Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Leverages SOCi SmartBot To Communicate With Potential Customers

A black and white image of a Dinosaur Bar-B-Que restaurant with patrons and parked motorcycles outside.

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Leverages SOCi SmartBot to Communicate With Potential Customers and Win More Leads

A laptop displaying the Dinosaur BBQ Facebook page and a chatbot conversation about restaurant hours.

The Challenge

What do dinosaurs, bikers, and Good Morning America have in common? Dinosaur Bar-B-Que of course! This legendary BBQ joint began humbly as a mobile food stand that catered specifically to motorcyclists up and down the east coast. After 33 years of increasing success, Dinosaur Bar-B-Que now boasts 6 locations, the prestigious title of America’s Best BBQ from Good Morning America, a line of award-winning BBQ sauces on shelves at Whole Foods, 175,000 (and counting) copies of their cookbook sold, and, even a catering division complete with mobile barbeque rigs. While growth was and is always the goal, the owners of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que wanted to ensure that their teams were best equipped to tackle increasing demand.

“Truthfully, guests were asking questions 24/7 and we needed a way to provide information to them in a timely and efficient manner, without us having to answer messages 24/7,” said Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Marketing Director, Jason Ryan. “The volume kept growing and we kept thinking, ‘there has to be a better way?’”

A laptop displaying the Dinosaur BBQ website and the SOCi SmartBot interface.

The SOCi Solution

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que needed a way to efficiently handle the flood of online ordering questions, reservations, and hours of operations inquiries and provide real-time updates, like shifts in hours, holiday packages, sold-out catering days, and more. They deployed seven SOCi SmartBots across all locations to address leads and catering questions. In just one year, SOCi SmartBot successfully handled over 118,000 messages on behalf of their team. SOCi SmartBot was even able to mitigate potential revenue loss, by automatically addressing 203 messages with negative sentiment at any hour of the day. Most importantly, 98% of all messaging inquires were responded to by the bot, reducing the need for human resources by nearly 100%.

“Using this tech gives us time back to make the award-winning food we’re known for while our customers get faster responses. It’s really win-win,” said Ryan.