Is a cluttered inbox holding your restaurant back from greater success? It’s the kind of thing you may not even notice. But your overloaded email inbox may be causing delayed replies, lost messages, and missed opportunities for collaboration.
Email communication problems in restaurants are extremely common. And these problems may be costing you more time and money than you realize.
These are exactly the problems that Canada-based tech pioneers Missive set out to solve. The Missive app brings all of your incoming messages (email, audio, social media, and more) together on a single collaborative platform where you can:
As chief operating officer Janie Blouin-Grondin explains, Missive was born out of a very real need when its founders realized that their growing business simply couldn’t keep up with the volume of incoming email.
Let’s dig just a little deeper on this idea of email chaos. Janie explains, “Email chaos means endless forwarding. It means losing the context. It means having different people responding to the same email at the same time. It means that nobody has clear ownership or accountability.”
Email communication problems in restaurants can have a direct impact on employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and the overall efficiency of your operation. In short, all that chaos could be costing you money, wasting your time, and compromising your security. Products like Missive are designed to rein in chaos.
Missive is a collaborative email client, which means it helps businesses share and streamline communication from every channel — email, WhatsApp, SMS, and live chat — all into one user-friendly platform.
As Janie explains, “Missive enables you to connect all of those inboxes, all in one.” You may be juggling incoming messages from half-a-dozen different channels. This centralization, says Janie, “gives you visibility, traceability, and collaboration potential with all of them.”
Technically, Missive is what Janie calls “industry agnostic.” Its collaborative email solutions are applicable in a wide range of industries. But, she says, “We perform well in the hospitality and restaurant industries – really anywhere where there’s a team dynamic, because the point is to unlock collaboration.”
With that in mind, let's take a closer look at a few common email communication problems in restaurants and discuss how leading edge restaurant communication management tools can help.
Email overload is obviously a root cause for much of the chaos that restaurants grapple with. People are constantly pinging your inbox – diners have questions about your menu; vendors have product updates they want you to see; job seekers are submitting applications.
Then there’s the steady flow of social media messages, posts, and marketing materials flowing through your inbox. It can be overwhelming, hard to organize, and just plain annoying.
Missive provides a ton of tools to help organize this massive inflow of messages so that they are easily navigable and accessible to every team member. For example, whenever a team member starts replying to an email from a shared inbox, other team members can see it live. This prevents the duplication of work and unlocks all kinds of collaboration possibilities.
One way of collaborating involves team members co-drafting emails, tagging each other (or a manager) for extra help. Also, “Rather than creating folders that are not accessible to everyone,” explains Janie, “you can use AI to create labels and triage your inbox, which makes it much easier for your staff to find information.”
This function really shows its value when it comes to SMS. A lot of restaurants still use group texting when they need to cover last minute shifts or call for front of house reinforcements. But as Janie points out, “when you send a message to 25 people, and then 25 people start replying, it becomes chaotic.”
Missive prevents this type of overload by sending an individual message to each staff member. So if you’re a manager who needs to find someone to cover a shift at the last minute, you can select the front-of-house email list and send a request to all of your servers. Each staff member can reply to the shift request in an individual message.
At the same time, the entire conversation including all responses can be viewed using a shared inbox. This way, every staff member has access to the full conversation without being bombarded by messages that don’t concern them.
All those minutes you spend reading, forwarding, and responding to emails really add up. Naturally, this means the labor costs for these tasks also add up.
How much valuable time do managers, administrative personnel, and team leaders spend responding to emails? And how many of those emails ask the same questions over and over again?
Missive has a bunch of solutions for that wasted time. Janie explains, “You can create what we call canned responses for questions that we often get from customers. Rather than drafting all emails from scratch, simply hit #nametheresponse and the answer will be included in the email automatically. This not only speeds up reply time, but saves you tons of communications and training time for all staff members.”
Missive makes it possible to identify and respond to inquiries about things like restaurant hours, menu items, reservations, allergy specifications, and catering orders with the push of a single button.
That means it takes seconds to do what previously took minutes. Over just a single shift, those minutes can make all the difference in a customer’s experience. Over a week or a month, those minutes translate into improved profit margins.
One of the most common email communication problems in restaurants is unresponsiveness. If your restaurant is operating off of a general inbox (e.g. “info at yourrestaurant dot com”), it takes time and effort to sift through every message, forward specialized inquiries to the right people, create responses, and so on.
But each minute that passes comes at a cost. If you delay a response to a customer, they may just go ahead and find a more responsive restaurant to dine at. If you delay your response to prospective employees, your competitors will surely swoop in to hire them away.
That’s why Missive will work with you to create customized, automated email sorting and forwarding. With Missive, says Janie, “you can create rules to make sure that, based on the geography and based on its content, every email is routed to the right team.”
Missive uses tools provided by OpenAI to customize rules for your restaurant’s automated rule engine. For instance, Missive can create a rule that ensures all urgent messages are automatically sent to the right person.
Missive’s rule engine can also fast-track already-delayed responses. Janie explains, “We can build SLA [service-level agreement] rules where, if a customer has not been answered, let's say within a day, it creates an escalation, and it sends a notification reminding you to respond to the customer.”
Restaurant management communication tools aren’t just about improving the customer experience, though this is a big factor. The right tools can also really improve the employee experience. Especially at a time when so many restaurants are struggling with labor shortages and high turnover, employee morale is vital to your operational success.
Part of this, says Janie, is protecting your team against email fatigue – a feeling of burnout brought on by the massive and endless influx of messages from email, SMS, and social media. She explains, “Providing people with the right tools really helps with employee engagement, and that's something that's really important when you work in a direct customer-facing industry."
Missive includes a number of tools designed to lower the email burden on your staff, including AI-generated responses, automatic multilingual translation, and an AI-powered task management dashboard.
Of all the email communication problems in restaurants, this may be the costliest. Janie explains, “One of the main challenges companies face with email is that it wasn’t designed for teams or collaboration. As a result, people often end up using other tools — like Slack, project management apps, or even forwarding chains — to discuss and coordinate around emails.”
This, she says, results in “scattered communication, lack of context, and delays in response time. Important information lives outside the inbox, and teams waste time switching tools or wondering who’s handling what.”
Missive was designed to confront this problem head on with a host of collaborative tools including:
Los Angeles bakery Lark Cake Shop, for instance, found Missive useful in managing custom orders across their two locations.
Restaurant management communication tools give restaurants the power to improve internal communication, remove procedural inefficiencies, and create a system for shared accountability. In the best case scenario, not only can these tools improve your operation, but they can help create a more positive internal culture – one built on open communication and collaboration.
Missive is part of a growing market of advanced restaurant management communication tools, all designed to streamline and improve the flow of communication and information in your restaurant.
If your team is buried under a pile of emails, social media messages, and texts, it might be time to explore some of these tools. To find out exactly which cutting edge restaurant management communication tools are right for your operation, schedule your free consultation with one of our in-house restaurant tech experts today!