A website chatbot for catering companies

A catering enquiry is unanswerable without four facts and dangerous without a fifth. The four are the date, the headcount, the venue and the style of service. The fifth is allergies, and it is the one place where a chatbot must be built to be careful rather than helpful. An Allinaa assistant on your website collects the four and handles the fifth the way a kitchen would.

Allergens first, because this is where it matters

Configure the assistant so that it never confirms a dish is free from an allergen, never says a kitchen is free from an ingredient, and never reassures anybody about cross-contamination. Those are statements only your kitchen can make about a specific menu on a specific day, and a wrong one can put somebody in hospital. What it should do is record what the guest has told it and route it to a person, with your own wording:

Write that sentence yourself, test it by claiming a severe allergy, and check that nothing reassuring comes back. The same applies to religious requirements - halal, kosher, and the certification question behind them: the assistant states only the arrangements your knowledge describes and claims no certification you do not hold.

The four facts behind a quote

1. Date, and whether it is fixed
2. Headcount, as a range if it is not final
3. Venue, and crucially whether it has a kitchen, power and water, or whether you are working from a marquee or a field
4. Style: plated, buffet, canapes, bowl food, barbecue, drop-off - each a different price and a different crew

The venue-facilities question is the one most caterers have to go back for, and it changes a quote more than the menu does. Ask it in the chat and your proposal goes out the same day.

The practical questions, answered exactly

• Minimum numbers and minimum spend, by day of the week if that is how you work
• Whether staff, crockery, glassware, linen and tables are included or hired in
• Whether you hold the licence for alcohol or the client does, and your corkage position
• How far you travel and what travel costs
• Your deposit, your final-numbers deadline and your cancellation terms, in the words your contract uses
• Whether you can work alongside a venue's own exclusive-supplier rules

Write these once and the assistant answers them all weekend. The cancellation and final-numbers terms especially: stating them plainly up front prevents the single most common dispute in catering.

Price per head, and why it will not guess one

If your website publishes a per-head figure, the assistant quotes exactly that, because it quotes only what is in your knowledge. If it does not, configure it not to estimate - the same headcount can be a drop-off buffet or a plated dinner with waiting staff, and a guessed figure either loses the enquiry or binds you to it. Let it collect and let your proposal do the quoting. See quote requests.

Corporate and regular accounts

Office lunches, meeting catering and regular weekly deliveries are a different business from events: they buy on lead time, ordering cut-off, invoicing and whether you can deliver to a reception desk at a fixed time. Write that path separately, including your cut-off time and what happens to a late order, and the assistant will answer the only two questions those customers ever have.

What happens to the enquiry

The assistant offers the inquiry form once it has the four facts. The visitor confirms their own contact details and agrees to be contacted, you get an e-mail, and the enquiry waits in your inbox with the dietary notes attached, a status, private notes and CSV export. On Premium an enquiry can be assigned to the right person with an alert, and a visitor can send a photograph of the venue or the room. See files customers send and the launch checklist.