In today’s episode of the Gupshup Conversational Messaging Podcast, join Gupshup’s Beerud and Srini as they discuss how the pandemic and the rise of digital smartphones affected the consumers’ dining experience. Listen as they talk about how conversational messaging allows restaurants to receive a “natural” and personalized dining experience, at the comfort of their own homes.

How The Dining Experience Evolved

The global forces that affected the dining and food ordering industry for the past year are the pandemic and the rise of digital smartphones. Because people have been discouraged to dine-in for the collective good, a lot of consumers relied on online platforms to put in their orders in restaurants. However, despite the presumed comfort of this approach, it doesn’t seem to give consumers a “natural” experience that is comparable to in-house dining.

“We're all getting used to your smartphone as a remote control for the world that can magically bring whatever you need. Consumer habits are changing; they expect to have natural experiences.”  - Beerud Sheth

How Consumers Value Personal Experience

Beerud thinks there’s an unmet opportunity for restaurants — the opportunity to provide a personalized digital experience. Some examples Beerud mentioned are: creating a loyalty program, offering coupons, giving special benefits to regulars, personalizing the ordering process through links or QR codes, and such.

“Once you can offer these conversational experiences, it makes it much easier. When I say conversational, it can support both structured and unstructured interactions.”  - Beerud Sheth

How To Break The Normal

Many businesses, especially the small ones, think that going digital and transitioning to conversational messaging is hard—but it’s not. Companies like Gupshup make it possible by offering models with built-in integrations, which can be used immediately and have flexible and convenient pricing. The best part is that conversational messaging for restaurants is easy to blend into any marketing campaign, so it covers every aspect of the restaurant interaction.

“These tools have become so easy that literally anybody can do it.”  - Beerud Sheth

To know more about Conversational Messaging For Restaurants, and for more information about Beerud Sheth and Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan, listen to this episode.

Bio:

Beerud Sheth

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Beerud is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 100K+ customers and developers and handles over 6 billion messages per month. He previously founded and led Elance (now Upwork, a publicly listed company), the pioneer of online freelancing and the gig economy.

Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the MIT Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning agents for personalized news filtering. Beerud earned an M.S. in Computer Science from MIT & a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.

Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan

VP Marketing

Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io