Luna Rosa Gelato Cafe launches Alexa app
March 30, 2017
It sounds like a great problem for a restaurant to have — daily calls asking about the gelato flavors of the day. But with up to 24 flavors and dozens of calls every day (dozens and dozens of calls in the warm-weather months), Luna Rosa Gelato Cafe needed another way to communicate with its customers.
The cafe in downtown Greenville had been an early adopter of restaurant tech, mostly because it was forced to be clever and scrappy. It opened in 2007 and enjoyed a nice honeymoon before the restaurant-killing recession set in. Luna Rosa experimented with several mobile loyalty rewards solutions, but they were designed to solve a different problem — getting people to visit frequently. What co-owner Jose Ortiz soon realized was that once his customers got hooked on a particular flavor, they wanted to know when that flavor was freshly made and in the case. And he needed a way to get the word out that didn’t involve his staff answering the phone all day.
Texting seemed like a natural communication channel, but getting customers to hand over digits involves some friction. (What are they going to send me? How often are they going to be texting me?) What Luna Rosa needed was a less intrusive, customer-driven solution, one that Amazon created when it opened its Alexa voice skills platform to developers.
“We knew that the perfect solution for Luna Rosa was a voice assistant that could keep their customers informed on demand,” said Elizabeth Barr, CEO of Bev, a Greenville firm that creates AI tools for the food and beverage industry. “Luna Rosa fans wanted to be able to know when their favorite flavor was available, fast.”
Luna Rosa arrived in the Alexa skills store last week. In a second bit of great timing, Amazon put its Alexa voice assistant right into its iPhone app, so now you can shop and track packages, get weather and news updates, and even find out if your favorite gelato flavor is available — all by talking to Alexa on your phone; no Amazon-purchased hardware necessary. So now you can ask Alexa whatever you need, on the go, without having to be home in range of your Echo device.
(For those with Android phones, Alexa will be coming for you soon, but in the meantime you’ll still need to use an Echo or Echo Dot to #JustAsk.)
“A voice-activated app is ideal for a restaurant with frequently changing menu items, like specials or beers on tap, or even for food trucks to update their daily locations,” Barr said.
The Alexa skill also gives listeners the store’s hours of operation. Luna Rosa might add lunch specials to its daily Alexa update, but the gelato update solves is its biggest need.
A companion Alexa skill allows the truly gelato-addicted to customize their flash briefing, so they get the Luna Rosa gelato flavors right along with their TechCrunch news or NPR updates.
