Who is Monbanquet.fr?

Event-planning is stressful. Deciding on the guest list, finding a location, setting a date…and of course, there’s the catering. On top of everything that needs to be organized, what if choosing the food could be easy and enjoyable? This is where Monbanquet.fr comes in.

Founded by Maxime Renault, Hugo Rivière and Mario Matar, Monbanquet.fr is an end-to-end platform that disrupts the banquet experience by offering quality, convenience and affordability for corporate event catering. They offer custom banquets made by the best local food artisans for any event organized by firms and non-profits.  Via their website, event-organizers in Paris or Lyon can be guided towards a dedicated offer made by passionate local artisans. Monbanquet.fr also offers a full-range of services, including drinks and animations.  With an affordable minimum of 150 Euros, and the ability to order up to 48 hours before the event, Monbanquet.fr hopes to make it easy to cater for any occasion, big or small, with quality, “on-demand” local creations.

The challenge: ensure confirmation notifications don’t get lost in the shuffle

For Monbanquet.fr to truly ensure a no-stress catering experience, they need to create a top-notch notification system.  “We used to only use emails for notifications. This would be for payment and delivery confirmations, or to let our artisans know they had a new order. The problem was that it often took days for these emails to get opened.  They were getting lost in the shuffle of all the junk emails people receive nowadays,” explained Mario, Monbanquet.fr’s Co-founder and CTO. “When people look for a caterer, they need to know right away whether Monbanquet.fr will be able to accompany them in organizing their event. Likewise, you need to reassure customers a few days before the event that they haven’t been forgotten. These notifications need to be read in a timely fashion, or they’re useless.”

The solution: make automated SMS their prime notification channel

This is how Monbanquet.fr got interested in SMS. “It’s common knowledge that SMS have high open and response rates, and that they get opened faster than email,” elaborated Mario, “so we started looking at APIs to send automated SMS as our main notification system.”  Monbanquet.fr tried a few solutions before discovering CALLR through a friend.  “We made the switch to CALLR for a few reasons,” explained Mario. “First, CALLR’s API was extremely simple and efficient, especially their webhooks function, which we need to notify our IT system when a client responds to a text message.  They also had very competitive pricing, and an excellent support team that really knew what they were talking about.”  Mario explained that the integration only took a few hours using JAVA.

Monbanquet.fr still uses email, but as a backup.  “Email is more of a contractual record that a business transaction has taken place, that might be handy for later use. SMS is the real-time notification that gets important information across in context.”

Today, Monbanquet.fr uses CALLR’s API to trigger SMS in three scenarios: to inform a client that a quotation has been sent, a payment has been processed on their website, or that an invoice has been sent, to remind them a few days before their event of their upcoming delivery, and to inform the artisans they partner with when a new order has been made.  “We personalize the messages with the client and salesperson’s first name. In fact, many of our clients think we’ve written the messages by hand!”

Mario added that they’ve definitely seen the value of using SMS as their main notifications.  “Responses via email used to take a few days,” he explained, “whereas with SMS it’s sped up to half a day.”

The next step: order modifications and customer feedback via SMS

Mario explained their future plans to expand the use of CALLR’s API: “We’re working on making it possible for clients to modify or cancel orders via SMS, or to fill out an NPS survey.  In both scenarios, we could do this by sending a text message containing the link to the appropriate page on our website. We’re also in the process of adding an SMS that’s sent a few minutes before an order will arrive on-site.”

Mario’s final word on using CALLR’s API? “CALLR helped us build a cohesive, end-to-end customer experience that reassures our clients that their orders have been accepted and will be delivered on time.”

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