Catering Order Status and Delivery Updates on WhatsApp
This recipe answers the questions that arrive on event mornings and at lunch: “is my order on the way”, “what time will it arrive”, “where is the driver”. It reads the order’s status from your POS or online ordering system and replies on the channel the customer used. Anything late or wrong goes to a person straight away. Part of the restaurant and caterer workflows.
What happens today
At 11.20am on a weekday, five customers with noon events message to ask where their food is. The kitchen is packing the next run. The person who knows which driver has which order is on the road. Each customer waits, then calls, then calls again.
Most of these customers need one line: when it will arrive. The few with a real problem are hard to see among the rest.
The flow that works
- The customer asks about their order. AeroChat finds it in your POS or online ordering system by phone number or order number.
- It replies with the status the system shows, such as received, being prepared, ready or out for delivery, with the expected time.
- If the order goes by courier, it reads the courier’s tracking status where the courier has a public API.
- If the order is past its delivery time, or the customer says something is missing or wrong, it hands over to a person immediately and marks it urgent.
- When a customer asks to change the address or time, it passes the new details to your team, who update the order.
The recipe
Copy this into AeroChat
When a customer asks about the status of their order or delivery, follow these steps.
- Find the order in our POS or online ordering system by the customer’s phone number or order number. If there is more than one order, ask which date.
- Reply with the order’s current status and the promised pickup or delivery time from our system. If the order is out for delivery, give the expected arrival time if the system has it.
- If the order was sent with a courier, read the courier’s tracking status and reply with it.
- If the current time is past the promised time and the order is not marked delivered or picked up, apologise, tag the conversation “late order” and “urgent”, hand it to our team and notify them. Tell the customer a team member is checking now.
- If the customer says items are missing, wrong or damaged, ask what is affected, ask for a photo, tag the conversation “order issue”, and hand it to our team.
- If the customer asks to change the delivery address or time, collect the new details and hand them to our team. If it is less than 24 hours before delivery (example rule), tell the customer our team will confirm whether the change is possible.
Never promise a refund, a replacement or a new delivery time. Never guess a status that is not in our system or the tracking. Reply in the customer’s language.
Change the change rule and tags to your own before you paste it. Your team keeps each order’s status current in the POS as it moves through the kitchen and out the door.
What to connect
- Your POS or online ordering system. The recipe reads each order’s status, promised time and delivery details from it. Square, Toast and Lightspeed Restaurant connect through their APIs. For Square, create an access token in the Square Developer Console. For Toast, create standard API credentials (a client ID and secret) in Toast Web. For Lightspeed Restaurant, ask your Lightspeed account manager for API access. Paste them in when AeroChat asks.
- Your courier, if you use one. A courier with a public API connects the same way, so AeroChat can read the tracking.
- Your delivery terms. Upload delivery areas, time windows and change rules to the AeroChat knowledge base.
If you run catering deliveries with your own drivers from a Google Sheet of orders, connect your Google account and approve the access. AeroChat replies from whatever status your team last entered.
Using a different system? If it has a public API, it connects to AeroChat the same way: describe what you want, paste in its key, and it runs.
Can’t find your tool? Message us in the chat on this page and we’ll tell you how it connects.
What you still decide
- The statuses your team sets in the POS, and who updates them.
- How late an order can be before it goes to a person.
- How close to delivery a customer can change the address or time.
- What you offer when an order is late or wrong.
The result to expect
Customers asking “where is it” get an answer in seconds, and the late or wrong orders reach a person faster because they are no longer buried in routine questions. The kitchen and drivers take fewer calls on event mornings.
Measure it with your own numbers: status questions answered without a person, and time to first reply on late orders, for a month before and after. See also WISMO.
Next: catering quote requests.
Answer your next “where is it” in chat
Connect your POS, paste the recipe, and ask your own number where today’s order is.
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On Shopify? Install AeroChat from the Shopify App Store.