Numa is an answering service like no other. Using Artificial Intelligence, it turns your phone into a text autoresponder or order taker. For restaurants experiencing high call in order volumes, Numa can direct callers directly to your online menu then to your POS and even let your customers know when and where to pick it up. Numa saves time and allows you to increase your order capacity!
Listen in as founder and CEO Tasso Roumeliotis and real life Numa-user, Lex Gopnik-Lewinski, owner of Augie’s Montreal Deli discuss Numa and how it can help your business increase efficiencies, especially during peak periods.
Rather Read?
Angel: Welcome to the easy retail tech podcast, where we take locally owned retail and restaurant owners boldly and fearlessly into the tech solutions that can help them operate and market businesses more efficiently and effectively. We present in plain speak the exciting new tech solutions that can help you grow and prosper. I am Angel Cicerone, your host. Today we have two guests talking about Numa, an automated answering service that actually learns about your business so it can help you better serve your customers. This is a very timely podcast because people and restaurants are using this during the COVID crisis. I'm very excited to introduce the founder and CEO of Numa, Tasso Roumeliotis, and Numa client Lex Lewinsky of Augie's Montreal Deli, a real life Numa customer who will share his experience with us. Welcome to you both.
So Tasso, let's start with you. Tell us about Numa.
Tasso: Numa is a tool for main street businesses. Restaurants and retailers that are interacting with customers. Customers typically are going to have questions to place an order for lunch, or they might want to know if there's the shoe size of the latest new kicks in stock. And they're trying to get this information from these businesses. Numa allows you, the retailer or restaurant, to communicate to the consumer in a digital way. So you can send them a text message. The retailer can respond back to you with a picture these new shoes to see if that's what you're looking for. You can arrange curbside pickup.
So all of the exchange and consumers and businesses moving away from the classic way that we actually used to reach out to businesses, which is calling them on the phone and migrating into a way where millennials, and truly everybody today, wants to be able to message and text and use all the advantages of their mobile phone. Numa takes your phone number, where people are calling you and makes a conversation with the consumer much richer, because we converted messaging and are able to take advantage of all those technologies that are so powerful on your phone.
Angel: So it takes your phone number, your landline that you might have published on your website, for example, and it turns it into a communication tool that can text you on that line.
Tasso: That's right. So the first exchange typically with one of our businesses is you will call them up and most of the time, if they're not picking up the phone, because they are busy serving a customer. It might be after hours and we'll text you back. So there's a very interesting experience from a consumer's perspective is now you thought, you would have to leave a voicemail. People hate doing that and they don't do that anymore, but now you get a message back and that says, Hey, we can actually help answer a bunch of questions for you. Like, hey, are you open Labor Day? The system will have learned those kinds of, that kind of information, but then you can also interact directly with the business owner and get the information you need. In the case of restaurants, what we're able to do is, we do find that in a lot of the quick service restaurant world, 80% of the calls inbound into these businesses are for people wanting to place the lunch or dinner orders. So we'll automatically ask, Hey, if you want to order food, just text order. And the consumer will text order, and there's a whole seamless flow that allows you to add, to order your food, pay for it. And that gets printed into the printer of the restaurants, kitchen. And then we get the information and then communicate that back to the customer and tell them that the order is going to be ready in half an hour. And if there's curbside built in, we can also say, go to parking spot, number 15, at this time, and we'll deliver it to you. So it has that just a much better experience for you to be able to interact with businesses and in today's world where you're not doing a lot of in dining, in a particular restaurant or walking into a retailer, it just gives the retailer, the main stream business, and better tools to serve their customers.
Angel: So on one level you can call the landline, on the second level, you could actually advertise text order to such a number, and it will automatically bring up this online sequence.
Tasso: Exactly. Anyway, a customer is going to reach out to you, whether they a phone call and they convert it to messaging, or as you just said, which is like just text order to this particular number, or even in today's kind of new Google search world. If a business is message enabled, the Google search result that comes up gives you right directly from the browser the ability to click the message button, which is a new feature of Google and be able to message directly with the business. So what we do is we have our relationship with Google and we look to enable that for businesses. So your customers can now direct, just after a Google search, right after Google search, they can actually message you rather than we're being required to call you.
Angel: Now, what if the customer wants to leave a voicemail?
