Boosting Restaurant Profits Using AI With Carl Turner
Running a restaurant is tough – managing orders, executing marketing campaigns, and maintaining high customer engagement can quickly become overwhelming. Thankfully, AI has been changing the game and is now helping owners automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. In this episode, Jaime Oikle talks with Carl Turner, CEO of SWIPEBY, to discuss how AI-driven tools can streamline marketing, online ordering, and customer interactions. They emphasize how this innovation allows owners to spend more time on things that truly matter: great food and outstanding service. Whether you are looking to improve efficiency or drive more repeat customers, this conversation is packed with insights you do not want to miss.
Find out more at https://swipe.by/
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Boosting Restaurant Profits Using AI With Carl Turner
How AI Revolutionizes Restaurant Sales And Marketing
We're going to talk about AI, which is always fun. We got Carl Turner of SWIPEBY. You guys are working with restaurants across the country in lots of different ways. Welcome, Carl. Give me the overview. What are you guys doing? We'll dig in.
Thanks, Jaime, for having me. I'm excited to be here. In the end, the problem that we are addressing, we've been doing this for some time. We started as an online ordering company. We had a focus on curbside pickup in a pre-COVID world, obviously in a COVID world. The core challenge that we have identified is that, for restaurants, the number one priority, if I'm running one, is normally the people in the business. My guests, my putting the pizza in the oven, putting the wings in the fryer, and so on.
A core challenge remains, normally, around how to grow the business? What is with reputation? What is with marketing? What is with social media? What is with the phone? While there are a lot of tools in the market, there are a billion ways to send emails, a billion ways to answer the phone, a billion ways to post on social media and come up with content, it normally always requires me, as the business owner, the restaurant owner, the GM, to do all of these tasks.
What we are doing is using AI to not just be the tool but also to be the tool and the person that runs the tool. We take real-time data of a business, online ordering data, sales data, business data, analytical data, and customer data, and then use artificial intelligence, what we call AI teams, to then do functions on the business, full social media, full review and reputation management, full remarketing and retargeting.
Without needing any input, without needing to log in anywhere or click the magic wand like you have with a lot of tools because that's where we have seen the failure point, but doing it end to end. In short, we're like a marketing agency, a GM, a full-time hire that works on the business while the business owner can focus on being in the business.
First of all, that sounds awesome. Second of all, you guys are obviously in an exciting space. Anything wrapped around AI is hot and exciting. I've been poking my toes in different parts of it, from ChatGPT to reading about prompts to reading some books that talk about technology. You guys are in a cool space. Talk about the company, how long you guys have been running, where you focus and operate, and how you're tackling the market. I want to come back and revisit some of the other stuff you hit on, but give me some background there.
The Journey Of SWIPEBY From Startup To Growth
I originally started the company some time ago. We launched in 2019, but it was purely my own problem. The problem was, I'm originally from Germany. I studied in the United States. I was in North Carolina and was like, “I don't want to go to Chick-fil-A. I don't want to go to McDonald's, but I'm craving the drive-thru experience.” My favorite sushi place, pizza place, pasta place didn’t have that. What I founded was a curbside pickup platform using geolocation technology to automatically facilitate that type of curbside experience in a pre-COVID world.
I was running with that, again, in 2019, but then COVID hit. Overnight, I didn't have to explain anymore what curbside is. A lot of competitors entered the market. What I figured was curbside is good and great, but it's just one function. Let us add more to that. We added delivery, we added no-commission delivery, usual stuff, loyalty and rewards, and built this full 360-degree eCommerce platform. Still with a focus on North Carolina, we ventured into neighboring markets. That's when the next observation came in, because in online ordering, we are obviously not alone.
There are a lot of technologies out there. What I identified was that our pitch, as well as the pitch from everyone else, had these two core things. Own your data and don’t pay commissions. It’s the common pitch. Don't pay commissions and own your data. What we found, at least for our customers, was that the own your data pitch was a lot of fugazi, fugazi. It’s because what business does anything with the data that the POS, the online ordering platform, generates? What business owner has the time to open that Excel file and look at the dashboard? We track time on our dashboards, but it was virtually none.
