AI Chatbot for Social Media Order & Reservation Requests at a Boutique Restaurant

Overview

Built an AI chatbot that monitors a boutique restaurant's social media direct messages and automatically handles order and reservation requests that were previously answered manually, often hours later, by the owner between shifts. The chatbot pulls current availability and menu information in real time so its answers never go stale, and it confirms reservations directly rather than just pointing customers to call the restaurant. Anything outside its scope, like large group bookings or special dietary accommodations, gets flagged for the owner to handle personally. This mattered because a growing share of the restaurant's inquiries were arriving through social media rather than phone calls, a channel the small team wasn't set up to monitor consistently. A growing share of a boutique restaurant's order and reservation inquiries arrived through social media direct messages, a channel the small team wasn't set up to monitor consistently, often answered hours later by the owner between shifts. We built an AI chatbot that monitors social media DMs and handles order and reservation requests directly, pulling real-time availability and menu information so answers never go stale, flagging anything outside its scope for the owner. We connected the chatbot to the restaurant's real-time availability and menu data first, since stale information would undermine trust immediately. It ran alongside the owner's manual replies for two weeks, with every conversation reviewed, before becoming the primary responder. Average response time to social media inquiries dropped from several hours to under a minute, recovering bookings that were previously lost to slow replies during busy shifts.