By Charlie Pogacar
Many pizzeria operators have witnessed it: A slammed Friday night, phone ringing off the hook, team members scurrying around to keep everyone happy. The host picks up the phone, praying it’s a straightforward order—no, the customer wants to ask a litany of questions. The host starts breathing heavier; yet another guest approaches the host stand to put their name in for a table.
Ray Villaman, owner of Tahoe Restaurant Group—an outfit with three high-volume pizzerias in the Lake Tahoe area, including Base Camp Pizza Co.—used to watch scenes like this unfold routinely. And his pizzerias are big, busy operations: picture 3,000-plus-square-foot, 100-team-member pizzerias with a 200-person waitlist on a busy winter or summer’s night. As good as his team members are at providing exemplary service to dine-in guests, that same grace isn’t always extended to those placing call-in orders. For that, he couldn’t blame them.
“The phones at our restaurants just ring and ring,” Villaman recently told PMQ Pizza. “Team members see the phone as a distraction when there’s a line out the door.”
This ultimately led Villaman to look into options for voice ordering AI. Villaman, who has operated restaurants for over 40 years and did stints at California Pizza Kitchen and Boston Market prior to going indie, knew he was losing revenue on missed calls and hang ups. He didn’t want AI to replace his team members—a big fear across industries—but to supplement the team member experience.
“The biggest determinant for the success of technology launches [in restaurants] has been, ‘Is the team going to embrace it?’” Villaman said. “Are they going to be happy using it? Will it make their job easier? Because everything we do at our restaurant group is geared toward making our team members very successful.”
Base Camp Pizza Co. is in the midst of rolling out an AI agent designed by VoicePlug AI. Here’s how it works: When a customer calls in, a custom AI agent named Gina answers. Gina is capable of handling an order, walking a customer through an FAQ (think store hours, etc.), upselling or encouraging add-on items, or booking catering events or large parties (among many other things). The agent speaks multiple languages, understands a wide variety of accents and can take calls after hours when nobody is in the restaurant. Gina is also capable of transferring a guest to a human order taker at any time.
The early returns at Base Camp Pizza Co. have been promising. Villaman said the system captures between 25-30% more calls. Base Camp has seen a similar 25-30% uptick in large party reservations. More than anything, he views the technology as a huge boon to his team members on the ground. It’s worth restating: Villaman is not planning on cutting any team members as a result of implementing the technology and believes it will vastly improve the customer and employee experience, respectively.
“It’s a productivity tool that is improving your team’s ability to execute,” Villaman said. “It’s not a replacement. It’s a complement to our team members.”
Aiming for 99% Accuracy or Higher
Kyle Rosch, co-owner at Brenz Pizza Co.—an eight-shop brand based in Columbus, Ohio—began considering voice ordering AI for similar reasons. Rosch has watched AI ordering roll out in Columbus—where drive-thru tests by national chains have primed customers for conversational ordering—and decided to pilot an agent designed by Palona AI after seeing a direct integration with their POS at Pizza Expo.
View this post on Instagram
Like Villaman, Rosch framed the technology as an operations fix more than a shiny novelty: During peak hours, callers were waiting “upwards of 2.5 to 3 minutes” to place a call-in order and staff were stressed and distracted. “If you can keep that phone from ringing on a Friday night so they can focus on making the pizza and taking care of the customer, we’re going to have a better success rate,” he said. “It’s almost more of a benefit to our employees than customers” because it removes the relentless ringing that wears staff down.
Brenz Pizza Co. is currently in the process of training its AI agent—named Scarlett, a play on Ohio State University’s trademark hue of red. Scarlett will have to meet a high standard prior to being implemented. “The success rate of an accurate order has to be 99% or higher,” Kyle told PMQ Pizza.
Both operators stressed that successful rollouts are not passive. They require real-hours of menu training, careful messaging to customers (plus a plan for the vocal critics), and, often, the slow work of POS integrations. For Brenz Pizza Co, the training process includes an hour or two a day of operator input. Rosch and his team are monitoring current phone calls for any questions that come up—questions that Scarlett will eventually need to know the answers to. The AI agent has already had to learn the menu, store hours and other FAQs.
To preserve customer trust, Brenz has been explicit about design choices: They’ll announce Scarlett up front (“Hi, this is Scarlett, your AI assistant”), pick pilot locations where customers are likely to adopt it and build clear “trapdoors” so callers can jump to a live team member if they want.
“The ‘trapdoors’ were really important to us—we felt like there had to be easy ways to get out of it,” Rosch said. “It’s for those people who aren’t really comfortable with the technology for whatever reason.”
View this post on Instagram
Brenz Pizza Co. is planning on launching Scarlett in the coming weeks. Rosch has some trepidation about how it will be received by the public. He knows there will be a vocal minority who will believe AI is taking jobs, even if that is not, in fact, true (similar to Villaman, Rosch said Brenz does not plan to lay off a single person after rolling out Scarlett). What he’s more worried about, however, are the people who say nothing despite being rubbed the wrong way by the new technology.
“My concern is that we will come off as extremely corporate,” Rosch said. “And I’m more concerned about the silent minority—it’s the same with online reviews. It’s the ones who don’t say anything and stop ordering. We’d rather people bring stuff to our attention so we can address it head on, because we hope everyone involved has a good experience with this.”
For these reasons, Brenz Pizza Co. is carefully selecting the markets in which to debut the AI agent. For now, it will pilot the program at stores where the demographics are more likely to have already encountered AI voice ordering in the drive-thru or via the phone at larger chains. Despite these concerns, Rosch believes implementing voice ordering will lead to massive gains in productivity, as well as customer and employee satisfaction. In other words—the juice is worth the squeeze.
“If you can keep that phone from ringing on a Friday night so they can focus on making the pizza and taking care of the customer, we’re gonna have a better overall success rate,” Rosch said. “And we’re going to sell more pizza.”
