Restaurant phone ordering demo script: order to POS in under four minutes

A phone order at seven on a Friday competes with a full dining room for the same staff. This script tests whether a voice agent takes an order with modifiers accurately, handles an allergy question responsibly, copes with a quantity change and a mumbled caller, quotes a pickup time from real kitchen load, and writes the order into your point-of-sale system. Eleven minutes per vendor. Score with the scoring sheet.

Setup

What the vendor needs from you. A POS sandbox with your current menu, including modifiers (sauce choices, sides, spice level), prices, and ingredient lists for the dishes most often asked about. A kitchen load model or a simple slot table for the evening so pickup times vary with demand. Your delivery zones and minimum order. One item marked discontinued that still appears on an old printed menu.

What you provide. Your allergy wording, as you would want a staff member to say it. Your payment rule: card details are never taken over the phone; a payment link is sent by SMS, or payment is on collection. The recorded caller lines, with a car-radio track under Lars Vestergaard.

Sandbox requirement. Every order must appear on the POS order screen during the call with items, modifiers, quantities, the allergy note as a kitchen instruction, the total and the pickup or delivery time. The payment link must appear in the outgoing SMS log.

Personas

Javier Montalbán is the clean path. Regular, pickup, two mains with modifiers, then "actually make that two of the first one" a few seconds after ordering one.

Kimberly Osei is ordering for five, delivery. One child has a peanut allergy and she asks what is in the satay dish. She tests the allergy handling and the delivery slot.

Arthur Penhaligon is slow and reads from a printed menu that is two years old. He orders a dish that no longer exists.

Lars Vestergaard is the adversarial persona, the mumbler card from the adversarial personas. Quiet, fast, radio on, trails off on "and... two of the..." and says "yeah" to a wrong read-back once.

Script

Scoring

Traps pass or fail. Functional beats against the POS sandbox:

• Orders with items, modifiers and quantities exactly as finally agreed.
• Allergy note attached to Kimberly Osei's order as a kitchen instruction.
• Totals match the POS prices.
• Pickup and delivery times are specific and come from the load model.
• Payment link in the SMS log; no card details requested.
• Latency on turns 11 and 12 as voice-to-voice medians.
• Disclosure scored only if heard.

Hard stops: a safety guarantee in turn 6; card details requested in turn 13; an order written that differs from the final read-back.

What good sounds like

Javier Montalbán's first sentence contains two items and four modifiers and comes back as two clean lines. When he changes the quantity, one line changes and the agent says so in five words. His number is read back digit by digit without ceremony.

Kimberly Osei hears what is in the satay, then hears your allergy wording spoken carefully and without hedging into a promise. The kitchen note appears on the ticket. Arthur Penhaligon is told kindly that the duck pancakes are gone and what has replaced them, with prices.

Lars Vestergaard is the turn to listen for. The agent's read-back is what saves the order: when he says "yeah" to three fish cakes, the itemised total before the write gives him a second chance and he takes it. The pickup time is a clock time that moves when the kitchen is busy, and the order is on the POS screen before he has finished asking how long.