Tasso: They could still do that obviously. And a lot of them still do. What happens is we take that voicemail, we do voice the text and the Numa customer. So someone like Lex or another main stream business will go onto their portal onto the messaging portal. And they'll see that this particular number who is, and we can take that number maybe associated with the name, just by doing a public search. This person left you this voicemail. You can listen the voicemail and you can see what the, what was said in the voicemail. So it's voice to text and then directly from your application, you can actually send that person a message back. If they ask, for example, I’ll go back to the case of, are you open labor data? Say they left that voicemail. You can actually directly from your app rather than have to call the customer back, just text them, Yes, we're open Labor Day. And then they get a message back saying, yes, this is new balance running store. We were open Labor Day.
Angel: So let me ask you, you said that the system can actually learn the answers to certain questions. Tell me a little bit about how that works.
Tasso: Yeah, it works two fold. The first thing we do for a business is there's public information about you, like what your hours are, do you have parking, are you a kid friendly restaurant information that might be on Google, on your website, on Yelp. So we're able to first and foremost, go up and learn about your business and automatically answer a lot of these basic questions, which are useful after hours for example and there's a whole, so that's one set of learning that we do. We built a kind of an automatic conversation, artificial intelligence kind of bot response to these basic questions. Are you open, parking, those kinds of things. The second thing we do is there's going to be specific questions that the system is not going to know that the owner or the manager of the main street business is going to answer back. So that might be a question like, do you have high chairs for kids? And that's like hard to, that information is probably not on a website, probably not on Yelp or Google. So the owner or the manager will respond back and say, yes, we have high chair for kids, but minimum age is whatever a year and a half to come in here, like for it to be a comfortable experience, we can learn that. So the next time people are asking those kinds of questions about a business. We can automatically answer that and build that into the DNA of how you communicate with your customer automatically. Other things will be like, do you have a patio? Can I bring my pet, all these kinds of things, which we see actually being used with our customers?
Angel: Not bad. Right now, those are two huge questions. So let me ask you, how then does your customer program that in, or do you do it for them?
Tasso: Well, so what happens is we try and make it as easy as possible. We don't want our customers who are busy running their businesses, having to go in and program, although they can do some of that. We will watch the interaction and there's multiple thematic questions around things like, you have high chairs, we'll auto suggest that to the business. We'll say there seems to be a lot of questions around or there's questions coming in regarding the status of high chairs. And this is your, we've decided that this is your base answer. You want us to automatically kind of save this into the artificial intelligence and answer this back when next time somebody answers this question and if they write, yes, we do that. So it learns, but it also gets your approval before, as you know, it being part of the answer set.
Angel: So it actually suggests ideas to you based on what's actually happening.
Tasso: That's right. How you're actually answering. So trying to learn from your behavior, how you want to talk to your customer, and we try to encapsulate that and automate it.
Angel: So this has become now over the past couple of months, a tool for curbside delivery and a curbside take-out and delivery I gather.
Tasso: Yeah. I mean, that's one of the big new feature sets that we built in today's world, as we talked about, people need to be, are collecting or getting their goods outside of the actual physical establishment. Cause they can't walk in and that's a, that requires a whole new coordination component to it. Because I might be driving up, I might be doing takeout. The whole timing of when I should, when I should come, these are all additional pieces of information that you need to be communicating with the main street business real time. And you can't be sitting there waiting on hold, nor can they be waiting on hold with you, trying to decide, are you here yet? And what's your package number is? So messaging is a very, very easy and seamless way for you to could do for you to solve that problem with your business.
Angel: So why don't you take us through the actual sequence of how a restaurant owner would use Numa and then we'll go to Lex and talk to him about how he's actually implemented it in his restaurant.
Tasso: Sure, sure. So I’ll take the kind of the first step of a very classic approach is for, businesses like Lex, which have the majority of their business, lunch and dinner time, obviously that's when the majority of folks eat. And most businesses still have, unlike our household businesses still have landline numbers, it's still the lowest common denominator way that people can reach you, especially your customers. So lunch and dinner time, things are obviously at their busy peak and the person that's answering the phone is probably taking the orders for people who are walking in the store. So a lot of cases the businesses are unable to answer the call during the busiest and most important times when the customers are coming in. So what we do for a business for a restaurant like Lexus is when they're not picking up the phone, like they let it ring, it kind of gets diverted to us. And then we pick up the phone on behalf of the restaurant. We tell the consumer that, Hey, we are a textable business now, if you text order or press one we can have a whole interaction with you that way. And then the consumer would press, with texts order, the business is a very classic case. It's the majority of the case why people are calling is because they want their food for lunch and their lunch food or dinner. And then from there, we've taken the menu of the restaurant and the text interaction where we say, okay, for the customer said, click on this link. That link takes you to a page where you select what you want. Your classic kind of, buying food, online food from an Uber Eats or door dash for most companies, you pay for it on your phone. And then we'll communicate that back to the kitchen and we get the information and we'll let the customer know how much time it will be ready and communicate that back to them. So that's kind of a very, very classic scenario. We take your landline phone, we make it textable, we take over the, when you can't pick it up, we'll pick it up on behalf of you. And we will, you know help answer the customer's questions or drive them towards an order, which is a revenue generating transaction for you as a business and help with the communication path with the customer all the way through.
