How AI Voice is Increasing Restaurant Revenue by 23%

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: A lot of restaurants kill their growth by ignoring one of their most critical inbound engagement points, and that's phone calls. ⁓ Weins, the CEO of Loman and I, talk about how ⁓ voice AI is truly changing the restaurant game, ⁓ busy, broken phone systems into profitable systems that you can drive ⁓ over % of callers that don't ⁓ even that they're talking to a machine. And it's increased.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us as I like to each and every time. I know you guys got lots of choices out on the Internet to go listen to people and so thank you for hanging with us. Today, I am joined by a co-founder of a product and I keep seeing more and more of these and so I'm excited to dig in with Christian.

But Christian, why don't you give our audience a little bit. Who is Christian? Where did Christian come from? I know you and I got a chance to talk before we hit the record button, but I'd love to have our audience here.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: in some of their restaurants that they work with, over 25 % sales increase using the phone and having that digitized. Christian shares the story of working in the front of the house as a kid in a busy restaurant in California and his path to creating software that handles unlimited calls simultaneously, ⁓ and truly driving great customer engagement. ⁓ there's a lot of people out there that are like, yeah, that's never gonna work.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Who is he and then kind of how did you get into restaurant tech in general? Christian Wiens: Sure. Yeah, my name is Christian Wiens. I'm the CEO and founder of Loman AI.

We build what I think is the best voice AI for restaurants on the market. We an AI that answers restaurants, phones, takes orders, takes reservations, integrates with point of sale systems, answers questions, right? And we do it with the highest accuracy, lowest latency, and the most ⁓ humanism of of the solutions out there by far. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...

: I would encourage you to listen to this episode because you'll learn quite a bit why the system that you have for your phones are costing you thousands in lost revenue, how really AI continues to increase and you're getting over 99 % accuracy, which quite frankly is oftentimes better than the human you have answering the phone and how hyper personalization is truly creating a loyal guest experience on the phone. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. Christian Wiens: We've tested it against every single competitor that we can find.

Our accuracy is higher. I mean, this is why customers stay with us and we can get into this. But yeah, that's what we do. We're Loman.

We're based out of Austin, Texas. We've been around for about two years. I know you're probably seeing a lot of these new companies pop up. There were like three or four companies that came before us, like years before us, like three or four years.

So they were very early. We nailed, I feel like we got lucky, honestly, with timing. We nailed timing. We were there.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant ...: I am the Chief Revenue Officer of CBS Northstar. We wrote the Northstar Point of Sale Solution for multi-units. Please check us out at cbsnorthstar.

com. And now on to the episode. Christian Wiens: two years ago, April, 2024, like perfect time. Like nobody else was really doing like making any buzz.

And it seems like over the last six months, there's been like all these random, you know, and good for them. They, realized it's a good solution. and, ⁓ and I've come up, ⁓ so that's who we are. that's where we are and happy, happy to be here today.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Awesome, I appreciate you sharing a little bit. Why don't you give our listeners a little bit of a background, because it's always fun to hear from founders that aren't just trying to solve a technology problem, because they see some cool tech out there. I know before I hit the record button, you're like, no, I like live this. I understand what this problem is, because of your upbringing and some of those kind of things.

so why don't you give our listeners a little bit of how did you even get into the restaurant business? Because I think even in our early conversations, like dude, this is hard. Christian Wiens: Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: You know it's hard dealing with restaurants. They you know they're they're fast paced manufacturing center and and it takes a you know understanding of it and I love that you kind of came up through that so why you share a little bit of that with our listeners. Christian Wiens: 100%.

Absolutely. Look, I didn't come to this from like, I'm like a, just a tech person that was trying to get into the restaurant industry, which look, nothing against those people. think that's fine. Like I worked in the restaurant industry for about a decade.

Starting from time I was like legally allowed to work. I worked in this fast casual. high volume barbecue restaurant in Pismo Beach, California called Mo's. I was working at the front of house, doing everything a front of house person does, know, filling the Pepsi machine, taking out food, expoing, getting ready for delivery drivers to come and pick them up.

And of course, answering the phone or not answering the phone, right? I think that's really the thing. It's like we... Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah.

Christian Wiens: If you know this area of California that I'm from, it's on the coast, It's Southern California, pretty much, kind of like Central Coast is what we call it around San Luis Obispo. The town that this place is in is actually called Pismo Beach, right? There's thousands and thousands and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that come through that area, this tourist area every single day, right? And this restaurant I worked in was on the front, on the main street in this place, right?

