TGI Fridays Deploys Chatbot on Facebook Messenger

Bar Tech Live blog post 1

American restaurant chain TGI Fridays is to use a Facebook Messenger chatbot to answer customer queries and offer reservation capabilities at some of its restaurants.  

Answering common questions such as where to find the nearest branch and allowing customers to make reservations at selected restaurants will be covered by the chatbot. 

TGI Fridays Vice President for Strategy and Brand Initiatives Sherif Mityas, said: “Today’s guests live in a digital world, spending large amounts of time interacting with friends and family on social platforms, and we want to meet them in the places they’re already engaging.

“Chatbot technology will allow us to engage with our guests in a more personal way, providing real-time responses from Fridays, whether they want to get on a reservation list, find the closest restaurant or find out what the most popular cocktail is at their Fridays.”

TGI will collaborate with Conversable, an Austin-based enterprise conversation platform which has previously worked with the likes of Pizza Hut to create an intelligent conversational ordering platform.


Mityas said: “This matches very well to the core of the TGI Fridays DNA as a social brand. Guests come to Fridays to enjoy time with family and friends over great food and drinks. Our effort is to make sure that Fridays experience extends to the places our guests are naturally interacting, which means we’re extending the ways guests can interact with our brand, whether they’re inside or outside the physical walls of our restaurants.”


Mityas said that TGI will expand its chatbox service to other social media channels such as Twitter and the messaging platform Kik, which is popular amongst a younger audience.  


“Fridays attracts a wide variety of guests, from millennials to boomers, to everyone in between. Today, there’s not one single platform that matches where our guests are interacting. Kik is one of the fastest-growing social platforms for millennials, so we’re excited to launch Fridays there soon; and we’re also looking forward to additional platforms that may make sense for Fridays as we continue to expand our digital footprint.”

He added: “We will continue to expand the opportunities for our guests to interact with us on various social and digital platforms. For example, our partnership with Conversable will extend beyond answering guest questions and taking reservations, to online ordering and additional conversational capabilities.”