Angel: Does it integrate with your POS? Is that how the orders get into the kitchen through your POS integration and does it integrate with all POS?
Tasso: We work with most POS. Especially on the restaurant side, we have a kind of a piece of software. Like we create an account and are integrated into them. So the goal is, yes, we would set you up with all of them.
Angel: Okay. So it seamless from phone call through to delivery. Okay. I have one more question before we get to Lex. So how does that work with an Uber Eats? So if I’m, I guess if I'm ordering through Uber Eats, I'm ordering through Uber Eats. So it's a different, it's a different set of, it's a different protocol. If I'm ordering through a third party.
Lex: I could take that one for your real quick Angel. When you're ordering through a third party, you have to manually input the order into your POS. So for instance, we use square at Augie's Montreal, and in Berkeley, California, and I have a tablet that is just set up for caviar. So when a caviar order comes in, I have to take that tablet, look at the order, accept the order, manually input it into our POS system and then print out the ticket which can be very time consuming. And if you're really busy, a pain in the butt, whereas with Numa, all we do is we accept the order on the tablet that they provide in automatically syncs up with the square and with the printers that we have throughout the restaurant, in order to print out that ticket for both the kitchen and the runner, who's going to run the food out to you. So it saves an entire step that you would normally have to do with some of these apps that you would get like caviar, Uber Eats or grubhub.
Angel: Right. So it's a time saver for sure.
Lex: Oh, a hundred percent.
Angel: But so you're trying to, for a restaurant, what you're trying to do is actually steer the ordering through the Numa app, as opposed to the third parties.
Lex: A hundred percent. And there's obviously two facets to that. The first one is that it's more convenient. It's easier. It's one less step that my staff has to take to make sure that we get that order. And the second most important thing, which people are finally kind of waking up to is that, money, dollars, cents, [15:15 inaudible], bread, dough percentages, as everybody knows, or as people are starting to figure out. We don't have high margins in the restaurant industry. If you're doing 5%, you're killing the game as they say, you're doing tremendously well. But these restaurant apps, third party apps for their delivery service are taking between 15 and 30% of each transaction in order to cover their costs. Whereas with Numa, it's a fixed rate you're paying, it's like a subscription. So it's just a, it's a line item in my budget every month that I know exactly what it's going to cost whether I do a million dollars’ worth of sales, which I wish I was, but I can't say that I am or $50 worth of sales. The price is going to be the same, as opposed to dealing with these third party apps where they're going to be taking a cut of every single sale that comes through.
Angel: So Lex you are doing self-delivery at your restaurant.
Lex: We have caviar, we use it as kind of a backup. The idea was at least pre COVID. The thinking is that the people that are going to order from some of these delivery apps are going to be people that might not necessarily come into your brick and mortar location, or maybe they don't have a car or they're busy. So it kind of worked almost as like a gravy for us. We've got people in the restaurant working already, we've got our staff staffed up. So, the fryers are on and the steamers working to steam, [16:40 inaudible] brisket. So these are ways to kind of get some extra cash flow coming in. But once covert hit, all of a sudden, if you're relying on an application to get you customers, that's going to take 15% to 30% of every single order that you have. You're not only not making money, you're probably losing money on all of those orders. So in the pre COVID time, again, it worked as a little bit of extra gravy, every couple of weeks coming in from people that might not necessarily come in. But during Covid times, those caviar prices were killing people.
Angel: What I am trying to say, the orders that come in through Numa are being self-delivered? Is that correct?
Lex: Yes. People are coming in and picking it up. So it's for curbside delivery. We don't do delivery ourselves, just the cost of delivery, the insurance of delivery for having a delivery drivers. It's pretty high. So this is kind of like a middle ground between the two.
Angel: Okay, great. Now tell me a little bit about how you started using this and the, in your restaurant. Give us a real life example.
