Restaurants

The phone rings in the middle of evening service.

At eight in the evening a restaurant phone rings four times, and each time somebody puts down a plate to answer it. Half the calls are simple reservations and the other half are questions whose answer is written on the website. The assistant takes both halves.

The assistant takes reservations with covers, time and special requirements, writes them into the restaurant calendar, confirms by SMS, and answers questions about hours, menu and parking from your own documents. It does not take paid orders over the phone.

§01 The calls

What rings on an ordinary evening

Every call below has the same useful property: it ends in a line written somewhere the floor can read without asking anybody.

A reservation

Date, time, covers, name and phone number, written straight into the calendar.

Special requirements

Allergies, a high chair, a birthday, a table on the terrace. Recorded as text rather than as a checkbox.

Changes and cancellations

It finds the booking by phone number and moves or deletes it, freeing the table early.

Hours and menu questions

Opening times, parking, whether dogs are allowed, whether there are vegetarian options. From your documents.

Groups and events

Above a covers threshold the call goes to the manager, because that is a negotiation rather than a booking.

§02 The flow

From the call to the line in the book

The flow is built on a calendar, because a restaurant has a calendar even when it has no reservation system at all.

How an assistant is built

01 Take the four fields Date, time, covers, name. In that order, because the number of covers decides whether the requested time is even possible.
02 Check what is free It calls the availability tool against the restaurant calendar, using the default sitting length you set.
03 Record requirements as text An allergy turned into a checkbox is an allergy lost. It stays exactly as the guest said it, in the booking description.
04 Write the reservation The calendar event with every field, plus a row in a sheet if that is where the floor looks.
05 Confirm by SMS Date, time, covers and address. For large tables a same-day reminder can be added.

§03 The written trail

What the floor sees

A restaurant has no time to open a report. The reservation has to appear where they already look.

What connects to CallAgent today

What the floor sees
In the calendar	The booking, with covers, name, phone number and special requirements in the description.
In the floor sheet	A row in Google Sheets, if that is where the reservation book lives.
By SMS	The confirmation to the guest, with the time and address.
On the call record	The transcript and the structured output with date, time, covers and the text of the requirement.

§04 Limits

What it does not do for a restaurant

This category is full of demos in which an agent takes a complete pizza order. It is worth being plain about what we do not do.

What is finished and what is not

It takes no paid orders It processes no cards and takes no money on the phone. At most it records an order that a person then confirms and charges.
No link to reservation platforms There is no connector for the booking platforms restaurants use. What works with no development is the calendar.
It does not know the table plan It works against a calendar with a capacity you configure, not against a floor plan with individual tables.
It does not negotiate group menus Above the covers threshold you set it hands the call over, because that conversation is about price and menu.
It does not promise a full slot If the interval is full in the calendar it offers another time rather than overbooking.

§05 Questions

What restaurants ask us

Can it know how many tables I have left?

It works on the calendar, with a per-interval capacity you configure. That covers a restaurant that already manages bookings by time, and it does not cover a floor plan with numbered tables. For that you need an HTTP tool over your own system.

What does it do about allergies?

It records them literally, exactly as the guest said them, in the booking description, and says nothing about what a dish contains. The assistant does not discuss the composition of food, because a mistake there is not an inconvenience, it is a medical emergency.

Can it call guests to confirm the booking?

Yes, through a short same-day campaign. For large tables it is worth it, because an unannounced table of ten blocks the evening. The reminders page describes the mechanism.

What does a reservation call cost?

A simple reservation runs under a minute. It is billed on real seconds, with a platform margin of 0.10 euro a minute on top of the vendors at their own price. The pricing page shows how the total is built and where each part comes from.

§06 Onward

Notes

1 The tools named on this page are the ones in App\Services\Integrations\ConnectorRegistry carrying implemented. Anything that is only in the catalogue, without that flag, is not named here as though it worked.
2 The reservation uses check_availability and create_event on the connected calendar, and the confirmation uses send_sms on the Twilio connector.