restaurant hospitality
How Mandla, a restaurant owner in Cape Town, turned his WhatsApp number into a booking engine
MJ handles after-hours reservation requests and FAQs while the kitchen is running, freeing the owner from constant phone-watching.
Mandla runs a 60-seat restaurant in Cape Town. The reservation problem isn't the tables — it's the constant WhatsApp pings during service, when nobody can answer them. By the time the front-of-house team checks the phone, three reservation requests are old, and the customer has booked elsewhere.
ClientPulse + MJ became the after-hours and during-service answer. MJ replies to incoming WhatsApp messages directly using an uploaded knowledge base — the menu, the corkage policy, hours, dietary accommodations, the WhatsApp number for group bookings. For routine reservation enquiries, she captures party size, date, time, and dietary notes and confirms the booking; for anything off-script (a complaint, a special-occasion request, a press enquiry), she cuts the conversation and creates a task for the manager to handle after service.
Birthday messages are the second win. Every regular customer's birthday gets an automatic WhatsApp wishing them well, in their language, branded with the restaurant's voice. The bookings on those birthday weeks have lifted noticeably — the message reminds people the restaurant exists, and they bring family.
“My phone used to ring at 22:30 with reservation requests for the next day. Now MJ handles them and I read the recap in the morning.”
Mandla — Restaurant Owner, Cape Town