Lex: Well, the reason we started using this is partly cause Tasso is Canadian and I'm Canadian and we stick together. Tasso actually had another company before this and we did our first catering gig before we even had a brick and mortar location. We're just a little mom & pop up restaurant. And our first ever catering gig with my largest sale to date was at Tassos' previous company, because he's a good Canadian boy and we support each other and he needed his fix of Montreal style smoke meters, we call in the United States, Montreal style, pastrami poutine. So that's how me and Tasso met. When he had his different company. He ended up selling that company. And when he came up with the Numa idea, he approached us about, Hey, would you be interested in this? Is this something you would like to do? And I was like, yeah, absolutely sounds great. He staff came in, worked with our printers to make sure everything was seamless. We helped them out to make sure that everything worked as conveniently as possible to give them some perspective and insight into what we have to deal with on a daily basis. So that's kind of how, how our relationship, but August Montreal, deli and Numa got started. Pre COVID we were using it more as a, it was especially helpful for us when parking might be tight and people couldn't find a parking spot, but they still to get their food. So they would go ahead and text the word order to our landline. We would see their order, they would place it. They tell us what kind of car they ran and then they would just shoot us a text when they showed up. And then we could just go ahead and bring the food up to you.
Angel: Terrific. Thank you, Lex. So Tasso, let's get back to you and the setup and the learning curve. Tell us about how that works and how long would a restaurant need before this was operational. What kind of training and what kind of support you have?
Tasso: I mean, it’s actually, obviously we try and make it as easy and as quick and as seamless as possible. It's very much like a consumer app rather than a kind of business enterprise deployment. So the longest pole in that integration is just getting your phone number, pop up the messaging. There's a little bit of a lag time, but typically we can get your, you give us your phone number and we go off and kind of get that made messageable within a day. And then there is and then what happens is there's an app and you as the mainstream business owner, you can go log onto your computer and see it on your desktop. There's a tablet app. And then there's also a mobile app, well, Android and iPhone. And you're able to see if somebody calls you and you don't pick up and, and the consumer starts messaging. You'll able to respond directly to what this consumer via messaging app. So it's like we try to make it as easy as for example, downloading and using whatsapp, but it's for your business. And it's got all these rich business tools. So we get you up and running very quickly. And the familiarity with messaging apps that all consumers have these days, given that it's the, the most dumb thing by humans is messaging, makes it very easy.
Angel: So what about getting the menus up and the answers, that all happens within a couple of days as well?
Tasso: Sure. Yeah. In the case of a restaurant, there's obviously more work to do. We have to take that menu. We have to go through a process of kind of creating an online. The business has to, we kind of automate most of that, the business, the restaurant has to kind of agree with it. Agree with, obviously you're going to, how that looks, and is part of how they want to be kind of viewed. We want to be able to do some testing of it and make sure that it works. So the integration, there is much more akin to what a Uber Eats or door dash would do, because there is a tablet that we give you and we need to be connected into the printer. There's a little bit more when it comes to an actual restaurant.
Angel: Week, two weeks, what do you think?
Tasso: Oh, no. I mean, we're talking a few days.
Angel: Alright. So Lex, in terms as a restaurant owner, tell me what your thoughts on, did this make you money, save you money, both. What do you think life would have been like in this COVID world without something like this, and what do you think life will be like now that, maybe some of that urgency is over, you think this is still going to be a great tool?
Lex: A hundred percent. I mean, we would be out of business. Angel, you would not be calling me. We would not be having this conversation if we were relying on the delivery apps right now. I mean, there's no doubt about that. In my mind and my business partner's mind. We are, one of the silver linings I think about COVID and Numa is that now people have got to experience it. They've got to interact with it. I've got old grandmas who will give me a call and say, I don't do much text messaging, but that was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. And it was so simple and great. And to bring it out to the car, we deliver it because we're Canadian. We put the bags on a hockey stick to keep our six foot distance. So we hand it to our customers in their car on the hockey stick, and then nobody has to have any contact. Nobody has to get too close to each other. So that's been nice. But I think the nice thing is that people are discovering how easy it is. For me as a business person like Tasso was saying earlier, we don't have to have somebody just standing by the phone, Manning the phone and putting people on hold, waiting for people to get in. Because 90% of the questions are what time are you open? Where are you located and Numa is going to reply automatically to those people. So it's just been a time saver and it's been a lifesaver. I mean, it's been a business saver for us during this time. I'd recommending it to everybody I know who's in the industry because it really has been the thing that's just, that saved us and allowed us to hang in here when so many restaurants are struggling and going down right now.
Angel: That's great. One of the chief complaints I hear from my restaurant clients is that there's really just no way to schedule people, to answer those phones and keep it current. So that solve a huge problem.
