How modern restaurants can benefit from AI-driven customer service

In a world increasingly dominated by automation, it’s no wonder that restaurants are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) for help with their customer service. After all, AI-driven customer service can provide a number of benefits for modern restaurants, including:

1. Increased efficiency and speed

2. Improved accuracy in dealing with customer complaints

3. Enhanced customer satisfaction

More specifically, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants reduce overhead while improving customer service. By helping restaurants automate simple tasks, like automating customer sentiment analysis or handling routine inquiries, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants focus on more important tasks, like developing better customer relationships.

This increased efficiency and speed can be a boon for modern restaurants, which are often under pressure to provide quality food and service quickly and at a low cost. 

But how does AI-driven customer service work? In this article, we’ll take a look at three ways AI-driven customer service can help restaurants improve their customer service.

Let’s get started!

Why AI-driven customer service is important

First, it’s important to understand the basics of AI-driven customer service. Simply put, AI-driven customer service uses artificial intelligence to automate certain aspects of customer service. This can include tasks like analyzing customer reviews, handling routine inquiries, or recommending solutions to customer complaints.

By automating these tasks, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants improve the accuracy and speed of their customer service. This can be especially important for modern restaurants, which are often under pressure to provide quality food and service quickly and at a low cost.

In addition, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants improve customer satisfaction. By automating tasks like complaint resolution, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants quickly and accurately resolve complaints. This increased efficiency can lead to happier customers and improved reviews.

Finally, AI-driven customer service can also help restaurants improve their bottom line. By automating tasks like customer sentiment analysis, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants reduce the amount of time and money spent on manual customer success teams. This can lead to increased efficiency and savings for restaurants.

How to use AI-driven customer service

Now that we’ve looked at the basics of AI-driven customer service, let’s take a look at how it can be used in modern restaurants. Below are three ways AI-driven customer service can help restaurants improve their customer service:

1. Automate customer sentiment analysis

2. Automate complaint resolution

3. Automate recommendations for solutions to customer complaints

We’ll dive more specifically into each below.

1. Automating Customer Sentiment Analysis

One way that AI-driven customer service can help restaurants is by automating customer sentiment analysis. By using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants automatically analyze customer reviews. This can help restaurants quickly identify problems and take steps to resolve them. 

Retention360 uses AI-driven customer service to help restaurants automate customer sentiment analysis. Using NLP algorithms, Retention360 helps restaurants automatically analyze customer reviews and identify areas of improvement, which are then forwarded to customer success teams for manual review. Needless to say, this can significantly improve overhead.

2. Automating Complaint Resolution

Another way AI-driven customer service can help restaurants is by automating complaint resolution. Through the use of advanced algorithms, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants automatically resolve complaints. This can be a valuable way for restaurants to quickly and accurately resolve complaints, leading to happier customers and improved reviews. 

With simple, procedural responses that handle the vast majority of customer complaints, AI-driven customer service can take a lot of the burden off of manual customer success teams. And when used in conjunction with live chat, AI-driven customer service can provide an even more seamless experience for customers.

3. Automating Recommendations for Solutions to Customer Complaints

Finally, AI-driven customer service can also help restaurants by automating recommendations for solutions to customer complaints. By using machine learning algorithms, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants automatically recommend solutions to customer complaints. This can be a valuable way for restaurants to quickly and accurately resolve complaints, leading to happier customers and improved reviews

Improving Customer Success Teams with AI

Now that we’ve covered the basics of AI-driven customer service, let’s take a look at how it can help improve customer success teams.

Every customer success team is short on time, overworked, and often drowning in outstanding replies and complaints. That’s where AI comes in – to take the load off of their back, and help them focus on the queries that matter.

As we mentioned earlier, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants reduce the amount of time and money spent on manual customer success teams, freeing up their time. This is done via automation of traditionally time-intensive tasks like customer sentiment analysis.

Customer sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing customer reviews to identify trends. This can be a time-consuming task for restaurants, as it requires manually reading and categorizing customer reviews. However, AI-driven customer service can automate this task by using natural language processing to quickly read and categorize customer reviews.

This automation can free up time for customer success team members, who can then focus on more important tasks, like resolving customer complaints. In addition, AI-driven customer service can help restaurants improve the accuracy of their customer sentiment analysis – some large language models can actually analyze sentiment *better* than humans!

The future of customer service

We’re quickly entering a world in which AI-driven customer service is the norm. In fact, it’s estimated that by 2025, 85% of all customer interactions will be handled by AI.

This shift is being driven by the fact that AI provides a number of benefits for businesses, including increased efficiency and accuracy. At the same time, it often increases human satisfaction by providing a more personalized experience.

“Robots provide a more personalized experience?” you might be thinking.

Yes, they do! Right now, most companies are using inflexible customer service scripts that are read verbatim by voiceover actors. This can often lead to frustration on the part of the customer, who feels like they’re being treated like a number instead of a human being.

AI-driven customer service, on the other hand, can provide a more personalized experience by understanding the customer’s emotional state and responding accordingly. Automated sentiment analysis is one way AI can do this – by understanding the tone, context, and keywords used in customer service interactions, AI can provide more personalized analysis that is better suited to the customer’s needs. High-priority customers can then be automatically routed to the best-suited customer service representative for further follow-up.

Where Retention360 fits in 

Retention360 is a powerful customer retention software that helps restaurants keep their customers coming back. It does this by tracking customer behavior and preferences through reviews and online reputation, and then using this data to automatically score customer interactions based on both sentiment and priority.

This enables teams to scale quickly, without sacrificing quality or missing important customer issues. At the same time, you can significantly improve the efficiency of a small customer success team, since they will no longer need to manually score and prioritize customer interactions.

Retention360 has a number of additional benefits, too. Specifically, we help you:

Automate customer service tasks: By automating the scoring and prioritization of customer interactions, Retention360 frees up your team’s time so they can focus on more important tasks.

Improve customer satisfaction: By quickly and accurately addressing customer complaints, Retention360 helps you improve your customer satisfaction scores.

Get more out of your customer data: Retention360’s reporting and analysis features help you glean insights from your customer data so you can make better decisions about how to improve your customer service.

Capture important customer feedback: Retention360’s review monitoring features help you capture important customer feedback so you can take action to improve your restaurant.

Direct response tool: rather than a one size fits all system (like email), Retention360 lets you respond directly to your customers through their preferred channels (e.g. phone, text, social media platform) – and you do it quickly and in a personalized way.

In short, Retention360 is the perfect tool for restaurants that want to improve their customer service with AI.

AI-driven customer service: final thoughts

In short, AI-driven customer service can provide numerous benefits for restaurants, including increased efficiency, improved accuracy, and enhanced customer satisfaction. If you’re looking to improve your restaurant’s customer service, AI-driven customer service is definitely worth considering – and a partner like Retention360 can help you get started.

Looking to begin today? Reach out and book a demo with us to see how AI-driven customer service can work for your business!

Tony Castiglione

Tony Castiglione