So we'd have... they're probably doing 10 million a year, five million a year revenue, something like crazy, right? Because there's just so much traffic. We would always have three people working in the front of the house, four or five sometimes on Fridays.

legitimately, at least 50 % of the time when I was working a night shift, like a dinner shift, we would rip the phone out of the wall. Remember those old landlines that you just unplug the little thing? We would take that out, right? And so...

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Mm-hmm. Christian Wiens: That's because we could, it wasn't because the kitchen couldn't handle more capacity. It was because the front of house just like had way too much going on that we were leaving our customers on essentially on red, right? Like imagine calling a restaurant and this happens all the time, right?

I can go into all the stats here, but calling a restaurant, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, they don't answer. Let's say you call back. Only 40 % of people actually do call back actually. So you're losing 60 % of the business the first time you don't answer that phone.

But let's say they do call back and then they call again, right? Now I'm pissed off. Now I'm not going to come back, right? That's exactly what was happening there.

because ⁓ happening at every restaurant across the United States that has a phone and has volume. The old solutions, right? The, the VOIPs, the, you know, press one, press two, those solutions are literally in their stated mission is to deflect phone calls to I don't want phone calls, right? And that was all that was available three, four years ago, right?

You really wanted to get people away. The salespeople at those companies like Reachify or like whatever, like RingCentral, their whole thing was telling you, don't answer the phone, deflect your calls. Okay, well, that's like telling you piss off 40 % of your business, right? Because phones are still between 20 and 40 % of restaurant business across the United States, depends on the type of restaurant.

It's even higher for pizza restaurants. Some pizza restaurants, it's 60 % of their business. So you don't wanna answer the phone, okay, you're just literally pissing off 40 % of your customers, 30 % of your customers, and you're losing, the more important thing is you're losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. We've seen it with Loman, and that's why we came up with this solution.

It's in my blood. I've been working in restaurants since I was young. My aunt uncle own a restaurant on both sides of my family, right? It's not something I just came to.

And also my co-founder, Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah. Christian Wiens: our CTO, was previously working building ⁓ another company AI computer vision company for bars and restaurants. So we came to this back in April of 2024. We said, look, we have the right skill set, the right background, we know the problem and we dove headfirst in.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah, no, and I think your story about kind of we're in the hospitality business, but for whatever reason, the phone is most the most inhospitable means because to your point when you're working the front of the house, it's a huge challenge. You oftentimes have a guest in front of you. You've got the phone ringing. You're dealing with the kitchen trying to get you to pick up something from the expo window or from the takeout window.

And so across the board, I guess, you know, it's just it's a challenge. I was actually having food recently and I was like, dude, I don't know how. Christian Wiens: That's right. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: because I grew up working in restaurants.

like, I don't even know how I would deal with it. Because when I was working in restaurants, I'm much older than you are and much older than probably a lot of our listeners. It was like there was one channel. People walked in the door.

They might call, you know, they might call, but now you've got third party, you've got first party ordering, you've got phone, you've got text messaging delivery, you know, ordering platforms. So why don't you define what voice ordering AI is? There's a lot of misnomers about really just, guess, ⁓ is AI? You know, we didn't make it 30 seconds into the show without.

Christian Wiens: Yep, that's right. Yeah, for sure. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: talking about AI, think every single episode in 2026 thus far has had AI somewhere in it, but I'd love for you to define what even does that mean? Because there's a lot of people out there when I talk with them, they're like, dude, there's no way.

Because they think of an IVR, they think of calling American Express, or they think about calling American Airlines and they're just pissed, and they have to keep pushing buttons. And I know it's nowhere close to that. I got a chance to watch your guys' demo online. And I was like, dude, this is really good.

So I'd love for you to educate our listeners to what really it is that Christian Wiens: Yes! Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: You know, you define the problem, but now how is AI and really your guys' solution solving so of this? Christian Wiens: Yeah, I think this takes us back to April of 2024, early 2024 when we started this company, right? Like there are two or three companies that came before us.

There's like Soundhound. I'm not going to, I'm sorry. I'm not going to name them. I don't think that's fair.

Like there's some companies that came a couple of years, a few years before us. The reason we started the company in April of 2024, or, you know, we started thinking about it a little bit before that. was because the tech had finally got there. If you wanted to build a solution in 2022, 2023 even, definitely 2019, 2020, 2021, you were building something that was going to piss your customers off way more than if you just deflected them and said, we don't take calls.

