it does not replace the part where a regular gets recognised, though an app that remembers customers between conversations gets closer to that than most people expect.

It fixes exactly one thing: the hundred messages a week that have the same answer, arriving at the worst possible moment.

Setting it up for a kitchen

The details you would upload, and what the reply is allowed to state outright, are described on the features page. The for-business page covers the same ground for shops and service businesses, and the plans are on the pricing page. The free allowance is enough to see a full week of service before deciding.

A Friday, from the phone’s point of view

It helps to see the shape of an evening rather than a feature list.

6:40pm. “Are you open tonight?” Answered from your hours, in a sentence, in the app they wrote in. You are prepping and never see it.

7:15pm. “Do you do a veg version of the biryani?” Answered from the menu you photographed on Tuesday. This is the pile that was eating your evening.

7:40pm. “Is the special still on?” You told it this afternoon that there were twelve portions. It says the special is on and does not promise a number, because a count from four hours ago is not a fact about now.

8:05pm. “Table for 6 at 9?” It stops. This is a commitment about your capacity and it waits for you, with the message and the reason on your home screen. You look up between plates and answer in four seconds.

8:30pm. “Last night’s order was cold and nobody called back.” It stops again. A complaint answered smoothly by software is worse than a complaint answered late by a person.

9:50pm. Someone asks about parking. Answered.

The evening’s automation is the four boring ones. The two that mattered still reached you, which is the entire design, and it is worth checking any tool you consider against exactly this list.

The upload you will forget

Every restaurant that sets this up updates the menu once and then changes the Sunday special without telling it. Put the update in the same routine as the chalkboard: if you rub something off the board, change it in the app. It takes longer to write that sentence than to do it.

The other side of this, for people selling goods rather than food, is “is this in stock”, answered forty times a day. And if you want the honest version of what happens when an automated reply gets something wrong, that is here.