As many of our current customers know, the eHungry.com system provides restaurants with automated telephone notifications upon order receipt as an optional service. This is valuable because many times, receiving orders via fax or thermal printer can go undetected by busy restaurant staff. That phone call can be a real life-saver if you don’t want angry customers wondering where their order is.
Up until now, this service has been relatively simple and without frills. eHungry account managers merely told our system that they wanted to be notified at a certain telephone number, and our system called each time an order was placed.
However, we are about to turbo-charge our voice platform to provide our customers with more value. In particular, we are moving away from third-party providers for our voice operations and bringing those capabilities into our own data center on a custom platform that we have developed for our own use.
This has a great many advantages. First, we expect that performance and reliability will be improved. In the past, we have had restaurants tell us about late or missing calls – well, no more. With the greater control we have over the precise operation of our own platform, we can provide better, more consistent service to you.
A second advantage is an expansion in features. We plan to soon provide the ability to schedule exactly how many times you want our system to keep trying if it cannot reach you by phone; whether it ought to try to determine if a person or a machine answered; how long to wait before calling you after an order has been placed; and even what message it should speak to you when it calls.
But perhaps the greatest change coming down the pike with respect to our voice platform is the ability to now receive entire order details via phone instead of just a brief notification. We plan to include this option as a primary order receipt method, which means our system can dial you and read you your orders by phone, in complete detail, all for a reasonable per-minute fee.
With this new capability, you have another option for receiving your orders even when faxing, thermal printers, and email are not good enough. What’s more, we plan to provide this new capability as a fallback order receipt method as well, so that even if you prefer to receive orders by fax, our system can call you and deliver the order when faxing fails or your fax lines are busy. And, we will be providing inbound calling service as well, so you can dial in to receive order details with just a few keypresses.
So, there’s a lot on the way! We have not fully worked out pricing and availability yet, but you can expect to see some of these features appearing within the next few weeks, with incremental additions to our new system arriving regularly thereafter.
We are excited about these improvements to our service offerings and we think you will be too! If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us at support@ehungry.com. We value the feedback you can provide.
