Nobody was less prepared for this pandemic more than small brick and mortar businesses. Even if they may be reopening slowly, there are lots of hoops to jump trough. One of them is capacity management and a chatbot can help with that.
The main condition for restaurants or other small businesses that have to accomodate their customers in order to reopen is ensuring the fact that they can manage a safe distance for their patrons. How can you get a safe distance if you can’t manage the number of clients before they get to your door? Of course you can just tell them “no” once they are at your doorstep because you are at full capacity, but that may come off as being rude.
The best thing to do is to manage you cutomer flow before they even bother to make their way to your storefront.
Why use the chatbot?
Why should you use the chatbot in order to manage bookings and not some other ready-made app? Because every app has a learning courve, if I need to learn the layout of the booking app in order to get a table at your restaurant, I’m more likely to revert to something I already know – like just callling.
The good part is, people know how to use Facebook Messenger so there is no learning courve. If the chatbot is well made, the user will feel jjust as if they were chatting with their favourite waiter.
Is capacity management such a big thing?
From your point of view, capacity management doesn’t seem like such a big thing, does it?
Let us just list a couple of businesses that MUST manage capacity:
- Restaurants need to manage capacity. The chatbot will help.
- Hotels need to manage capacity. The chatbot will help.
- Hair salons and spas need to manage capacity. The chatbot will help.
- Gyms need to manage capacity. The chatbot will help.
- Any office or co-working space needs to manage capacity. The chatbot will help.
- Real Estate open houses need to manage capacity. The chatbot will help.
- Car showrooms need to manage capacity. The chatbot will help.
- Coffee Shops need to manage capacity. – Guess what? The chatbot will help.
Automated bookings using a Facebook Messenger Chatbot?
Yes, it is a thing. To your customers the chatbot may look just like another conversation, and it should look like that, it should look friendly. But, in the backgroud the chatbot is doing lots of maths and filling in Excel Spreadsheets.
Math may not be your cup of tea so let us explain to you how this all should work. Click the bubble in the bottom right corner and get in touch with us.