A bot or an online widget: what to choose for a venue

If your guests are used to writing in a messenger, choose a bot: it answers where the guest already is and can hold a conversation, not just accept form fields. If guests come from the website and know exactly what they want, a widget works well, that is, a booking form on the page. These are two different approaches, and the choice depends on where people come to you from and what they ask before booking.

To be honest about ourselves up front: GuestKeepr has no widget for the website, only bots in Telegram and WhatsApp. So below we compare the approaches on their merits rather than selling one of them.

How guests actually book

Look at the last ten bookings at your venue and answer a simple question: where did the guest start the conversation? The picture is usually like this:

• they wrote in a messenger because the number or contact was already in their phone;
• they called or wrote after walking past and seeing the sign;
• they went to the website or the map, looked at the menu and decided to book;
• they came on a friend's recommendation and asked in private messages.

A guest in a messenger often asks questions along with the booking: “Do you have a table by the window?”, “Can we bring a dog?”, “What's the dress code?”. A guest on the website more often arrives with a decision made: date, time, number of people. That's the main difference: a conversation versus a form.

Pros and cons of a messenger bot

The bot lives in the chat where the guest talks to people anyway. They don't need to install anything or open a website.

Pros:

• A familiar channel. The guest writes the same way they'd write to the manager.
• Natural language. It can answer a question about the menu, the dress code or the time and go straight on to the booking.
• Working outside the shift. A message at 23:40 isn't lost; it's answered at once.
• The conversation history. The whole exchange is kept, and the staff see what was agreed.

Cons:

• The channel has to be connected. Each messenger is connected separately and has its own rules. For example, in WhatsApp the window for replying to a guest is limited to 24 hours.
• The bot can misunderstand. Guests write imprecisely, joke, change their minds as they go. A good bot asks again and in difficult cases calls a person.
• The first answer sets the tone. If the bot answers off the mark, the guest leaves. So it's important to fill in the information about the venue in advance.

Pros and cons of a widget

A widget is built into the website: the guest picks a date, time and number of people and sends a request. Everything is structured; there's no conversation.

Pros:

• Predictability. A form doesn't understand anything extra, so it doesn't misinterpret anything either.
• Convenient for those already on the website. The menu's been read, there are no questions, all that's left is to pick a time.
• Easy to explain. The guest sees which fields to fill in.

Cons:

• You need a website and traffic to it. If guests rarely visit the website, the widget will sit idle.
• There's no room for questions. A guest with a doubt closes the form or writes in a messenger anyway.
• A request isn't an agreement. If after the form you still have to call back and clarify, the time saved is small.
• Night questions go unanswered if there's no chat next to the form.

What to choose for a club, a restaurant or a salon

Compare on three counts: where guests come from, how many questions they ask, and who answers now.

A club. Guests often ask about the VIP room, the dress code, age and terms. These are conversational questions, so a bot suits better than a form.

A restaurant. If you work mainly with regulars and phone calls, a bot is enough. If you have a lively website with the menu and a good flow from it, a widget adds convenience.

A beauty salon. The client wants to choose a specialist and a time. That can also be done in a chat: the bot shows free specialists and times, and the appointment is saved in the dashboard.

There's also a simple test. Ask yourself: “If the guest has a question, where will they ask it?” If the answer is “in a messenger”, a form on the website won't cover that question.

Can you combine them?

You can, and often should, because every guest has their own habits. But one rule is important: all requests must land in one place. If the widget writes to one spreadsheet, messengers are kept on personal phones and calls are written in a notebook, you'll get double bookings and lost arrangements.

So when combining, check:

1. Is there a single booking book where all the sources can be seen?
2. Is a table protected against a double booking if two requests arrive at the same time?
3. Do the staff see the guest's conversation when the guest arrives on a request?

There's one more way: connect a bot and put a link to it on the website, the maps and social media instead of a form. The guest taps and lands in the messenger. Not a form, but also one step.

How it's done in GuestKeepr

The GuestKeepr virtual front desk works in Telegram and WhatsApp. The guest writes in Russian, English, Romanian or Armenian, and the bot answers in their language. It checks free places, shows tables or specialists, and creates, moves and cancels the guest's own bookings. The bot always asks for the name, the phone number, and the place and time. If a question goes beyond its limits, the bot calls a person: the staff get a notification and can answer from the dashboard.

All bookings, however they arrived, sit in one dashboard, and a double booking of one table for overlapping times is impossible. We wrote more about how the channels differ in the article about bookings via WhatsApp and Telegram.

The limits are worth naming too: there's no website widget, the bot doesn't take payments or prepayments (it only states the deposit terms as text), and it doesn't handle calls. If your venue really needs a form on the website, GuestKeepr won't solve that task.

We described the general order of choosing in the checklist for choosing a booking system.

What to check before deciding

Before choosing, run a small experiment on your own data, without other people's figures:

1. Open your conversations and website analytics, if you have them, and estimate where the latest bookings came from.
2. Ask your managers which questions they hear most often: about bookings, or about everything else.
3. Recall how many requests over the last month came outside the shift and how they ended.
4. Answer honestly: who will go through the requests in the morning, and where will they be kept?

The answers to these four questions usually choose the tool for you.

Frequently asked questions