Sorry, right? Like a customer is going to get. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you'd be better off just not taking the calls because that AI assistant was awful.

Christian Wiens: Right. Everybody knows the example of calling CVS or calling your bank, right? Where they still use these outdated tools that are, Hey, ⁓ like you have to literally go through a phone tree takes 10 minutes. And sometimes, right.

got so pissed off the other day. I was trying to call my pharmacy to like, get some dealt with with a prescription. I got through the whole phone tree. took me, was like, I looked at my phone.

was like seven minutes and something like 30 seconds. At the very end, they were like, yeah, actually we can't take a call. just have to leave a voicemail. And I was like, ⁓ my goodness, man.

And so anyways, back to my story. Like at that time, the LLMs got good enough finally to where we could legitimately get on a call with, you know, create a call with one of these LLMs. And it sounded 90 % like a human, like almost, you know, now we're at. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah, and they hang up on you.

Christian Wiens: pretty much LLMs are, and these voice AI tools are better than a human at taking phone calls. And there's a couple of reasons why, and I can go through that. has to do with like, they can, yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah, I'd love to understand why, because I was actually even talking to our own CTO recently about that because it feels like this world has exploded the last couple of years. Because to your point, I've heard of the Soundhounds of the world that have been around for quite some time and they had a different model, but it feels like the ability to get up to speed and create something that is going to make a huge difference. I don't know if it's the barrier to entry, if it's that the tools have gotten better, but I'd love for you to share a little bit more about that.

Christian Wiens: Yeah. Well, here's, yeah, I think here's the beautiful thing or like the beautiful, also like brutal thing about this, where we are currently in 2026. Okay. It is really easy for a new company to come on the scene and make a demo just as easy as it was for us to do it back in 2024.

I mean, actually it was a little bit harder for us, but like at the end of the day, right. Making a demo. It's not hard. Like if you give me your restaurant, you say there, here's my menu.

Here's a few pieces of information. I can make you a flashy demo that sounds like it's working, like almost at 100%. I can just basically tell the AI, say, hey, just make sure that you always agree with the customer, allow anything they say. I can make it sound really good.

The dirty little secret about this industry is that is only 5 % of the problem. So there's all these companies coming out that are like, ⁓ we have the voice AI, and it sounds amazing. listen to it, you're like, ⁓ it sounds good. It sounds almost as good as Loman or like whatever, right?

Here's the problem. The problem comes when you don't have the, taken the tens of millions of calls that Loman's taken. You don't know how a menu needs to be structured for a specific type of restaurant, for a pizza restaurant, for a chicken restaurant, for a sit down, ⁓ fine dining restaurant, for a sandwich restaurant. You don't know how an order needs to be taken.

You don't know what the typical ⁓ issues people run into on calls are. You don't know how the AI needs to be structured, what instructions need to be given to the AI. You don't know how the tool calling, and now I'm getting into some technical terms, like you don't know how that needs to be structured. You don't know the prompts to make it work.

So now when you try to get into production, it fails 25 % of the time. And 25 % failure is abject failure in this industry by far. Lomit is 99.3 % accurate.

People claim higher accuracy, but I don't believe them and I've tried all the other ones and look that. Where we separate ourselves is accuracy, latency, and humanism. At the end of the day, we do some research on this. It's really hard to get the inaccurate number because it's really hard to get an accurate number.

But we think around 63 % of the people that talk to Loman don't know they're speaking to an AI. It's that good. And let's talk about ⁓ it gets better. It's better than a human at answering the phone.

Well, here's why it's better. It can answer up to 100. ⁓ Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah. Christian Wiens: technically, like unlimited calls at the same time.

had one go to 12 simultaneous calls before. That was the most ever for one restaurant. ⁓ ⁓ crazy. You can answer as many calls as you want at the same time.

The AI will remember every single thing you tell it. It knows the menu front and back, does not ⁓ know anything that a customer is going to ask. can train it to have basically any. It's imagine if you had an employee.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: That's amazing. Christian Wiens: that never slept, never complained, never had a bad day, never broke up with his boyfriend or girlfriend, so they came in and were pissed off. They never missed a call. They could answer.

They had a bazillion arms and years, so they could answer as many calls as you want. Their brain was on super mode, so they could remember the whole menu, remember every single thing you ever told them ever, remember every single customer's payment ⁓ method, take a credit card without asking for the numbers, right? So like Lomon is that, right? That is why AI is so helpful and technically better than a human.