Restaurant owners do not have time to analyze data. AI can do it for them and turn insights into real, automated actions.
The business owners were happy that orders were coming in, that they weren't paying commissions, but all of the extra juicy stuff, the data, wasn't used. With the rise of AI, now we're talking 2022, we thought, “How can we now use this to fully turn that data into value without needing input from the business owner? How can we tackle the problem of, ‘I didn’t post on social media again for a month?’” We know your best-selling items. We know your new promotion because we have the online ordering data.
Let's create the post fully autonomously, and you just approve it by a text message. Are you looking to get more five-star reviews? We have direct access to the customers. Let’s communicate and get some more five-star reviews. That was the progression. When it comes to where we are now, I think we’re in 40, maybe close to all 50 states in the US. That led to another observation. We are helping with automation, but the reason why we need to help with automation is because, again, restaurant owners, you are busy in the business.
You are busy serving the customers. That's why you have a restaurant and not a ghost kitchen. It’s because a real person walks in the door, and you want to have that interaction. We are now focusing on an approach where we have people on the ground. We don’t try to do any email marketing. We don’t do ads. We don’t do cold calling. Instead, we’re hiring, and the inspiration is food service. The inspiration is US Foods and Performance Foodservice. All of those companies where, if you ask a restaurant owner, “Who is the one person you trust outside of your business, your family,” I would say, in a lot of cases, it’s the food service rep. That’s the trust point.
It’s never a tech rep because they’re virtual. They’re not there in person. We are focusing on a market-in-market approach, having people on the ground, being able to be there in person, and building a relationship on top of this AI automation thing that we are. That’s the progression, curbside pickup, online ordering, AI. We are close to 50 people in the company. It’s growing very quickly. It used to be just ten. That’s the journey.
Interesting point about the data. Everyone does say, "Own the data," and you do want to versus having it sit in somebody else's platform that you can't. The follow-up point is also well taken that no one grabs it. The classic example is I give my email address, even worse, to the restaurant that says I want to be contacted, and then I'm never even contacted. That's a simple one. Never mind all the POS data that you're talking about, all the analytics, and then it just never gets utilized.
I was going to ask you the question, and you hinted at it, but I want to make sure because I also just re-watched one of the Tom Cruise movies where the AI goes rogue. The AI is not out there sending messages just completely randomly that could be way off. You use the phrase, "It sends you a text message, and you approve it." Talk about that process. It's doing stuff in the background, and maybe some of it is completely automated. I don't want to say that that's bad, but what are some of the checks and balances?
AI To Improve Customer Engagement
In the end, again, when we build our product, and again, we are taking a horizontal approach, we are building product, again, from social media over phone, over review reputation. We're trying to be in multiple teams that you can hire. We always ask ourselves, what would a good employee do? If I have a great idea, odds are, I would send you a text or an email and say, "Jaime, do you like this post? Can I post it? I tried something creative. This is why I did it."
Our AI does the exact same. Everything that is a little bit more, where there is risk of hallucination, where there is risk of getting it wrong, we always do approval via text message. It is because we also understand, again, the same problem we're trying to solve. If we require a login to a dashboard, to a URL, to a website, failure. That is not going to happen. A text message is generally one where we get significantly easier engagement with busy business owners. Obviously, we have functionality that also runs on autopilot.
Generally, how most of our customers operate with our system, they are using the full approval via text message, they gain trust, and then they can turn on automations. For example, an easy one is always in review and reputation management. “I trust this now. Everything that is five-star and four-star, AI can now handle full circle, two-star, three-star, one-star, I still want to be involved." They can make these adjustments. Super important, exactly.
We don't want to create some crazy content for, again, across social, phone answering, marketing, retargeting, even digital ads. We can run the full digital ad spend for a business at zero cost. AI just handles this. It's tested. We do always have, "We're planning on doing an ad in this direction, in this market, based on your delivery data, that's where your people are and where your customers are based. Do you approve, and do you approve this budget?" It’s like exactly a human would do, just that it's AI.
