Agentforce will transform ezCater’s customer experience.

ezCater, the #1 food tech platform for workplaces in the US, connects businesses with restaurants nationwide, making it easy to order food for entire workforces, meetings, and events.

Complex workplace meal orders create an opportunity to automate.

Ordering meals for a large group can be daunting. There are many factors to consider, like where to order from, how much food to get, and how to accommodate diverse dietary needs. 

The rise of hybrid work models brought new complexities, with fluctuating office occupancy and remote work patterns. Although the pandemic hit the catering business hard, ezCater recognized the chance to evolve, innovate, and use new technology to adapt to emerging customer needs. ezCater used the challenge of unpredictable office attendance as an opportunity to innovate and launched its product Relish by ezCater, which brings recurring, individually packaged meals from local restaurants to workplaces. The greater flexibility was appreciated by customers, and it created a new workflow for ezCater to manage the increased variety of meal orders.

The ability to accurately handle a variety of workplace orders—and for them to arrive on-time and as-ordered—is crucial for ezCater’s success. Accurately responding to customer requests, such as updating event headcount, modifying for dietary needs, or adding delivery information at scale requires intelligent automation that reduces manual updates and minimizes delivery errors.

To achieve this, ezCater aims to upgrade its systems to quickly update orders, anticipate future needs, and address customer issues efficiently. This will enable them to deliver increasingly complex orders on-time while embracing new workplace realities and supporting its internal staff.

Agentforce will enhance rep productivity while fostering meaningful human connections.

Agentforce—Salesforce’s suite of autonomous AI agents, services, and tools— will transform ezCater’s ordering experience by utilizing AI-powered agents to effectively handle complex tasks like dietary requirements and last-minute changes.

For instance, when an ezCater customer needs to modify a lunch order for a visiting client with diverse dietary requirements, they can easily communicate their needs using natural language. Agentforce will automatically adjust the orders, making the process as intuitive as speaking to a human. 

If a more complex issue arises—such as a sudden venue change requiring a complete reconfiguration of the catering order—Agentforce can automatically escalate the request to a human representative. This smooth transition from autonomous to human personalized support ensures that ezCater provides a flawless, stress-free experience for their customers, managing every detail with precision and efficiency.

Data Cloud unifies data to help ezCater adapt to the evolving workplace culture.

Data Cloud will unite five key systems for ezCater—including their data warehouse, CRM, and transactional systems—resulting in a single source of truth for understanding each customer’s needs. With a complete view of each customer, ezCater can not only address current needs but also anticipate future orders. For instance, if a team enjoyed an order for Taco Tuesday, we could recommend a future Taco Tuesday order that meets their dietary needs and order preferences.

Agentforce will provide personalized recommendations based on nearly two decades of catering data.

​​Agentforce will transform the restaurant discovery and ordering experience for ezCater by enabling customers to make natural language requests via chat– such as the need for gourmet options, seasonal dishes, or items similar to their last order. 

By leveraging data from millions of workplace food orders, Agentforce will enable the virtual agent to provide tailored suggestions and make order adjustments based on customer needs. For example, if a customer requests vegan and gluten-free for 20 people, the virtual agent can provide the customer with restaurants to choose from, and then once selected, provide clear structured input into ezCater’s API to calculate the fully formed order to meet the customer’s needs. Or, if a customer places an order for 20 employees, but the restaurant’s lasagna tray only serves 15, ezCater can automatically suggest menu items to supplement the order.

AI integrations into existing HR workflows will make data entry a thing of the past.

Integrating Agentforce into Slack will revolutionize how people order food for the workplace. ezCater plans to launch a public app in the Slack App Marketplace, which will allow customers to order directly within Slack. Both the person placing the order and the team members enjoying the meal will be able to interact throughout the entire process—responding to preference polls, receiving tailored recommendations, updating orders, and sharing feedback.

ezCater is also exploring HR systems integrations so that workplaces can capture employee preferences like dietary restrictions to make catering to specific teams effortless, reducing repetitive data entry and ensuring orders meet team needs.

Additionally, by centralizing all customer data, ezCater will be able to better forecast future demand. Using predictive models on Salesforce Data Cloud, ezCater will anticipate and prepare for new orders, optimize resource allocation, and stay ahead of busy periods, all while managing workloads efficiently.

Salesforce automates complex, manual tasks, unifying data across five separate systems to overcome the operational challenges of ordering and managing food for the workplace. With AI built into every application, Salesforce elevates the customer experience by reducing operational strain, and anticipates future needs, all while maintaining the high-touch service that ezCater is known for.  ​​