And this is why Lomon, when adopt Lomon, they see a 23 % increase in their phone order revenue. So if you're doing 30%, 40%, 50 % of your revenue through the phones, if Lomon's gonna give you a 20 % bump, can easily, I mean, that revenue is just peer-found revenue. ⁓ I mean, it's not even close, right? The ROI, like we have this ROI calculator on our website.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah, that pays for the system. Christian Wiens: It almost looks fake, right? Because like, you're going to spend whatever it is, 400 bucks a month and you're to save or you're going to make an extra 200,000 a year. And it's like, ⁓ that can't be real.

You know, but we see this here's like what I I would, I want to caution your audience like on this, like, and, and, and, and also test us. But if you go with a provider, a voice CI provider, just because it's cheaper, right? You are going to get burned. Like.

I've seen it happen here over and over. What you need to do is you need to test it live with your true customers calling, have it take orders and see what the accuracy is into your POS. If it doesn't integrate with their POS, just stop the conversation right there. There's literally no reason to use an AI that doesn't integrate with your POS unless you're trying to deflect the calls.

That's different. If you're trying to do that and you want to just sound a little bit better, then sure, there's tools out there for that. But if you're a serious operator that's taking orders, taking reservations, you want every single call to be answered, you want the person on the other end of the line to have a friendly voice every single time they talk to your customers, you need an AI that you know is going to be accurate and it integrates with the tools that you're already using.

Those are kind of the things that I would tell your audience is like, we see this over and over again where a customer will go to like a cheap. option, a suit, like, oh, we're, you know, it's going to be $200 a month for a billion calls a month. And we're like, okay, well, we just can't compete with that. So sorry.

Um, they come back after two months and they're like, Hey, they never got me live. Uh, I never got any support. It doesn't work. We see this almost a hundred percent of the time when that happens.

Um, so we stick to our guns as the industry's leading voice AI. We're not the cheapest though. And I'm going to tell you, you and your audience that right now. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Mm-hmm.

Christian Wiens: If you want the cheapest version of something, like that's okay. I know there's a spot for that, but that's not Lomond, but we will give you the best results. I can guarantee you that. know this conversation has gone a totally, totally different direction, but.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: the the the the the the the the the don't know. Well, and I think it's really that advent of the large language models, again, for people that may not even know what that means. It's the Chetchi PTs and the clods and all of these things. They've trained on enough data to get there.

There's two things I guess I'd love for you to help us overcome, is first, is human in the loop, and second is latency. You mentioned latency in a sentence or two, but I know that's a big one for people is, Christian Wiens: Yep. Okay. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: A human has a bit of empathy and can, even in our conversation, I'm listening to your tone, I'm responding with tone.

And again, I think that those things are part of what everybody doesn't believe that the tool can solve for today. And then there's this whole idea of, I need something that the computer can't solve for. How do I get a real person on the phone so that I can explain to them? Christian Wiens: Yes.

Absolutely. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: that I'm doing something for something that might be sensitive information. I'm doing a surprise party and I need to talk to somebody about a surprise party or catering a memorial and I need to make sure that they understand ⁓ to be all cheery when they come and deliver the catering. Christian Wiens: Yeah.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: So I'd love for you talk through both of those real for me ⁓ or for our listeners. ⁓ Christian Wiens: Yep. Yeah. The, the first part is more technical, right?

It's how do you do something called like turn detection or like how, what type of models are you using? How does your prompting work? Right. Everything that goes into how you build an agent will make it more human light.

Right. So I can respond to you stay on your, at your tone, on your level. don't sound right. The whole point of this, you know, back in the day, right, when you talk to a computer, you know, it's just this like level like.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Monotone. Christian Wiens: monotone thing, right? Like our AI, because of the models, the way we've tweaked them, the way we fine tune them, the we prompt them, all of these, ⁓ special little sauce, right? At end of the day, we going to match tone, tone of voice.

We automatically inject ambient restaurant noise into the background of the calls, but it sounds more realistic. Latency is configured. We actually went... What's funny about this whole like latency problem is people ask about this, like it's too slow, it's too slow.

Well, the actual thing that we got to was it was too fast. Like we got where latency was so low that people naturally pause sometimes when they speak. Maybe I don't and I sound like I'm on too much coffee or something. But when people paused, like they would be, ⁓ okay, let me get, let me get a number one with French fries and, ⁓ and then they pause like a second.

And I would like jump in. Right. So. We had to fix that too, because it was too fast, right?

