Restaurants · voice, web chat and email
Peak call time is peak service time. Your host is at the door, and the guest in front of them always wins. Zumu answers the line nobody can get to.
Your own number, or a new one · English and Spanish today, on a speech stack that understands 10+ languages
of diners reach for the phone first
63%
Harris Poll, 2,065 U.S. adults, May 2025, ±2.5 points. Stated preference, not call logs — and not our data.
is the busiest hour of the week
7pm
Point-of-sale data across roughly 99,000 U.S. locations: the busiest hour in 16 of 17 metros.
of reservations are booked within two hours of the table
23%
From the same data set. This is why the line rings during service and not at four in the afternoon.
of inbound calls are a reservation
38%
Vendor call data, 1.2 million calls across 1,000-plus locations. Unaudited and self-selected — read the shape, not the decimal.
What actually answers
Answering a phone call well is five separate pieces of engineering stacked on each other. Point at one.
One Friday service
The solid line is how many people called. The dashed line is how many of those calls the host stand could physically take. They move in opposite directions, and the area between them is the part of Friday nobody sees.
A chart of one Friday dinner service. Calls offered rise to a peak at 7pm while the number the host stand can take falls to its lowest point at the same time; the area between the two curves is shaded.
At 7p, the 17 calls the host stand cannot reach go to the agent instead, with your menu and your book already in front of it.
Across the service: 214 calls offered, 78 a person could reach, 136 the agent picked up.
One hundred dinner-rush calls
One dot is one call. Twenty-four get handled at the host stand. The rest go to voicemail, or ring long enough that the caller gives up and tries the place across the street.
How this page is built
No illustration file, no charting library, no motion library, no 3D engine. Three techniques, none of them longer than fifteen lines, and all three are running above.
Questions
If yours is not here, bring it to the demo — along with a call you wish had gone better.
It writes into your book by tool call or API, and it checks real availability before it writes anything. The change lands in your system carrying who asked for it, what changed and when. The honest part is access: most reservation platforms gate their API behind a signed partner agreement, so this is business-development work rather than engineering work. Tell us which system you run and we will tell you what it allows.
Some guests will know, and we do not pretend otherwise. What the agent does is take a turn the way a person does — it hears when a caller has finished the sentence, waits when they have not, and stops talking when they cut in. A transfer or a hangup waits behind the agent’s own last sentence, so no caller is cut off mid-word. Agents answer in English and Spanish today, on a speech stack that understands 10+ languages.
Yes. Zumu runs the SIP edge underneath the number, over a SIP trunk you already have a contract with or an API-native carrier. The call flow behind the number does not know or care which one it is. If you would rather start on a new number, buying one runs a four-step pipeline and is done in minutes. Porting the number you already have is your carrier’s process on your carrier’s timing, not ours.
It hands the call over. On a warm transfer the caller goes to hold music rather than a dial tone while the agent briefs whoever picks up in four to six sentences: who is calling, what they asked for, and what it thinks should happen next. Declining is a real option. If nobody answers inside the ring window, you choose what runs next — hand it over cold, send it to voicemail, retry the ring, or end the call cleanly.
From your own documents. You upload the menu, the hours and the allergen sheet, and answers are grounded in those files rather than in a model’s general impression of restaurants. When the menu changes on Tuesday you replace the file — you do not rewrite a script. If the answer is not in what you gave it, the agent says so and offers a person instead of guessing at an ingredient.
Per minute of AI handling time, not per call and not per seat, and the meter counts the seconds the agent was actually on the line. When your manager takes the call over, the AI meter stops there. Every conversation carries its own cost line on its own session report, alongside the duration, the outcome and the transcript. We do not publish a rate card — talk to us for the numbers that fit your call mix.
Book a demo
Point the agent at your own menu, your own hours and your own book. Then listen to the calls it took, one session report at a time.
No credit card for the demo · Bring a call from last Friday · Ask us for the assumptions
