AI Customer Service for Restaurants and Caterers

A restaurant and a caterer look like one business and have two different inboxes. The
restaurant gets reservations and questions about the menu. The caterer gets quotes with a
headcount, a date, a delivery window and a dietary requirement, which is a far more
awkward conversation and a much larger order.

Most operators run both. This page covers both, because the workflows share a spine and
differ in exactly two places: the deposit and the delivery.

The restaurant inbox

Four things, in descending volume.

Reservations. “table for 4 tonight 7pm”. A live availability check,
a booking, a confirmation, and a reminder on the day. Straightforward, and the highest
volume.
Large groups. “anywhere for 18 people on the 14th”. Not the same
workflow. It affects floor plan and often needs a set menu and a deposit, so it should
qualify and route to a person with the details already gathered.
Menu and dietary questions. Opening hours, whether you are halal,
whether there are vegetarian options, whether a dish contains nuts. The first three are
document answers. The fourth is not, and it is covered below.
Where is my delivery. If you deliver, this arrives in volume at
lunchtime and dinner, and it is the most repetitive message you get. See
WISMO.

The catering inbox

A catering enquiry contains four variables, and the customer usually supplies two of
them.

“hi do you still have the nasi lemak set for 40 pax on the 8th” has a product, a
quantity and a date. It is missing the delivery time and the address, and it says nothing
about dietary requirements. A workflow that handles this well does four things in order:
confirms the date is available, quotes the correct price tier for that headcount, asks the
two missing questions, and takes a deposit to hold the date.

Each of those is a real operation rather than a reply. The date check is a capacity
lookup, not a calendar glance: a kitchen can produce a finite number of covers on a
Sunday, and that ceiling is yours to configure. The price tier is a table, and getting the
40-pax rate right matters because the customer is comparing you with two other
caterers.

The deposit is the part that changes the business. A verbal confirmation for a date
three weeks out is worth very little. A paid deposit is a booking. Taking it inside the
conversation, with a payment link while the customer is
still engaged, converts far better than sending bank details and waiting for a
screenshot. Money settles into your own account: AeroChat never sees card numbers and
never holds your funds.

The allergen question

This is the one line that matters more than everything else on this page.

An automated system must not infer whether a dish is safe for someone with an allergy.
Not from the menu description, not from the ingredient list, not helpfully. Cross
contamination in a working kitchen is not a data question, and the consequence of a wrong
answer is not a refund.

What automation should do: recognise the question, give the factual information you have
published, state plainly that the kitchen handles allergens and that it will confirm with
them, and pass the message to a person immediately. Configure this as a hard rule in the
software rather than as guidance in the AI’s instructions, because the second kind gets
talked past by a customer who asks three times. See
live chat handover.

The same applies to halal status in any form beyond repeating your actual
certification. State the certification you hold. Do not reason about it.

The change request

Catering orders change. “can you make it 45 instead” arrives two days before, and it is
the clearest test of whether your tooling acts or only answers.

Handling it properly means reading the existing order, re-pricing at the new tier,
collecting the difference, updating the delivery booking and confirming all of it. A tool
that can only reply will send the customer a message asking them to call. A tool connected
to your order and payment systems finishes it in the thread.

Delivery

For caterers, delivery is part of the product. The food arriving at 11.30 for a noon
event is the service. So delivery cannot be a separate manual step bolted onto an
automated sale.

AeroChat books delivery with POS Malaysia directly, which covers creating a shipment
and label, booking a pickup, rescheduling or cancelling it, tracking a parcel and quoting
an international rate. Delivery updates then go back to the customer on the channel they
messaged from. Worth stating plainly because it gets muddled: the payment provider and the
courier are two separate connections. Neither is reached through the other.

For in-house drivers the equivalent is sending the customer the dispatch and
on-the-way updates automatically, which removes most of the lunchtime “where is it”
traffic.

Channels

WhatsApp for catering, without question. The enquiry is a conversation with several
rounds, and nobody conducts that by email. Instagram brings the enquiries for anything
visual, especially cakes, dessert tables and event catering, and those often arrive as a
photo with “can you do this for 60 people”. Web chat catches people comparing caterers on
your site, where the first question is almost always price for a headcount.

Where to start

Reservations and reminders, from live availability.
Catering quotes by headcount tier, with the date capacity check.
Deposits taken in the chat to hold a date.
Delivery updates sent to the channel the customer used.
Every allergen and dietary-safety message escalated to a person on arrival.

Start for free

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