At responding and So there's a lot of things that you can do to make a voice agent sound more realistic, like cycle the voices, like make sure that, I mean, it's all this technology type stuff that I could go through. Sorry, second question. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: just suffice it to say, guess, Christian, is that you guys have solved for that latency. it does, it sounds more like a human.

Because again, even two years ago, when I first started testing some of the stuff, I would get these like, you get these awkward pauses and you'd be like, oh, I can tell I'm talking to a computer. And to certain guests, I think it's going to be fine because they just they don't really even want to talk to a human. at the end of the day, you're trying to create this hospitable environment. And and the thing I continue to remind our listeners about is is.

Christian Wiens: yeah. Yep. Yep. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: As the AI continues to get better, it continues to learn and it continues to just enhance itself almost as time goes on.

So today's order is gonna sound very different than a year from now's order because a year from now it's gonna have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of calls that it's learned on to get better. It is at least what I've heard from people. Christian Wiens: Yes. That's exactly, exactly right.

And it's not just that, it's something that Loman is doing that it's really important, right, is personalization. like, know, a certain, like, I can't give you the, I don't know the exact number, right, for our customers, but it's high, right? Over 10%, 5 % of calls these restaurants get are from repeat callers. It's higher than that even.

Repeat right? They're calling back, they've called the restaurant before, they want to order something again. Lohman wants to make every interaction with that restaurant, like the most personalized interaction as possible because that gives us the opportunity to upsell or suggestively sell something better. So every conversation we're having, it's training the main model, right?

So our main model gets better and better and better and better, right? It gets more context about how somebody orders a pizza in Boston and, you know, and ⁓ they order a sandwich or what they call this. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Mm-hmm. Christian Wiens: Right, but also we're memorizing personal information about what you are as a diner, right?

What type of food Jeremy likes when he calls Christian's pizza? What does he order? How often does he order? What is his payment method, right?

Like how much does he normally order when he's on? Like what ⁓ be a good potential? All of this information comes together to allow us to create a profile of you as a diner and we can then suggestively sell to you over the phone and Increase your revenue. So we're actually also increasing the average ticket size by 18 percent.

Over the phone. ⁓ it's humongous Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: That's huge. So not only answering 100 % of the calls of which oftentimes 40, 50, 60 % of them don't get answered, but then when you get them on the phone, you're driving, you top line check. Christian Wiens: Yes.

Yep, exactly. Top line revenue is going up. Average order value is going up. Sorry, top line revenue for phone orders in general, because we can't really affect your online yet.

We're doing some fun things. ⁓ And then I wanted to answer the human in the loop stuff. So we took a few different looks at how we should do this. ⁓ we were like, should we have a call center?

⁓ we take calls? ⁓ Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Mm-hmm. Okay. Christian Wiens: Ourself, I don't know, there's a lot of different things.

So what we ended up with after talking to dozens of our customers that we had was they want to take the calls when somebody asks to speak to a human, right? If somebody's like, hey, I'm late for work. Sending that to a call center does nothing. That's just another problem, right?

So if somebody calls with something that the AI quote can't handle, it's more like things that are programmed for the AI to send the call to the restaurant. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Okay. Christian Wiens: An employee is calling, a customer is calling for catering and they don't want the AI to take the catering orders. Although we do do that, but like some restaurants want to take them themselves, right?

They have a special event space. I don't know, something like that, right? That is when we will send the call directly to the restaurant's phone, right? And so that transfer rate stays really low.

⁓ Like still taking a huge majority of the calls. now it's like not even, you're gonna forget the phone rings. But if you have a call that needs to go through to the restaurant, like that's something that ⁓ you can take Yeah, I think ⁓ it's pretty cool man like customers some of the stories people tell us about like here's like one thing like Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Well, some of the testimonials you guys have on your website are incredible. I spent a little bit of time earlier today thinking, you know, watching a couple of the testimonial videos and or the text on there was like, guys have really solved some huge problems ⁓ unless those are AI bots that you guys went and bought somewhere in China to put up there.

⁓ teasing you. ⁓ Christian Wiens: Yeah. That, yeah, no, you can go eat at those restaurants, call those owner, I mean, don't call the owners, I don't want everybody calling the owner, like, definitely, like they're all, but most of those people are willing to talk, like most of those people are talking to other customers of ours because people call them, like that is another thing that I would highly suggest people do. If you get a voice AI company that does not have testimonials on their website, Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah.

Christian Wiens: or they don't have customers that you can go and talk to about their experience. That is a problem. Like that means that they are hiding from something I would say, not that they don't have professionally made, like, ⁓ that's totally different. Like that's just a matter of me going out and doing those.

