Restaurant email × Heep: every request answered in under 1 minute, 24/7 (and 4 extra bookings per day)

A booking email does not ring. That is the whole difference with the phone: nobody is forced to deal with it now, so nobody deals with it. The message sits in the inbox, between an invoice and a speculative CV, and it ages.

When we connected the email channel, the question was not "how do we reply faster". It was: how do you recognise that an email is worth a booking? Heep reads every inbound message, pulls out seven things (request type, date, covers, language, allergens, intent, urgency), then picks a path. A table for two and a group of eighteen do not follow the same one.

That path takes under a minute on average, against roughly 8 hours across restaurants. A group request that lands at 10:47 p.m. gets handled overnight, not at 10:12 the next morning, once the table has already gone elsewhere.

Why email is the most profitable channel you're letting die

Email accounts for 30 to 40 % of all off-service requests to your restaurant. Tables, groups, press, allergens, partnerships: everything flows through your professional inbox. Nobody talks about it because everyone is focused on SMS, WhatsApp and Instagram DMs.

Meanwhile, 89 % of guests expect a reply in under an hour (Toister Performance Solutions), and the sector's average open rate still sits at 43.6 % in 2025 (MailerLite Email Benchmarks 2025): the message gets read, it is the reply that is missing. Add that 47 % of restaurants still have no online booking (Tool-advisor.fr, 2026), and you get the channel that concentrates your most expensive requests without a single person named as its owner. That is the defining symptom of unanswered inbox requests: 35 % of restaurants miss booking enquiries every single week. See also: how unanswered reviews compound the same problem.

The arithmetic is quick. For a 60-cover restaurant with a £45 average spend, 4 unprocessed email requests a day equal roughly £180/day in evaporated revenue, so ~£5,400/month and nearly £60,000 in revenue over eleven trading months.

Find out how many emails you're losing

Anatomy of a lost request: 24 hours, and the booking is gone

Five scenarios play out every week in the same inbox. For each one, the moment it breaks down, and what it costs.

• Table for 2. Read 14 hours later: the guest has booked elsewhere, £90 gone. Picked up on arrival, it is confirmed in 38 seconds, slot locked in.
• Group of 18. Reply at D+3 with no quote: private hire cancelled, £1,150. Qualified on arrival, the quote goes out in 4 minutes and the team escalation happens the same day.
• Press or influencer. Received at 11 p.m., seen at 11 a.m.: the newsletter goes live without you. Handled straight away, the reply lands at 11:08 p.m. with a meeting proposed.
• Allergens and dietary requests. Gluten request ignored for 48 h: booking cancelled, £135. Handled, it gets a considered reply and an alternative menu inside a minute.
• Email in another language. Translated by hand when there's a quiet moment, i.e. never: £180. Handled, it goes back out in the language it arrived in.

On a 60-cover bistro in Paris, fourteen days with Heep give the order of magnitude: 120 inbound emails a week, 35 % of requests unanswered beyond 24 h before, 100 % handled in under 10 minutes after. Email-to-booking conversion gains 19 points, which works out at 4 paying bookings recovered per day and around £5,600 of additional net monthly revenue.

Observed on one venue in the Heep base, over two weeks. Read it as an order of magnitude, not a market average.

How Heep takes control of your inbox (no full access, no dependency)

Heep does not connect as an admin to your Google Workspace. No shared password, no admin access token. The connection works through an alias or a forwarding rule: you stay in control, and you can disconnect in 30 seconds.

1. Alias or forwarding, 90 seconds

   You create an alias such as contact@yourrestaurant.heep.email or activate a forwarding rule from Gmail, OVH or Outlook. No access to the original inbox.

2. Reading and qualification, 8 seconds

   Heep extracts request type, date, covers, language, allergens, intent and urgency. Those seven things decide the path, rather than whoever happens to open the inbox.

3. Multilingual reply, 40 seconds

   Reply drafted in the guest's language, in your restaurant's tone, with a real slot drawn from your floor plan. The guest receives a confirmation, not an acknowledgement.

4. Human escalation, 6 defined triggers

   Group over 12, press, dispute, unusual allergen, foreign press, legal request: Heep sends a holding reply and hands the conversation to your team in under a minute.

Those six cases are the trade-off for everything else: outside that list, Heep answers on its own. If you want it to hand over sooner, it is the list that grows, not the product that changes.

What changes: groups captured, press replied to at 3 a.m., +4 bookings per day

On the same bistro, the hourly response curve moves. The night stops being a black hole: it becomes the window during which your competitors are still asleep.

• Every request handled within minutes, where a share of them used to go unanswered.
• 14 group requests captured over 14 days, 9 confirmed, versus 4 in the previous period.
• 3 press contacts replied to between midnight and 6 a.m., two of which led to publications.
• Heep email cost: recovered in under 36 hours of trading.

Email is only one channel among several: the same always-on logic applies to your Google reviews, and Heep runs both from the same thread.

What is left for you to decide fits in three lines: which requests Heep handles alone, which ones it drafts for you to approve, and the threshold at which it hands over. The rest is the rule running, nights included.