5 Ways to Use AI to Solve Staff Shortages

You post a job ad and nobody applies. When someone does join, they don't stay long. For restaurants running on a small team, it's a familiar problem.

If adding people is hard, the realistic move is to cut the work that isn't serving guests. Say you run a 50-seat restaurant with five staff. At lunch, every time the phone rings, someone has to stop serving to answer it; after closing, someone copies the online bookings into the reservation book. Taking requests, copying details and looking things up are exactly the jobs AI and software handle well.

This article covers five tasks that are easy to hand off, and what to watch out for when you do. Not all of them are AI in the strict sense: some are simply automated by fixed rules.

1. Let AI answer the phone first#

An AI phone service picks up the call, finds out what the caller wants and keeps a record of the conversation. It's a good fit for peak hours and after closing, when nobody can get to the phone.

Before you start, decide who checks the call records, when, and enters the bookings into the book. Whether a booking can be confirmed during the call differs from service to service, so check that as well.

2. Put booking-site reservations into your book automatically#

If booking-site reservations are read from their notification emails and entered into your book automatically, nobody has to copy them by hand. A booking made at 2 a.m. is already in the book by morning, and missed entries and double bookings become easier to avoid.

Still, check now and then for emails that couldn't be read.

3. Let AI answer common LINE questions first#

Opening hours, parking, whether children are welcome: many enquiries on LINE are the same questions over and over. If you put the answers into an FAQ, AI can answer the first question and pass only the ones it can't answer to your staff.

For anything that affects safety, such as allergies, don't let the AI give a definitive answer. It's safer to have staff check and reply.

4. Check reviews in one place, and write replies yourself#

Visiting each site to look for new reviews takes more time than you'd expect. Gather reviews from several sites into one list so you notice low ratings sooner.

Replies are best written by a person, in your restaurant's own voice. See How to reply to a one-star review for tips.

5. Build shifts from templates#

Instead of building the rota from scratch every week, turn the staff numbers and hours you need for each day of the week into a template. Generate the week from it and adjust only for time-off requests and last-minute absences, and scheduling takes less time.

What Bookmi can do#

Bookmi covers the five tasks above with the following features. Available features vary by plan.

• Booking email import: reads booking notification emails from Hot Pepper, Tabelog, Gurunavi and others and adds them to the reservation list. Changes and cancellations are reflected too (setup guide)
• AI Phone (add-on): AI answers calls first, and you can read the conversations in the call log. Bookings taken by phone don't go into the book automatically, so staff enter them into the reservation list from the call log
• LINE Official Account integration: receive and reply to enquiries in the dashboard. AI answers the first question based on your FAQ and notifies the person in charge when it can't
• Review management: see reviews from Tabelog, Gurunavi, Hot Pepper and Google in one list. Replies are posted on each site
• Shift templates: generate a week of shifts automatically from day-of-week templates

For the full range of restaurant features, see Bookmi for Restaurants.

Let AI handle what AI can handle, and let people focus on the work only people can do.

Put the time you save into serving guests and training new staff.