Restaurant Phone Systems: Handling High Call Volume During Rush

You’re busy, and you know that — so how often have you missed calls during dinner rush? Every time that happens, it’s a hit to your bottom line, not just due to a missed order, but because it’s also a missed relationship. The customer is hungry, so they call someone else… and now they have a new favorite.

A well-configured restaurant phone system is the difference between capturing that revenue and losing it to a competitor down the street.

Digital ordering has not eliminated phone demand. Research from Cornell University confirms that customers still value the personal connection a phone call provides, particularly among older demographics and guests placing complex or large orders. As such, you need something more robust than a digital-only web portal paired with an on-premises phone line ringing on your wall.

Five unanswered calls per evening, each representing a table of three at a $45 average check, adds up to roughly $1,500 in lost monthly revenue. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, remember that that figure fails to account for lost repeat customers.

There is also a human cost. Staff caught between managing a packed dining room and a ringing phone get stressed, which degrades service quality across the board.

Fortunately, you can solve these problems with the right phone system, so let’s take a look at the features you should keep an eye out for.

What to Look for in a High-Volume Restaurant Phone System

We’ve already made it clear how much a missed call actually costs, but understanding the problem is only half the work. To solve that problem, several modern software features can make mealtime rushes far more manageable and allow you to stay on top of your incoming calls even when your kitchen is understaffed, your lines are overpacked, and your staff is overtired:

• Call queuing: Instead of delivering a busy signal, queuing holds callers in line with estimated wait messaging. This encourages customers to stay on the line a bit longer, instead of instantly hanging up when they hit a voicemail inbox.
• Intelligent call routing: Between Intermedia AI voice recognition, natural language processing, and robust IVR phone trees, modern phone systems can route callers instantly and automatically, sending reservation inquiries down one path and takeout orders down another. Self-sorting helps to clear up tedious work and prevent one overworked phone line from ringing with every single query at once.
• Mobile integration: A manager circulating the dining room should never be unreachable. Mobile-integrated, cloud-hosted PBX systems keep decision-makers connected regardless of where they are standing, and make it easy to take calls from a number of devices at once (without demanding costly hardware installs for physical phone lines).
• Durability and reliability: Consumer-grade hardware isn’t engineered for constant noise, or the network strain of a packed service period. Commercial-grade business lines provide greater network clarity and consistent uptime, ensuring that provider outages never shut down your remote orders for an entire evening.

Boosting Order Volume Without Increasing Labor Costs

At the end of the day, the easiest improvement you can make to your restaurant’s business phone system is to shift to a cloud-based PBX platform. At their heart, cloud PBX solutions are built to effortlessly handle simultaneous call loads and scale with busy hours, whereas physical phone lines are not.

You don’t have to worry about having too many, or too few, cooks in the kitchen; all you need to do is make it easy for your team to handle variable amounts of business with consistent success.

Every time a host steps away from the door to answer a phone, a guest waiting to be seated experiences a longer wait, especially during peak hours. Automation absorbs incoming calls so your in-person staff can stay focused on in-person guests. The result is faster table turns and a smoother floor operation, without adding a single payroll hour.

AI-integrated routing and automatic task completion can help capture 50 or more additional daily orders simply by ensuring no call hits a busy tone and drops. Plus, Intermedia’s integrated call analytics can reveal peak call windows with greater clarity, allowing you to more confidently schedule your staff without needing to constantly guess at customer volume.

Spam protection and smart call routing work in the background to filter robocalls and solicitations, ensuring the lines your team answers are real guests with real orders. 

With all that combined? Your employee’s day gets easier, your customers walk out satisfied, and your business’s bottom line flourishes.

Beat the Rush with Business Phone Solutions by Intermedia

Every unanswered call during rush is a missed order, a lost reservation, and a guest who may not call back. Goodwill and capable staff can certainly help, but proper infrastructure is mandatory to keep those losses to a minimum. 

Fortunately, moving from a legacy landline or fragmented system to Intermedia’s cloud PBX solutions is easier (and cheaper) than you might think. With our streamlined onboarding and round-the-clock support from technical experts, Intermedia can help you port existing numbers, configure call queues, and enable mobile extensions without shutting down service for a single shift. 

Those integrations support both back-of-house and front-of-house operations by keeping your phone system integrated into your CRM and the rest of your business messaging. Whether you get an order by portal, text, or call, you can see it all in one place with real-time visibility and automated transcription.

Plus, with our 99.999% annual SLA uptime guarantee, you can stop worrying about the worst-case scenario. Intermedia maintains that uptime through redundant cloud infrastructure hosted on numerous robust servers, so a local internet hiccup doesn’t bring down your entire communication flow during peak service.

Act now, before the next Friday rush overwhelms your current setup. See how Unite can fit your restaurant’s phone system needs (and more) today.

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.