But if they don't have people you can go and talk to or are willing to talk to their success with the product, that's an issue. And that's we place a lot of, I mean, the number one thing at Loman that I heard from the very beginning of of starting this company was, ⁓ POS sucks. Like I can't get anybody on the phone. All the tools I use, they suck.

The support sucks. know, all of it, like I kept thinking about it. Like, how is this possible? Like how come people aren't like, you know, able to get to some, like when you're running a restaurant, it's a high stress situation.

When a problem happens, you're pretty screwed. Like there's like, if your toast system goes down, like, and you know, all you get is like somebody and like, you know. halfway across the world picking up the phone, nothing wrong with that if they could fix your problem, but if they can't fix your problem, you're in real situation. So, from the very beginning of starting Lohman, one of our core tenets is provide the best white glove support we could possibly.

If you get, you, or by Lohman, of course, right, we will get back to you in minutes. Anytime of the day, ⁓ think the only time we're technically off-bine is in the like ⁓ a.m. to like 4 a.

m. or something like that, or 5 a.m. one of those, but every other time, Like those first hundred customers, they still have my cell phone.

They call me all the time, right? There's like, I fix problems for them if they have them, you know, a core tenant of Loman and the company is that we believe that restaurant owners like are like some of the most amazing entrepreneurs in the world. And when they come across a problem, they should be supported, especially with a new technology like this. And so white glove support goes to every single customer that we have.

you can get in touch with somebody to fix your problem right away. I mean, ⁓ was like another really huge ⁓ I think. Like if somebody sends you to like a Discord or like says, ⁓ hey, just like ⁓ send us an email. that does not work.

⁓ Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah, yeah, exactly restaurant restaurants are trying to get their managers out of the office and off of their devices and and often times it's a it's a phone thing so. Talk me through Christian a little bit of kind of where else you guys are seeing things expand for I I had a very similar experience to what you said where I happen to ⁓ be father of 4. ⁓ So ⁓ when going out to. Christian Wiens: That's exactly right.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: dinner if it's a restaurant that I know is busy, I will call before I go because I want to make sure and quite frankly for me, oftentimes it's less about ordering and more about can you see me am I going to have to wait for 30 minutes when I get there those kind of things but I have the ring no answer ring no answer ring no answer and I'm like you know what screw it it happened to be cold and rainy and I wanted ramen so I like you know what ramen sounds good on a rainy day when it's chilly out and and I tried it I didn't end up going there because of exactly what you're talking about are you guys seeing that are you saying drive through like.

Christian Wiens: Yeah, questions. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: You know, again, I think there's a lot of different ways that this can help. I'd love for you to kind of talk a little bit about beyond just kind of voice ordering, what else are you guys seeing as kind of the for you guys to continue to expand into? Christian Wiens: Yeah.

Huh? Yeah, no, look, I probably harp on ordering a lot because I think that's the hardest problem, but like around 25 % of the calls that we get are questions, right? They're not. We have to be able to answer those accurately for customers because here's the problem.

Orders are great for restaurant, right? You're getting revenue, you're getting a new customer or customer returning, right? Something like that. Now, the amount of labor...

It costs, and the amount of distraction it costs to your front of house if you're not using a voice AI to answer the phone for somebody that picks up the phone and says, hey, are you guys open? That's exact same amount of time that that person has to spend on the phone with a looky-loo or somebody that doesn't, know, maybe they want to ask a million questions. The beautiful thing about AI is it will answer a million of your questions accurately. It will answer the smile on their face, right?

It doesn't have somebody in front of them asking, hey, I... Funny enough, I was at this Italian place here in Austin. I was picking up ⁓ dinner for the team. This was such a funny meta experience, basically.

I was picking up dinner for the team. I had called it in. ⁓ called the food in. I don't know, who knows?

Maybe I just wanted to try their phone. I go there, I park, I walk in. The guy's on the phone. I'm like, okay, that's okay.

I'll stand here and wait, of course. 10 minutes goes by, the guy's still on the phone, there's three people behind me and I'm trying to get his attention. like, hey, can I just like, I've already paid, right? I want to get my food.

Yeah. This guy's on the phone for 20 minutes. There's a line of six people behind me. And I'm like, dude, like this is like, you can't do that.

Like how did nobody tell him? And I get it. Look, I get it. It's incredibly busy.

It's a dinner rush. Like that right there was the physical manifestation of the problem that we're solving. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you just want to pick up your food.

