How Nice Hospitality Achieves a 93% Caller Satisfaction Score with Slang.ai

About

Nice Hospitality is an innovative, immersive hospitality group founded by creative entrepreneur Reed Slobusky. Nice Hospitality is known for its unorthodox, boundary-pushing concepts, such as SkinnyFATS, HallPass, and Snowmobile Pizza.

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Challenge

Nice Hospitality’s various restaurant concepts are no stranger to hype or virality. Because of this, various Nice Hospitality brands such as SkinnyFATS and newcomer, Cantina Tequila, were inundated with calls during the day. However, Cantina Tequila is a dinner-only restaurant, so that meant that nobody was there to answer phone calls when the restaurant was closed. 

“We got so many calls. They would go straight to voicemail and I was the person who was supposed to be handling the voicemails—it was a full-time job on its own,” said Sammie Morrissey, Creative Director at Nice Hospitality. 

The calls kept coming in, and most of the calls were repetitive. Guests called to see if reservations were available that perhaps weren’t showing up online. They also wanted to know if Cantina Tequila took walk-ins. They wanted to know Cantina Tequila’s hours. Over and over, guests were calling in with the same questions. 

“Eventually, we turned off voicemail because it became so overwhelming,” said Sammie. Front-of-house couldn’t focus on tending to in-house guests with a phone that was constantly ringing off the hook, and it wasn’t a good use of the staff’s time to answer the phone when dinner service was bustling. 

Cantina Tequila staff had to make a tradeoff: provide exceptional in-person guest experiences, but leave callers in the lurch. In an ideal world, they’d provide exceptional service across both domains, but that proved to be impossible without extra helping hands.

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Solution

Cantina Tequila needed a solution and fast. They had been using Slang at another Nice Hospitality concept, Snowmobile Pizza, and saw a lot of success with it. Once they realized Slang had an integration with OpenTable, their reservation platform of choice, they implemented it for Cantina Tequila. 

“That's been really helpful for us just because we do have older clientele that don’t use apps,” said Sammie. With the integration, guests can make a reservation directly over the phone, just as they normally would.

Now, Cantina Tequila staff don’t have to worry about the high volume of repetitive questions that were coming in before the restaurant even opened. “I love the fact that we don't have to worry about missing calls during the day,” said Morrissey. Now front-of-house-staff can focus on greeting guests instead of worrying about answering the phones. “What we’re grateful for the most is that now we don’t have to worry about the phones,” Sammie said.

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“Now that we have Slang there's no pressure for our hosts to answer the phone or interrupt someone as they're talking.” — Sammie Morrissey, Creative Director at Nice Hospitality

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