Lex: Totally. The customer service too, is really, really helpful. If you have any adjustments you need to make, as far as say, we make a rye pancake so it's a regular potato pancake, but we put some rye bread crumbs in there to kind of hold the potato and the eggs and onion together and say, we only make X number of those and say, we're running out. It's one, you go onto the new map, you click that it's not available. And then when people go ahead and try to place their order via text message, it shows that that's not available to them. So we don't have to worry about, we can keep track of our inventory and make those adjustments on the fly. If we have to add a new item, we've got a special going, it's really a simple, basically just send a text message or an email to the Numa customer support folks. And all of a sudden that's updated onto your website or onto your main page. And the link that gets sent to the consumer is updated. So it's very easy. It's very seamless. It doesn't take a lot of time. I've had issues with caviar for instance, where something ran out or we wanted to make a menu change. And we're waiting a day or two for somebody to get back to us to confirm that or hours of operation change works, with Numa It's really pretty much instant.
Angel: Excellent. So Tasso tell us a little bit about how much this costs. I do think you might even have a special offer for my listeners.
Tasso: Yes. So a few things. So the base kind of take your landline phone and make it textable with the artificial intelligence, that base product is $50 per month per location, per phone number. In fact, the rooftop is what we call it. If you are a restaurant and you're doing full ordering and we have to integrate your menu and with all the other tools that we bring that's an additional $150 per month. And by the way, I’ll say one of the advantages of this over some of the Uber Eats and the door dash is, this is for the restaurants. So you own those customers. It's not like, Uber Eats, which owns the customers in the case of, Lexus business. They could promote another deli. If, from somebody who bought, who really want to go on to Augie's and buy their deli, so you actually own that customer. That's really good for you. And then we're offering two months free. In today's world, a lot of our businesses, most of these businesses there are customers that we care about are struggling to make ends meet. So, we're trying to help out during the kind of crisis we weren't our existing customers, we want to make sure that we're able to be kind of good citizens that way.
Angel: So let me get this straight. A base program is $15, a restaurant program about $200?
Tasso: It's $200 for the restaurant program, and we have two months free.
Angel: And two months free. Fantastic. Now, where should somebody go to learn more?
Tasso: Just go to www.Numa.com.
Angel: www.Numa.Com to learn more. And these specials are on your website?
Tasso: Yes.
Angel: Terrific. Now I think this all sounds wonderful. Sounds like a great way to increase efficiency easily and get maximize your busiest times, which is what restaurants so desperately need to do. So I'm excited to bring this to the listeners, but before we go, Lex, I got to let you plug your deli. What makes a deli, a Montreal deli?
Tasso: So in Montreal, huge Jewish community, as people know, I mean, I know you're from New York, so you guys think you got the best bagels, but me and Tasso could, we spend an hour arguing about that. We've got Montreal style bagels in Montreal, and there's a huge Montreal Jewish deli scene and the main staple of a Montreal Jewish delis, what's called Montreal style smoked meat, or what we're calling here in the United States. So people don't get it confused with barbecue, Montreal style pastrami, we're taking a whole brisket, we're curing it, we're rubbing it. And then we're smoking it and baking it. And we say, it's like corn beef, and pastrami, got a nice bottle of Napa Valley wine. Turn on some Barry white made a baby you're getting that texture corn beef. You're getting that spicy richness, good fattiness of pastrami in one sandwich. And we slice everything by hand to order. So if you like stuff that's a little leaner. You're going to get it from what's called the flat of the brisket. If you like it a little fattier, you're going to get it from what's called the point of the brisket or the thing that we suggest is for folks to get a medium sandwich, which is a little bit from the flat, a little bit from the point you get that, again that nice little confluence of the two styles of meat. So that's our main thing we do. We're actually only Montreal style deli that actually co-packs our product. So we have a co-pack that makes it in a USDA facility. So we actually sell to markets all across the state of California. And eventually we'll be making our way over to the East coast and Midwest, and try to start selling this as a retail thing. We also do poutine, the French fries cheese curds, and gravy. We make an authentic, real deal, Quebecois poutine, which has the squeaky cheese curds that we get fresh from a local dairy. We triple fry our potatoes. So they hold up to the gravy and we tell our customers that you're hung over. It's almost like free healthcare. You come in, have a poutine, we'll fix up your hangover for you. And you're ready to go.
Angel: That is fantastic. And you are where, tell everybody where you are.
Lex: We're in Berkeley, California. If you want some more information about us, please visit our it's www.augiesmontrealdeli.com, that's www.augiesmontrealdeli.com.
Angel: Terrific. And for those of you interested in this fabulous phone technology, go to www.Numa.com. Tasso and Lex, I want to thank you so much for being here today and stay safe and stay strong!
Subscribe & Review in iTunes
Are you subscribed to my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. Click here to subscribe in iTunes!
Now if you like what you hear, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they’re also fun for me to read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!
