Background
Fitzgerald, Abstinence, Vesper, Hollywood Savoy, La Fontaine Gaillon. Five party dining addresses in Paris, open from lunch until 2am. A crowd of regulars, tourists and private parties, writing in their own language and at any hour.
Before Heep, requests came in on five phone numbers, five Instagram accounts and three email inboxes. Each restaurant coped with its own.
- Fitzgerald, Paris 7th
- Abstinence, Paris 15th
- Vesper, Paris 7th
- Hollywood Savoy, Paris 2nd
- La Fontaine Gaillon, Paris 2nd
The problem
A party restaurant lives at night. The phone rings during the rush and after midnight, when nobody can pick up. Instagram messages pile up between services. Group and private-hire enquiries get lost in the inbox, somewhere between the invoices and the job applications.
Saturday, 11pm. Three missed calls, two Instagram messages, one email about a private party. Nobody sees them before Monday. Multiply that by five addresses.
At head office, one question with no answer: how many guests went elsewhere without anyone knowing?
And one firm constraint: every house has its own identity. One address's Sunday brunch has nothing in common with another's club night. A single assistant answering the same way everywhere was not acceptable.
Setting it up
One profile per address. Each restaurant has its own configuration: tone of voice, menu, opening hours, house rules, instructions of the moment. Heep answers in the name of the restaurant the guest contacted, not in the name of the group.
One account for the group. Head office sees the five addresses in a single inbox. Each team only sees its own restaurant and sets its own alerts.
Bookings are written into SevenRooms. The group keeps its software. Heep checks availability, writes the booking into the diary of the address concerned and confirms it to the guest in writing.
The phone is no longer a black hole. Heep does not answer the phone: when a call is missed, the guest gets a WhatsApp message within seconds (SMS as a fallback), in their own language, and the conversation carries on in writing.
Instagram, WhatsApp and email in the same inbox. Instagram messages get an answer. Partnership and influencer requests are set aside and pointed to the group's press contact. Emails are sorted.
Private hire stays in the hands of head office. Heep asks the right questions (date, number of guests, type of event), sets the request out properly and passes it to the sales team. It never confirms a private hire on its own.
A few house rules encoded address by address:
- Groups of more than 10: qualify the request, then hand over to the team.
- One address is members-only after midnight: Heep explains this and suggests an alternative.
- Sunday brunch is open to children at another house: the information is given without anyone having to repeat it.
- No free invitations for influencers: the request is redirected every time.
Go-live address by address: three restaurants first, then the other two once the teams were comfortable. Each profile is adjusted in plain language from the app, with no technical work on the restaurant's side.
Results
- 4,200 requests a month handled in a single inbox: missed calls, Instagram messages, WhatsApp and emails from the five addresses.
- Five restaurants, one assistant, each with its own tone of voice and its own house rules.
- Every booking written into SevenRooms, in the diary of the right address, with a written confirmation to the guest in their own language.
- A group-wide view for management: volume and requests per address, without consolidating five spreadsheets.
The only figure published with the group's agreement is the monthly volume of requests. The other indicators on the account stay between Fitz Group and us.
What another group can take from this
- One tool, one profile per address. A short profile per restaurant (tone of voice, menu, opening hours, house rules) makes all the difference in the answers.
- Head office steers, the teams keep control. Roles let management see everything without the floor manager at one address seeing another's conversations.
- The night counts as much as the service. In a party group, a large share of requests arrives after the offices close. Not answering them means ignoring part of your clientele.