You wouldn't want to see a 12-inch pizzas, $1.99 special, and you go, "That's not what I want." You don't want that to happen. Let's go to the review section. Reviews and restaurants, such an always touchy subject. Everybody wants five-star reviews. We all hate one-star reviews, naturally. There's an impetus to get more reviews. Talk about how your system gets involved in reviews.
The Power Of AI In Managing Restaurant Reviews
I think, again, there is the lost opportunity in takeout. It is because, generally speaking, why do you give a review? It is because you had a great experience with a staff member. That is, again, what a brick-and-mortar is there for, what a restaurant is there for if you're not a ghost kitchen. Normally, though, the businesses that are most successful are doing the usual game. You just train your staff to be like, "Did you have a great experience? Could you leave a review?" Maybe they have some form or shape of a QR code they're giving, and so on.
In most cases, digitally, that doesn't happen, or it happens in closed ecosystems, such as the Uber ecosystem, the DoorDash, the Grubhub ecosystem, but not, again, the general ones like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and so on. Our system does a few things. It starts with a super simple one. That is just proactively engaging with the customer, with the guest, to ask for that feedback and ask for that review. We do have some, again, algorithms around that where we can understand, is it a negative experience? Is it a positive experience? Obviously, if it's a negative experience, we're trying to keep it in-house. We're trying just to capture what went wrong.
How can we address it? Can AI handle it end-to-end and address that concern? If it's a positive experience, obviously, we care about, "Let's try to push this public as much as we can without violating any FTC laws or review gating," and so on. We're handling those things. I think it boils down to, how was that pizza that you had just delivered an hour ago? Did you love it? How was your experience?
That's the starting point to then get more reviews and get your online reputation up, which is obviously an absolute key factor because of SEO. The Google Maps profile is sometimes even more important. That is the profile where the reviews count, where answering reviews counts, where engagement counts, where activity counts, which is quite often overlooked by businesses that are only focusing on organic search, aka the website.
I'm curious about this... Let's say a three-star review comes in, "Got the food, was pretty good, wasn't hot, was missing two things." You say that the chatbot can maybe start the process a little bit before it goes to a person. Give me a little bit more color there.
I think the core one is always making the customer feel heard. That is the first thing. Obviously, what we're currently not doing, we're not doing fully automated resolution because a lot of businesses are in different situations. Sometimes, I don't know if I think the customer's always right. I think that's a short version of the statement. I think there's a follow-on, the original one. We don't want to be just the yay-sayers where the system is always, "We're so sorry. Let's do this right." It is because I think, in some cases, not sorry. It's like, you came 30 minutes late after the pickup time. Why do you complain the food is cold? Just to be straight up here, especially as a restaurant operator.
Where the system comes in is it comes into the acknowledgment. It comes into analyzing what happened. We're still putting the burden of then deciding what to do on the business owner, that the business owner, or the GM, or the manager understands what happened, gets the feedback, and the customer knows they are heard and someone is working on this, normally does quite a lot when it comes to this proactiveness of managing bad experiences.
It's true. As a customer, if you have that experience and feel like you're going into a voicemail death trap, that's a bad experience. Get heard. Get a resolution. It could be the next day, that's fine. It could be sooner than that, or it could be in the near term. The point is, you don't want to get ignored because that turns into social media posts, spreading the word, bad word of mouth, etc.
Something else on the site that I was curious about, and I know you carry other verticals as well, but cross-selling, to me, is interesting with restaurants, and maybe it's something you're doing with online ordering. "You like this, you might like that." Is it that? Is there other stuff going on? How else are you working there?
I think there are two things. The one thing is the traditional, the customers are making a purchase right here, right now. Upselling, cross-selling on checkout, on menu. This is not rocket science. A lot of companies are doing that. We're taking a little bit of an approach of, again, feeding more outside data. Simple things like the weather. If I'm in Miami, it's a crazy hot day, and my upselling and cross-selling should maybe be something different than on a cold day.
Most platforms just have their standard, "These are the most popular items. That's what we are pushing." We're taking a little bit more of an approach of taking outside data and creating a personalized upselling and cross-selling experience that also gives the reason why. We have an upselling, cross-selling assistant that sits on the menu and on the checkout experience.
