A virtual front desk for a club

A virtual front desk for a club takes requests for tables and VIP rooms in messengers while the live staff are busy with the floor or asleep: it checks what's free, books the guest and tells them the rules of the evening. Decisions on disputed cases stay with people: the bot hands the conversation over to them and lets them know help is needed. Below we look at how a club differs from a restaurant when it comes to bookings, what can be handed to the bot and how to keep it under control.

Club tasks the bot handles

A club booking differs from a restaurant one in a few ways, and these are exactly what put pressure on the manager.

Requests come at the most inconvenient time. A guest decides where to go on Friday late on Thursday evening, or right in the middle of your shift. At that moment the manager is busy at the door or on the floor, and messages pile up.

Questions repeat. “What's on tonight?”, “Is there a dress code?”, “How many people can the VIP take?”, “What's the minimum age?” These are standard questions the owner knows the answers to and can write down once.

A table is expensive. A mistake with a VIP room booking costs noticeably more than one with an ordinary table. So order in the records matters more than speed here.

Guests are used to messaging. For many, writing “book us a table for Friday” is the simplest and most familiar way. If the answer comes half a day later, the guest has already made plans with another venue. How to organise taking requests outside the shift is covered in detail in the article about after-hours booking requests.

The virtual front desk doesn't solve all of this for you, but it takes on the routine: the first reply, checking availability and making the booking.

Tables and VIP rooms as resources

In GuestKeepr, anything that can be booked is called a resource. For a club these are tables and VIP rooms; for a beauty salon, specialists. The terminology in the dashboard adjusts: “booking” and “table” for clubs and restaurants, “appointment” and “specialist” for salons.

What this gives in practice:

• Each table and room is set up separately. Each has its own name and its own occupancy.
• Zones. Tables can be split into zones: the main room, the terrace, VIP. A guest can say where they want to sit.
• Overlaps are impossible. The same table can't be booked twice for overlapping times. The check happens at the database level, not “by eye”.
• A live picture of the evening. The Tables section of the dashboard shows guests' seating, walk-ins, shifts and the next booking at each table.

For a club the last point is especially important: walk-ins keep arriving through the night, and the host needs to see quickly what's free right now and when the next booking will arrive. More about working the floor: seating guests and the live floor.

What a VIP table booking looks like

An illustrative example. A guest writes in Telegram:

We'd like a VIP for Saturday, there are eight of us, it's a birthday.

What the bot does:

1. Clarifies the arrival time and checks it against real availability.
2. Shows suitable tables or rooms.
3. Asks for a name and phone number. In Telegram it asks the guest to confirm the number with the “share phone number” button.
4. Creates the booking and only then tells the guest it's been made.
5. The manager sees the booking in the dashboard, and the guest's wishes are on the booking card.

If the guest sends a voice message (“book us for Saturday, there are six of us”), the bot turns it into text and carries on the same way. For this, speech recognition has to be connected on the platform side.

If something non-standard is needed, such as a special order or approval from the general manager, the bot calls a manager, and the staff get a notification in Telegram.

Menu, rules and ready answers

A club answers more than the question “any places left?”. Guests ask about what's on offer, promotions and terms. The bot answers these only with what the owner has put into the system:

• The menu. It can be uploaded as a PDF, photos, an Excel or Word file, or as text.
• The venue profile. The description, promotions, deposit or minimum spend terms, cancellation terms, ready answers.
• Dress code and age restrictions. The owner writes them in the profile, and the bot passes them on to the guest.

Here we have to be honest. The bot states the terms, but it checks and charges nothing. It doesn't take payment and doesn't calculate the deposit. If you require a minimum spend for VIP, the bot will only tell the guest about it as text. It also doesn't check age or enforce the dress code: security at the door does that. If the profile has no answer, the bot doesn't make one up but calls a person.

How to prepare these materials so that the answers are accurate is described in the article about a menu for the bot.

Staff control and access

A club usually works with a lot of people: managers, hosts, general managers, sometimes contractors. Not everyone needs access to everything.

The dashboard has:

• Roles and permissions. Permissions are set by role: the host does their part, the general manager sees more, the owner sees everything.
• Invitations by email and Google sign-in. A new member of staff gets access without anyone passing around shared passwords.
• PIN sign-in on shared tablets. A tablet at the door or the bar doesn't need a long login every shift.
• The log. Who did what: created, moved, cancelled.
• Conversations. All the bot's dialogues with guests, with search and filters. You can check exactly what the bot replied.

If a member of staff answers a guest themselves, they take over the chat from the dashboard. While a person leads the conversation, the bot stays quiet, and if the member of staff hasn't written for 12 hours, the bot comes back. How to divide permissions without complicating the shift is covered in the article about staff roles in the dashboard.

Also: the venue's data is isolated from other venues' data, and the owner can completely erase a guest's data. A venue may also forbid the use of its conversations (in anonymised form) to improve the service.

Night mode: how not to lose a request

For a club, the most valuable time for requests falls on the hours when the floor is loud. Agree on a simple rule within the team: who checks the Conversations section and the notification queue, and at what point in the shift. The bot will take and record a standard booking by itself, but non-standard requests will wait for a person. If there's no one to deal with them in the morning, the guest will get an answer too late, and the bot can't help with that.

What the bot doesn't do

It's worth keeping the list of limits for a club in front of you.

• It doesn't take prepayments or online payments.
• It doesn't replace the “face of the club” at the door: face control and the decision to let someone in stay with people.
• It doesn't answer for what isn't in the venue profile and menu: where there's no answer, it calls a person.
• It doesn't take on non-standard arrangements. That's what conversation handover is for.

If table prepayment specifically matters to you, you'll still have to handle it outside GuestKeepr: the bot will only state the terms you've written down.

How to start

If you're a club owner or general manager, a sensible order is as follows. On the whole it's no different from launching in a restaurant, and the standard scenario is described in the article about a booking bot for a restaurant.

1. Connect Telegram and WhatsApp in the Channels section.
2. Set up tables and VIP rooms, and split them into zones.
3. Fill in the venue profile: description, dress code, age restrictions, deposit and cancellation terms, promotions.
4. Upload the menu.
5. Invite staff and hand out roles.
6. For the first week, read the conversations in the dashboard and add to the profile wherever the bot called a person.

More about the product: the GuestKeepr virtual front desk.

Frequently asked questions