Death of a pizza parlor phone order taker

On Christmas Eve, the Upper Crust on Charles Street - my go-to pizza place for the past 20+ years - closed. At first, I thought they were doing a reno, but after the first of the year a sign went up saying that they had closed. Their next closest outlet on Newbury Street was already gone, and after that...Well, I like being able to order my pizza and go pick it up. This worked well, as the Charles Street location was about a 2-minute walk. I suppose I could switch to delivery, but that always seems to add a whole lot of wait time into the process.

So no more Upper Crust. (Oh, boo hoo.)

I liked their pizza, and they had a pretty straightforward website to order from. Or you could call in and have a human take the order down. Neither method was foolproof. Once in a while they screwed up. But it worked pretty well.

Pizza order screw ups do tend to happen on occasion.

For a while, there was a good deep dish pizza - Bel Canto - on Charles Street, with a yummy whole wheat crust, a very tasty red sauce, and lots of interesting toppings. My favorite combo was broccoli and walnuts; my husband's was pepperoni, anchovies, and jalapeno. We used to do half and halfs. One time when we went to pick up, they gave us a spinach-only, which we were not interested in. I wish I could have seen the look on the person's face when they opened the box and saw our order.

One time, in anticipation of a blizzard, Jim and I ordered an extra-large super-deluxe from the late and surely lamented European Restaurant in Boston's North End. Extra-large was the size of a coffee table, so we figured one would hold us for a couple of snowbound days. The super-deluxe had everything on it, but I don't do anchovies, so we asked for no anchovies on half. Well, they made us two extra-larges - one with anchovies, one without - but when they realized their mistake, they only charged us for one. Those pizzas lasted to infinity and beyond and even I, an ardent lover of cold pizza, finally got sick of looking at it while the blizzard raged around us.

Both the Bel Canto and European mixups were pre-Internet. So were both phone orders, which is actually my preferred way even post-Internet. I like having the person take the order repeat it back to me, even though there were inevitably occasional human errors.

But now it seems that some pizza shops are starting to deploy AI. 

Crush Pizza [small local chain] is one of many small restaurants across New England and the country taking orders and fielding other calls using AI, a move helping cut costs and staff amid slim post-pandemic profit margins, inflated food and labor costs, and ongoing labor shortages. These technologies have been met with resistance from some customers who said they can’t get the service they are used to. 

Tony Naser, who rolled out AI answering systems at both of his Massachusetts-based Crush Pizza locations and another chain, Mickey’s N.Y. Pizza in New Hampshire, said many customers were “surprised,” and some “standoffish,” after the change. (Source: Boston Globe)

Most clients, Naser says, have come around, but I'm guessing that plenty are still not happy. They're probably just gritting their teeth and unhappily accepting one more human touch has given way to technology.

The technology Naser is deploying is from Loman.AI, an Austin TX startup with a website that boasts "Meet your new best employee, an AI phone agent for restaurants." Well, that doesn't exactly give me much by way of the feels. Who needs human employees, anyway?

And what's with the name Loman.AI. Loman is not the name of either of the co-founders, so where did it come from? How many people are there out there who don't hear the name "Loman" and think Willy Loman, the sad and suicidal lead character in Death of a Salesman. Or is Death of a Salesman no longer read? Anyway, a peculiar (and peculiarly depressing IYKYK) name for a company, me thinks.

Loman - AI, not Willy - says that their AI ordering system has an accuracy rate of 98.6 percent, which they compared to a 94 percent accuracy score found among data-taking receptionists in an entirely different industry. (Trust me when I say that marketers have a tendency to glom on to such favorable comparisons, whether they make sense or not.)

Outlets that have adopted AI ordering say that most people order online, anyway. So taking humans off the phone is no big deal.  And for them, AI ordering handles the phone orders better. No phone ringing off the hook; no geting put on endless hold; no disconnects. Unfortunately, the folks who still order via phone rather than online tend to want to use the phone to connect with another human. 

Tony Naser has become a big proponent of AI phone ordering. After all, larger chains/franchises like Chipotle and Domino's have been using such services for years. Why can't the mom-and-pop chains like his enjoy the same benefits? 

Naser said he feels local stores are being held to a different standard even as more large chains phase out human receptionists.

“You can’t call a lot of these big fast food chains. So why do customers get upset when a smaller mom-and-pop shop wants to try to get a little technological advancement or be a little bit more efficient?” Naser said.

Naser's got a point. 

But so do the folks who just want to have some human interaction. And so do the folks who want other folks to have jobs, even it's a crummy pizza parlor job for a high school kid answering phones and screwing up an occasional order. And there's no doubt that those jobs are going away. Loman says that two-thirds of their clients are able to cut staff by roughly one "human" shift per day. So, death of a pizza parlor phone order taker.

Where it all ends up, I don't know. 

My immediate worry is where I'm going to get pizza the next time I'm hankering for a sausage, ricotta, and roasted red pepper from Upper Crust? Sure hope another pizza joint goes into the space they just vacated.

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Image Source: Loman.ai