Wow. Mm-hmm. Christian Wiens: so we do that too, but here's where, here's where I think things are going. think hyper personalization in both the way that you get revenue as a restaurant.

So phone calls come in and the way that you get more revenue or you increase your revenue. So things like marketing, right? Like ⁓ right? Those are the things that we're talking about doing next, right?

Like we have an SMS AI agent as well, where you can text it in order, but like, imagine if I, Know you, Jeremy, I know that you order from this pizza place twice a week. know that you, um, I don't know, you always get a gluten free pizza. I don't know something like that. Or, like, you know, how about this?

Like maybe you're, uh, we know you're allergic to something specific. Um, we know that you've ordered a dessert a couple of times, but you don't always. So we know exactly what you are as a diner, you know, um, we can text you on the off week that you don't order and be like, Hey, it's Tuesday night again. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Mm-hmm.

Christian Wiens: You know, Jerry probably is picking up his kids from soccer practice. It's six 30. Like maybe we can hit him at the exact perfect time to where it be convenient for him to order. He can one click, just say, yes, that order is done.

He doesn't have to do anything. And that food is there when he gets home or at the place for him to pick up. So hyper personalized marketing. That's something that we're looking at, building hyper personalized conversations.

Right. can do. ⁓ but there's a long way to go in phone and voice, right? Like.

restaurants, there's a million of them in the United States. know, drive through, Drive ⁓ is an interesting one. ⁓ decided stay away from it because we didn't think that the ⁓ gains there. We were like, this doesn't make sense.

Like you still need somebody at the window and you stuff more cars unless you make a bigger drive through, right? There's no, like it's not like a phone where can, you know, people are calling. It's just. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: ⁓ huh.

It's hard. Christian Wiens: So I did it actually, I did it at Panda a few weeks ago and it was good. It was actually really good. I think it was a Soundhound one.

It mess up at the end and I ⁓ had flip over to a human. It ⁓ wouldn't stop me if I wanted crab ragoons for some reason and I was like, I don't want crab ragoons. ⁓ Yeah, ⁓ it was Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: You're like, ⁓ leave me alone. I'm driving forward and I'm Christian Wiens: I actually saw the guy, I was at MIRTEC, the multi-unit restaurant technology conference a couple of weeks ago, or last week.

And I saw the guy, the CTO of Panda or whatever. And I was like, Hey, like I, you know, he came up to our booth and I was like, Hey, so like, I know you guys are using drive-through. Like that's awesome. Like tell me about why.

Cause like, I never understood it. You don't get more money. You know, there's no real efficient, there's some efficiency gain, maybe like a tiny bit. But you still need to have somebody standing there at the window.

So you're not replacing that. person, you're not getting more revenue. And he's like, honestly, it just makes our staff happier. And I was like, OK, that's cool and very helpful, but it's not what I want.

That's not the problem I want to solve right now. Like, I think there's a huge problem with actual phone in orders. So we haven't gone after Drive-Thru. We haven't thought about doing it yet.

knows? It might be something we look at in the future. But yeah, not right now. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Awesome.

last question on kind of the tech and ⁓ talked about this, you know, ⁓ phone being able to have, you know, 12 people simultaneously. You talked about your, you know, the getting blasted. I guess for our listeners that are out there that are like, dude, there are times that I have to unplug the phone from the wall because I can't take another order. ⁓ Talk through how you guys can help ⁓ either them to a different place or, ⁓ you ⁓ give some, better experience than they might just ring.

No answer, ring, no answer, ring, no answer. Christian Wiens: Yeah. Sure. Yeah, so our technology, can set it, you can technically turn it off, right, if you want, right?

Like, hey, the kitchen, ⁓ can turn it into a paused state, basically. Hey, ⁓ you can actually change the message that the customers are getting when they call during that state. Hey. A tree fell on our power line outside the restaurant.

So we have no power. So we're not taking orders or Hey, kitchen's too backed up. We're pausing orders for the next hour. You can feel free to come in or order or yeah, feel free to come in and sit down if you would like to wait, you know, and then they can easily unpause it automatically from their app, their phone, their Loman app.

So that's, that's one thing we see a lot of people do if they really truly want like, was like too overwhelmed with business. We just. have a way to kind of fix that. have holiday, you you can obviously set hours during holidays or specific hours that you want Loman to answer the phone versus not like some customers, right?