What we can do there also is, instead of just having the pop-up, the last stroke, the customer's about to check out, let's try to get one more muffin in the door, we are having a consistent and consultative approach where, through the entire menu journey, we are consistently suggesting and updating what the customer might like in a non-intrusive way. With AI making those decisions and packaging the decision, meaning giving a reason why.
It's good and great that you think I might like a pizza, a salad, a cold slushy drink, or the muffin, but I'm more likely to purchase it if you might implant in my brain why I like it as a guest. That helps, obviously, to increase the ticket size. When it comes to upselling, cross-selling, the other component is the customer that used to be there. The daunting stat in restaurants is always, 70% of customers come once. You spend a lot of money, they come once. What is with those 70% of customers? How can you bring them back?
70% of customers only visit a restaurant once. AI can personalize follow-ups and retarget them to keep these people coming back.
That's where we move into remarketing, retargeting, where upselling and cross-selling is a function, too. It is because if we understand a customer very well, and with AI, we can do it at scale, not just anymore, "The Super Bowl is happening, order our wings." I might order the cauliflower crust pizza with all veggies on it. Unfortunately, that wing message for Super Bowl is missing the point with me.
It's incredibly hard for a business owner to go through 10,000 customers and come up with unique marketing messages. What our system does, again, every customer, every guest that you ever had has a unique designated marketing manager, AI, that comes up with a unique journey with unique timings for all of them.
There's an upselling and cross-selling function, too. It is because if we had a customer that ordered X and hasn't come back for X, we can try to get them back on X and the pepperoni pizza. Based on a lookalike audience, we can also try to get them back on other items that might likely pique their interest again. Obviously, a promotion, a special, the usual. That is where upselling and cross-selling also come in to beat that 70% ratio.
Get people consistently ordering because someone who ordered once, that's your lowest-hanging fruit. That's where AI can automate and personalize at an insane scale, like impossible to do without full automation. It is not just automated email sending, magic wand, writing an email for everyone, inserting first name, and pressing send. The results are day and night.
I'm curious about that because we obviously have a newsletter on our side, but it's not personalized. When we send out a newsletter, it goes to everybody, and it's the same thing. I'm starting to get more messages from more retailers and restaurants and so forth that seem like, "That looks like it's for me," not that version that everybody got. So much power in that, obviously, because you already hit on it.
The cross-messaging between pizza and vegan and all that and meat, you want to hit them with the right message because your menu, in a lot of cases, does a lot of different things. That's very normal. Your customers do have different profiles. I think what I want people to understand is let's just use a simple database of 1,000 people in your restaurant's email database. Literally, could 1,000 different messages go out at the end of the day?
How AI Helps In Personalizing Customer Marketing
It's 1,000 different messages at 1,000 different times. It is because, same thing, I order the Southwest salad at noon on a Monday, or I order the two Southwest salads on Friday at 6:00 PM. I don't know. This is now me. AI is even better at this. One is probably a lunch customer, I am not sure if they come on the weekend because it might be just the office. They might not live around. The other one may be the person living in the condo close to the office. It's ordered for a two-person household, healthy mindset kind of situation.
What the system does is the person on Monday hasn't ordered on Mondays again. When is the best time to target that person? Likely Monday morning, the highest chance to bring them back, and slightly around messaging about lunch specials. The person who ordered on Friday, two salads, or maybe even two pizzas, a kid's meal, and an appetizer, the family now, they are probably best to be targeted again on Friday afternoon, now trying to get that repeat behavior.
It is because moving the person that is the lunch customer into a dinner customer is possible but not the lowest-hanging fruit. A thousand customers with our system are getting a thousand different emails, different touchpoints, different subject lines, different content, and different coupon codes, if the business chooses to incentivize with that, and even at different times. If we take a simple stat, our average opening rates are like 60%. It's insane. It's because it's so personalized.
Obviously, you see the ROI on orders, too. Our general lift that we see is a 20% increase in direct sales and digital direct sales because that's what we can measure. We can’t measure the in-store sales. We don't know what it does to Uber or your DoorDash sales, but yes. Long story short, to your point, 1,000 customers, a thousand different emails, at a thousand different times.
