What the four bots are
Bots
Bots, in the sidebar under Admin, is where the four live. Three look after your customers and the fourth looks after you.
The Customer Service bot answers questions on your store front. The Feedback & Reviews bot asks customers how their order was. The Offers & Deals bot sends your offers. The Audit bot reads your records and emails you when something unusual happens, and sends you an audit of every report each month.
None of them makes anything up. Every answer a customer reads is one you wrote, and every alert you receive names the order, session or record behind it.
Only the owner sees the Bots screen — they speak to your customers in your restaurant's name, and the Audit bot reads every figure you have.
How the bots are sold
Plans & Extras
The bots and Online Ordering on WhatsApp are one add-on — Online Ordering & Bots — with one monthly price, on top of whichever plan you are on. You do not need a bigger plan.
If your account does not have it yet, the Bots item in the sidebar and the WhatsApp card on Settings → Integrations both show the price. Tapping either opens Plans & Extras, and one purchase switches on both.
On a trial it is switched on straight away and billed from your first invoice. On a running plan an invoice is raised for the days left in the period, and it switches on the moment that invoice is paid.
The Customer Service bot
Bots → Customer Service Bot
Its chat window appears on your online store front. It answers from the list of answers on its tab, matching the words a customer types against each answer's keywords.
Built-in answers for your opening hours, your address and your delivery areas can be switched on; they are read from your own settings, so they are always current.
Anything it could not answer is kept under Questions nobody answered. Tap one, write the answer, and the bot uses it from then on.
The Feedback & Reviews bot
Bots → Feedback Bot
A while after an order is finished — 45 minutes to start with — it sends the customer a message on WhatsApp or SMS asking how it was, with a link to rate it.
A customer who rates it well is thanked and shown your review page. One who rates it badly never sees the review link; your manager gets a WhatsApp with the order and what they said.
Read what customers said opens the inbox of every rating, with the unhappy ones on a filter of their own.
Delivery and online orders are the ones worth asking about — they end with the customer somewhere else, which is exactly when you never otherwise hear how it went.
The Offers & Deals bot
Bots → Offers Bot
Write the offer, choose who gets it — everybody, recent customers, customers you have not seen for a while, loyalty members, or a list of numbers — and the screen shows how many people it will reach before anything is sent.
It sends a few messages a minute, never during the quiet hours you set, and adds your opt-out line to every message. A campaign can be paused and started again; nobody is messaged twice.
The Audit bot
Bots → Audit Bot
The Audit bot works like an auditor on your staff. Every few minutes it reads your orders, discounts, cancellations, cash-ups, expenses, stock write-offs and the Activity Log, and when it finds something an owner would want to know about, it emails you — usually within five minutes.
It checks for: big discounts; orders cancelled after the kitchen had them or after payment; dishes voided off a sent order; records deleted; menu prices cut; tills and waiters short on cash; unusually large expenses and write-offs; Khata credit past a customer's limit; new staff logins and changed permissions; and sales or sign-ins while you are closed. Each check can be switched off.
On the first of every month it audits the month that has just ended — the headline figures against the month before, what it found, and the summary of every report in your Reports menu — and emails it to you as a PDF.
It only ever reads. It never changes, deletes or corrects anything.
Switching the Audit bot on
Bots → Audit Bot
There is no email to set up: the Audit bot sends from POS Beast's own bot mailbox. The one condition is that your account email address is verified, because the bot only ever writes to an address you have proved is yours.
If it is not verified yet, the Audit Bot tab says so and the switch stays locked until it is.
- 1 Top right → My Account → Verify your email address → Send me a code, and type the six digits from the email.
- 2 Open Bots → Audit Bot.
- 3 Turn the switch on. Leave both emails ticked — unusual activity as it happens, and the monthly audit.
- 4 Press Send me a test email and check it arrives. If it is not in the inbox, look in the spam folder and mark it as not spam.
- 5 Press Save.
Changing your account email address un-verifies it, and the Audit bot stops writing until the new address is verified. Nothing is lost in between: every alert stays on the Audit Bot tab.
Deciding what counts as unusual
Bots → Audit Bot
A big discount is 30% of the bill or more to start with. The same percentage decides when a menu price cut is worth an alert.
A till or waiter counts as short when the difference is at least one average bill, worked out from your own last 30 days. Type an amount instead if you would rather.
A large expense is five times your usual expense, from your last 90 days, until you type an amount.
You are closed from … to … tells the bot your closing hours. With the same hour twice it assumes you never close and that check stays quiet.
If the bot emails you about things you do not care about, raise the threshold or untick that check rather than switching the bot off — the rest of it is still worth having.
Reading the alerts and the monthly audits
Bots → Audit Bot
What it has noticed lists every alert, newest first, with the ones you have not read highlighted. The Bots item in the sidebar shows how many are unread.
Mark as read clears one; Mark all as read clears the lot. Alerts are never deleted — they are your record.
Under Monthly audits, pick any of the last twelve months and press Open the PDF to read it now, or Email it to me to have it sent. The list below shows each month's audit, what it found and when it was emailed.
An alert email lists everything found since the last one, worst first, so a busy evening arrives as one email rather than twenty. At most one alert email goes every few minutes.
This chapter describes the software as it is today. Every account gets the same guide inside the product, searchable and printable.