Yelp today announced a big update to its restaurant management & marketing tool, Yelp Host. This includes more than a dozen feature updates, including an integration with OpenTable, a native food ordering/pickup function, and a suite of personalization and management features.
Before going into those particulars, what is Yelp Host? In short, it’s an AI tool for restaurants to automate inbound calls, leads, and reservations. It can be customized with AI personas that match the “voice” of the business, and it has a counterpart called Yelp Receptionist, purpose-built for service-based SMBs.
As for today’s batch of updates, they carry the torch for Yelp Host’s founding mission to streamline operations for busy restaurants. Because resource constraints are a longstanding pain point for restaurants, Yelp is running with AI’s ability to automate operations and free up those resources.
“Restaurants today need to be available to every customer all the time, but their staff is stretched thin, especially during peak dining hours,” Yelp VP of Go-to-Market for Restaurants, Cliff Cate told Localogy Insider. “Every missed call is lost revenue, whether it’s a reservation that never gets booked or a takeout order that goes to a competitor. We’re hearing consistently that operators want technology that takes work off their plate without sacrificing the guest experience.”
Book, Modify & Cancel
To that end, what are the latest updates for Yelp Host? We’ve extracted the highlights and summarized them below for Localogy Insider readers.
- A new integration with OpenTable that handles reservation calls automatically. Guests can book, modify, and cancel reservations by phone 24/7 without staff time intervention.
- Voice AI food ordering lets restaurants accept phone orders for pickup through Yelp Host, with full menu integration, real-time POS syncing, and flexible payment options.
- Expanded language support and voice customization for AI voice experiences.
- 16 new languages have been added, including Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and more.
- We’ve expanded from 4 to 12 voice options, featuring different accents and tones.
- Custom voices are also supported, so the voice callers hear is distinctly on brand.
- Multiple dedicated phone numbers allow restaurants to configure separate routing for different inquiry types, such as catering, events, etc.
- New reporting tools and enhanced analytics give operators data to improve front-of-house operations, surfacing call evaluation metrics, after-hours call volume, reservation conversion rates, food order volumes, and concurrent call handling.
Goal Alignment
When looking at these updates, Cate tells us that the driving force in each case is the demand signals that Yelp sees from SMBs, which trace back to those classic resource constraints. Here, Yelp has robust data from its platform to glean all those demand signals and develop its road map accordingly.
“The OpenTable integration means even more reservation calls are handled automatically,” said Cate as an example of its goal alignment. “Plus, AI-powered food ordering opens Yelp Host to counter-service and takeout-focused restaurants for the first time, handling the full ordering flow conversationally and pushing orders straight into the POS.”
All this rigor and attention to feature detail is working so far for Yelp Host. It has already reached 1 million calls handled, with an average monthly growth rate of 38 percent. Cate points to a recent milestone when the system handled 40,000 calls on Mother’s Day Weekend alone, so momentum is on its side.
“With more than 1 million calls handled, Yelp Host is making an impact because it solves that problem directly — restaurants never miss a customer call, and staff stays focused on the guest experience,” said Cate.
