After-hours bookings
11 /week
Captured outside phone hours that previously bounced
A chat assistant on our own site that books a table, holds it with a small deposit and answers the questions Priya is tired of typing — at 11pm, mid-service, in four languages. It says plainly that it is an AI, and it hands the hard calls to a human. Same brain as the phone line
Why a deposit, not just a confirmation: Chope reports pre-paid bookings were 47.6% less likely to no-show. The amount is deliberately small and fully credited — a commitment device, not a barrier (directional, vendor figure).
Disclosed it's an AI in the first reply, named the human manager, and offered the off-ramp to Priya — the PDPA-honest opening, not buried in small print.
Checked real availability against the booking calendar, recommended the better table, took the deposit and wrote a unique reference (MF-W04417) the way the phone agent does.
Answered a dietary question from the actual menu — naming dairy-free dishes that are genuinely dairy-free — and tagged the booking for the kitchen rather than promising what it can't see.
Every turn is logged, so the quality layer can later check this answer against what the phone line would have said.
"Do you charge corkage?"
"No corkage on your first bottle, then $25 a bottle after that — and Tommo's happy to open it for you."
"Do you charge corkage?"
"First bottle is free; $25 per bottle after that. We'll open and pour it for you."
Different words, same fact — because both channels read the same FAQ and the same calendar. That consistency is the point: a guest who rings, then visits the site, should never get two different answers. When they do diverge, that mismatch is exactly the signal the quality layer measures — it watches both channels and flags any drift before a guest ever notices.
Why it escalates: a kitchen safety guarantee is a human, legal and clinical call. The agent states what it knows from the menu, refuses to overreach, and routes to the chef — it never invents reassurance.
Why it refuses: a guest's reservation is personal data. Under Singapore's PDPA the agent only discloses a booking to the person who made it, verified by their own name or reference — never to a third party, however reasonable the ask sounds.
This page is a design concept, not a live system. The thread, deposit flow and refusals above are hand-built to show how the agent should behave. A working version would be a thin chat widget on our own site, talking to the same agent brain as the phone line (uc01) — the same reservation calendar, the same menu and FAQ knowledge base, the same booking tools — so the two channels can't drift apart. No backend runs behind this mock-up; every figure is synthetic but sized for a 60-seat room in Tanjong Pagar, closed Mondays, roughly half walk-in and half booked.