Alicart Case Study

The Challenge

COVID-19 Closes Dining Rooms and Most Kitchens

Restaurants were among the earliest and hardest hit by closures stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Alicart’s main business is dine-in, specializing in large groups and the travel and tourism industries, both of which were all but shut down for months by the Coronavirus.

“The COVID-19 response has been extremely challenging. Times Square was empty. Nobody was in downtown offices; no one attending events in Vegas. Our business largely dried up.”

—Phil Dixon, Director of IT, Alicart

Needing to shift its sales model to keep revenues coming in, Alicart leadership sought a solution. While restaurants nationwide quickly pivoted to offering meals via order-ahead takeout, curbside pickup, and delivery, Alicart took an unusual approach that paid big dividends, even as most of its restaurants closed.

The Solution

Alicart Keeps Phone Orders Flowing with The Help of A Cloud-based Call Center

Although it closed most locations, the company kept kitchens open in restaurants located nearest large residential populations shut in by stay-at-home mandates. “The business was in residential areas, so we followed the business,” says Dixon. The company then promoted online and phone-in orders for curbside pickup or delivery.

The second decision was to subscribe to Fusion Connect Call Center. “I knew the cloud communications system from Fusion Connect would enable us to serve customers, with employees working remotely taking calls,” says Dixon, who manages the restaurant group’s technologies nationwide.

With most orders coming in during lunch and dinner rushes lasting about two hours each, a single person answering the phone inside the restaurant could not have handled the call volume. Worse, this would have provided guests with a bad experience: a busy signal or an extremely long wait.

“Over the years, we’ve discovered that our customer base likes to do business with us by phone,” says Dixon. “So that was one more reason we thought that using the Fusion Connect Call Center to accept phone-in orders would be a great solution.”

The company staffs between 3 and 4 Alicart team members working from home. They can handle all the mealtime rush call volume. Callers are greeted by an auto-attendant that plays a custom pre-recorded comfort message. The first available agent answers the call and takes the guest’s order and payment, while entering the order into a web-based point of sale interface. This interface sends the order to the kitchen to be cooked and prepared.

The call center was fully deployed and continues to be maintained by Fusion Connect. This enabled Alicart to focus on pivoting its business and operations at a critical time, while Fusion Connect managed the technology platform on a day-to-day basis.