Industries · Retail & hospitality
The phone rings through the lunch rush. Nobody can grab it.
It's 12:40 on a Saturday. The floor is full, the pass is stacked, and the phone is ringing — again. Whoever's calling wants a table tonight, or to change Friday's booking of eight, or to know if you do gluten-free. Nobody can grab it, so it rings out. That's bookings and orders walking out the door at your busiest, most profitable hour.
After close, you're wading through voicemails and Instagram DMs — a function enquiry from Tuesday nobody answered, two birthday bookings, someone asking about the duck. The rush is exactly when the phone matters most and exactly when nobody can answer it. That's not a staffing problem; it's a physics problem.
An extra set of hands that only works the phone
A voice agent answers every call, every time — through the rush, after close, on the day off. It takes reservations straight into your booking system, handles changes and cancellations, answers the questions you get forty times a week (hours, parking, dietaries, dogs-in-the-courtyard), and takes down order enquiries. Big group and function enquiries get captured with details and routed to whoever quotes them.
Your staff stop sprinting for the phone mid-service, your regulars stop hitting voicemail, and the 7pm two-top that would have rung the place down the road books with you instead. Walk-ins still get the warm welcome — the agent just makes sure the phone never decides who eats with you.
Common questions
Does it work with our booking system?
It connects to the mainstream reservation platforms — and reads your real availability, so it never promises a table you don't have. If you run bookings off a paper diary, the build usually includes getting you onto a system the agent can talk to; that's scoped in the discovery call.
Can it handle our menu and the weird questions?
It knows what you teach it: menu, dietaries, hours, parking, the courtyard rules, whether the duck is back on. Anything it genuinely can't answer, it takes the caller's details and gets a message to you — so even the curliest question becomes a captured enquiry instead of a hang-up.
What about big group bookings and functions?
It captures them properly — numbers, date, occasion, budget ballpark, contact — and routes them to whoever handles functions, flagged as the high-value enquiries they are. No more function leads dying in a voicemail box or a DM from last Tuesday.
We're flat out — how long does this take to set up?
Most hospitality builds are live within a couple of weeks of quote acceptance, and your time investment is a discovery call plus tasting-menu-length sessions to approve what the agent says. It typically starts on after-hours and overflow calls — where you're currently missing everything — before taking the front line.
How many bookings rang out during last week's rush?
Book a free discovery call. We'll work out what the unanswered phone is costing per service — and what catching it is worth.