Restaurants & Food Service// topic
Voice and phone ordering agents
In short
What it takes for a voice agent to take a real food order — modifiers, substitutions, upsell, allergies — and to hand back to a person before it commits a wrong ticket.
9 pages
diagnostics
- A severe allergy was spoken aloud and the ticket carries no traceA guest states an allergy, the recording proves it, and the prep ticket shows nothing. That is a schema failure, not a listening failure — and the repair is a typed object that stops the order closing.diagnostic10 min
- Half pepperoni, half veggie, and the kitchen makes it wholeA topping asked for on one half arrives on the whole pizza, or vanishes. Before blaming the agent, check whether the item can express a half at all — most catalogs cannot, and no prompt fixes that.diagnostic10 min
- The agent is accurate at three in the afternoon and useless at sevenAccuracy that tracks the clock rather than the order is an audio problem. Caller-side noise, the room behind the handset and a degraded audio path fail the same way and need three different fixes.diagnostic11 min
- The handoff fires correctly and the call still dies at the counterEscalation logs show the transfer firing and the guest still reaches nobody. The trigger is rarely the fault — the destination is, and it fails hardest during exactly the hours escalation happens.diagnostic10 min
- The pause after the guest stops talking is where the order is lostCallers do not abandon at random. They abandon at the turns that trigger a menu lookup — the first item, and any turn after a customisation — which tells you where the delay actually is.diagnostic10 min
- Three modifiers in one breath and only two reach the ticketThe recording contains three customisations and the printed chit carries two. Which one goes missing tells you which layer dropped it — and transcription is the least likely answer.diagnostic9 min
definitions
- Off-menu: the requests an agent must never improvise onOff-menu is not a property of the request. It is a property of your catalog on the day the call arrives — and only one of the three requests that sound off-menu actually is.definition7 min
- Read-back: the moment a spoken order becomes a kitchen ticketRead-back is the commit boundary of a phone order — the last moment a wrong item is still free to fix. Everything the kitchen will act on differently has to be spoken before anything is written.definition6 min
- What restaurant callers actually want before anyone takes an orderA restaurant phone line receives five different intents, and only one of them is an order. Each ends in a different system, so a single ordering script mis-serves four out of five callers.definition7 min
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