Five months after launching its first AI-based tool helping restaurants generate realistic images based on menu descriptions, digital ordering platform Swipeby released a new set of AI-driven features designed to help small restaurants compete with big brands.
The North Carolina-based company said its new tools will improve customer interaction, upsell purchases and make reviews “more manageable and powerful” in a bid to improve marketing.
“We give one-person and family-run restaurants the resources of a savvy thousand-person organization,” said Carl Turner, CEO and founder of Swipeby. “Using AI is no longer just a theory. We’ve actually put it into practice and our operators are beginning to take advantage of features that bring scaled, trained and specialized teams to small businesses artificially.”
Building off of its previously released Ai feature for meal images, the new rollout is aimed at a wider swath of business functions, including a re-marketing function.
Swipeby Edda is a customer-facing “AI guest assistant” that claims to provide a human-like interaction that makes suggestions for additional items the customer may want to purchase. The company says it’s not just “programmatic upselling,” but uses common sense, available items and order history to make personalized suggestions.
“It will never say ‘because other people purchased this,” Swipeby says, but instead will give concrete reasoning for its suggestions.
The new AI Review Consultant feature means restaurants will never miss the opportunity to respond to a review. It works in concert with the previously released 5-Star Review Management Tool that was released last year. It expands upon that by keeping track of all new public reviews and crafting an appropriate response using business data, including current promotions and specials.
Operators are notified via text of each review and the suggested response, with the ability to approve to post or send editing notes to receive a new draft. In theory, this allows restaurants to engage with customers, build loyalty and take action pointed out by negative comments.
At the end of the month, the feature provides an AI-driven report that analyzes public reviews and provides a summary from all of the data it collected in the previous weeks.
Its AI Remarketing feature is billed as a significant upgrade of the company’s existing remarketing engine. The new tool sends emails to customers that haven’t ordered after a certain number of days.
“The difference is that the new version is entirely AI powered,” the company said. “AI plans and writes unique emails for each customer every time, instead of a cookie-cutter approach to mass email that uses templates, merge tags, etc.”
“By embedding AI into the Swipeby platform, we have quickly developed and released AI-driven features that give independent restaurants all the advantages a mega-corporation has and may even wish for,” added Turner. “Swipeby is transforming the use of AI from single interactions, like creating a photo or designing a website, to incorporating AI into thousands of touch points and transactions every day. It significantly improves the way any restaurant engages with customers and makes operational decisions. It will only get more powerful from here!”
Edda, AI Review Consultant and Remarketing are available now for select Swipeby customers. Deep Review Insights is in beta with social media management and pricing recommendations expected to be rolled out later in July. Other AI features will be released on a biweekly to monthly schedule.