I want it to be clear because that's what I envision happening in the background. You, I think, can feel the power of that. We could probably talk for hours about all this stuff because I love it. One of the things I saw on your site for sure is the AI and the phone stuff. We're all used to the bank, press one to do this, press two to do that. Not so much from a restaurant perspective. What are you guys doing with the phones?
How AI-Powered Phone Systems Can Help Restaurants Grow
When we come to phone ordering these days, there's a lot of innovation, and it feels to us a little bit like online ordering these days. There are a lot of online ordering companies that are like us. We are like them. I would have a tough time differentiating. We're seeing this on the phone, too.
What we're doing, it's, again, the conversational piece, understanding the customer, understanding different languages, answering the customer based on their input. I think the nuance I'd like to make is, "I want to make a reservation tonight for two," or "I want to make a reservation for about 50 people for a rehearsal dinner in three weeks." One needs OpenTable or Resy or whatever. The other person needs a very different approach.
It is like a group reservation, it's event rental, and so on. Having said that, again, I would not even call that innovative anymore because there are now a handful of companies doing exactly that. Let's treat this not as a tool, as a phone tool that answers the phone, but as a team member in your team.
Treat AI not just as another business tool but as a member of your team.
It is because a good team member who would be on your phones, that you hire, would now talk to the operations team and be like, "By the way, we get so many online orderings at that time. We need to increase prep times. There is a backlog there," or, "It turns out that these customer profiles here that are calling about reservations, those are the ones we want to retarget to the marketing manager of the business," which, again, we know normally doesn't exist. That's how we treat it.
The core tech around answering the phone with AI, same as a lot of other companies. What is unique is that, again, if you choose to, we're à la carte. No customer needs to buy everything that we do. If you choose to have the social media team, the marketing team, the review reputation team, and yet you have the phone team, the digital ads team, all of these data points are talking, and interoperable with each other.
You can now learn your phone team, like it should sit in a meeting room with your marketing team and make decisions based on these data points. That makes you grow as a restaurant and harness. The beauty here, though, is that it's, again, not you as the business owner looking at an Excel sheet with a thousand phone entries, phone numbers, user IDs linked to each other or even a dashboard that tells you, "These were your phone customers." Now what?
I don't care what my phone people were, tell me what to do. Even if you tell me what to do, my wait staff just called, they didn't show up. I need to go back to the fryer. Boom, forgot. That's where the connections come in. Long story short, again, it's the conversational use of AI. We do a fun thing with voice cloning. We can clone the voice of the business owner. It's in there, like, Karl Schnitzelhausen now picks up with my slight or strong German accent right up front.
I like that it tells you what to do, I wrote that down. One of the big call-outs in that world is the phone call that says, "I'm looking to do a wedding rehearsal, and I have 50 people, and I'm checking places out." If that lands in voicemail or in the system, and if I don't get a call back very quickly, I am off to the next place, and you just missed out on $2,000. You want your system to ring all the bells on the thing and say, "This call is very important." The systems can do that versus sitting in oblivion. Those are missed opportunities that you do not want to miss. Do you find that to be true?
Why Restaurants Need AI For Social Media Management
A hundred percent. To segue, and there is another key channel that's again, with all the tech crisis, overlooked, and that's social media. Great that we now cover your channel for the phone, but what if the person that messaged you on Instagram was the same person? It is because, frankly, I don't engage over the phone. I message on Instagram and, if I have to, on Facebook.
I'm not too big on TikTok or on any of the other platforms. I'm too old for that at this point. That's where I engage. What we have seen is, to just segue, that when we talk about these teams is, now we gave you the team to answer your phone, but what if it was the same person or another person that, again, is planning the wedding via social media and is messaging you on Instagram? What we have found is pretty astonishing.
The majority of businesses never answer a direct message on Instagram or Facebook. It's never answered. You can message a business account, a restaurant, 12,000 followers, maybe even actively posts 1 or 2 posts a week, and you will not get an answer. Similar to the phone team, now this is where the AI social media teams come in, answering direct messages, even answering comments. You think about it, you're a business owner, you post that delicious pizza. Someone now comments, "That's delicious." You should answer that comment. It helps you with engagement.