Like they, knows for whatever reason, maybe the mornings are just so not busy that they just want the people to answer the phone and there's two calls a day or something. You can set it up. So Loman only answers from five to 8 PM and you guys take the calls the rest of the time. Yeah, we have, we We know that for restaurant owners, customizability is really important because especially because we work in SMB and mid-market restaurants, like they need customizability, right?

And so that's what we've done, made Lohmann very extensible and customizable the get. ⁓ Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: I love it. ⁓ does the engagement look like and how quickly can you guys get people up to speed? want to know they're sitting here and they're like 35 minutes in the going alright.

⁓ need this. I all of the success stories. I'm on the website. What can expect?

What does it look like to engage with your team and kind of kind of where you know where do go from here? I guess. Christian Wiens: Yeah. Yeah, this is also one of the things that really, is, is ⁓ is one of the things that sets Loman apart ⁓ white glove onboarding that takes 24 hours.

Right? So depending on how fast the restaurant owner wants to go, right? If a restaurant owner wants to go slower than that, like we, you know, we can take a week. can take it.

It's up to you. But what happens is when you come to Loman, all you gotta do is go to our website, ⁓ www.loman.ai.

⁓ going see a big. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Wow. Christian Wiens: Book a demo form right there, or you can shoot us an email at sales at loman.ai, but just easier to go to the low website, book a demo.

Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: There's a little bot there with your face on it, think, too, that shows up to schedule a call with you. Christian Wiens: That's right. You can book a time right there if you want, right? It might not be with me, it be with our sales team, but yeah, fill out that form.

We're going to immediately reach out to you and say, hey, I you fill out the form. We're going to get a bunch of information from you. If you decide to move forward, we'll then connect your point of sale system to Loman. ⁓ clean the menu, do a bunch of automated stuff on our side to make sure we get ready to build or to build your agent.

Build your agent. All of this stuff just takes a few hours. and then we'll set up a call with our White Club onboarding specialist. If you want to do it that same day, great.

If you want to do it in a week, great. If you want to do it three days, great. It's up to you, but we'll be ready for you to go live whenever you want. You'll get on the phone with the White Club onboarding specialist.

They're going to get a bunch of information from you. That's like, any other things that we need to know? Do you have a patio? Is it hard to find your parking lot?

Anything that you want the AI to know, you can train it on the dashboard that you will get from us. And by the way, this is another thing that the customer will get. You'll get a dashboard after that first, you know, I think it takes like 24 hours. Like I said, you'll get a dashboard that allows you to set up your agent, however you want to figure the voice, configure the times, configure the, ⁓ the training information that you're giving to the AI.

Hey, we have high chairs. We, ⁓ show the NFL games on Sunday. our parking lot is in the garage next door, whatever it is you want people to know when they call. ⁓ Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Yeah, dogs are available on the patio.

We do have a gluten-free menu, whatever. Yeah, all of the things. Christian Wiens: you can configure, yeah, it will know your menu, like no matter what, because we're gonna get it from your POS, hook up to your POS, and then you get on with the White Glove onboarding specialist, and then they will add to your agent, right? Like they're gonna ask you questions, they're gonna ask you, you're gonna have questions, I'm assuming, so you can ask them any questions you want, right?

⁓ And there, ⁓ it's a matter of flipping your phone over to the Loman ⁓ agent, right? So they can help you do that. You can do it as soon as you want. Maybe there's some extra things you want added to your agent.

We'll go ahead and do that. Maybe that takes a few more days. But our average customer gets onboarded in like 72 hours. That's another like, yeah, we put a lot of work into that.

we know restaurant owners want to get going with this stuff quick, but they want it to work at the same time. yeah, a little bit. You can come to our website, ⁓ www.loamandai.

just book us a demo and we'd be happy to help you out. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: That's incredible. love that. Awesome.

Well, Christian, I love that you guys have built this. I again, I've kind of seen just the advent of this and quite honestly, was work in the space every day and I get the privilege to sit at kind of the forefront of a lot of this technology. Not to lie. 2 years ago, 3 years ago.

didn't really believe it. ⁓ Now more I see it. It's just ⁓ it me away. So congratulations on ⁓ on building a real great solution that's going to solve some people's problems.

Christian Wiens: Yeah. Thank you so much, Jeremy, and really appreciated being on the podcast and happy to answer any other questions any of your audience has and hopefully we'll see each other again soon. Jeremy Julian - Restaurant Technology Guys: Awesome. Well, to our listeners guys, like I said at the onset, we know you guys have got lots of choices.

So thanks for hanging out with us this week. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to the show. Go check out loman.ai and have a great day.