You should maybe even send a message. Jaime just liked that picture and said, "Delicious." I should send, "Jaime, did you know that on Mondays, that pizza is off because we have Pizza Mondays by 10%? Check it out. Here's our link to place an order." We do that. We do fully integrate with Meta. We again take the phone data, the email data. It's the idea of, let's help anything in the business to be automatic. A hundred percent. To your point, sometimes, again, that one message about, "Can I make a reservation tonight on social media?" If that's not answered within an hour, the customer made a reservation somewhere else. They're gone.
They're gone. We hit a lot. I want to make sure is there something we didn't miss? As we start to wrap up here, parting thoughts about the whole enchilada of restaurant technology? Take it away in any direction you want for a little bit. Things we missed, things you also want to hit on, where to find you guys.
AI And The Future Of Restaurant Technology
In the end, what we're going to see a lot in restaurant technology, and we are one of the frontrunners of this, I would say, is we're going to see other companies, and there will be more companies popping up. It's the point of, let's handle this for you. Let me not give you, again, a tool where we build a social media calendar for you, but then you have to click on it, or we write the content, but you have to upload the image, or, again, we can help you with email marketing, but in the end, you still have to, again, write it or send it or come up with the cadence.
What do you want to do if a customer hasn't ordered in a day, or what do you want to send when it's someone's birthday? We see that with a lot of business owners. That decision point already is failure because they're so busy in the business. Where we are going and where technology is going is exactly these.
I have these pain points like, "I forgot again to post for months," "That social media message that came in this morning, I forgot to answer," "My waitstaff complained again about the phone," "We again forgot to send an email about the special that we added," "There was this one-star review that I wanted to handle on Google. I forgot again." This is, I think, what most business owners can relate to. Even I can relate to it. I wish sometimes I would have our technology for us, but we optimized it for restaurants. That's what we are handling.
There was just, obviously, the side point. Sometimes, when you think about the alternative, hiring someone, the agency is extremely costly. The beauty of AI, it's significantly cheaper. My salesy takeaway here is, right outside of that, we are at SWIPE.BY. If you, I think, put in Google just SWIPEBY or SWIPEBY for restaurants, we should come up somewhere there. It's a lightweight product. The beauty with AI too is, it just sits on the data. You don't need to change hardware. You don't need to change POS systems. You don't need to do any of that.
I think it's going to be exciting to see, and with brick-and-mortar business owners, to see AI is the big opportunity that they can truly focus on what matters. It is because if I say I build a tech company here, I engage with customers, and we are putting a heavy focus, trying to have people on the ground to connect with customers. If you have a brick-and-mortar, a restaurant, frankly, the person that ordered on Uber Eats is important, but the person in the business is even more important.
That is the customer that came in. That's why you have the storefront. That's why you choose that table, that wallpaper, that design. You put your heart into it. AI is the big opportunity to, in an extremely personalized way, sometimes maybe even better than I, as a person, would be able to do, address at scale all these millions of customer touchpoints, data points in the digital world, while then the business owner can focus on their passion, being in that business. SWIPEBY on Google, you'll find us, and we'd love to, if anyone is interested, book a demo and show more of what we do.
AI is a big opportunity to address a million customer touchpoints in an extremely personalized way while business owners focus on their passion: being in the restaurant business.
Excellent. That was great. I'm telling you, things are heading your way. You guys are in the right spot. You use the phrase pain point, which I like, and you hit a lot of those things that the busy restaurant owner deals with every day. They want to get to this, and they want to get to that, but they don't have it. Use a product like yours that kind of does some of the stuff magically in the background with some guidance and so forth.
Folks, Carl Turner of SWIPEBY. You can find them on the web at SWIPE.BY. For more restaurant tech and operations, people, service, and more, check us out at RunningRestaurants.com. In the meantime, do us a favor. Give a quick star review. We talked about reviews. Give us some feedback. Share it, please. We want to get this out to more folks and be helpful to the industry as a whole. Thank you, Carl. I appreciate it. We'll see you folks next time.
Thank you, Jaime.
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