My brother Rohit and I run our stores in San Diego. If you have worked a counter anywhere in this city, you already know the next sentence: a real share of the people who walk in, and a real share of the people who call, would rather do it in Spanish. Some of them speak English fine and just prefer Spanish on the phone. Some of them don't speak much English at all. Either way, they are customers, and some of them are calling about the big orders.
When we built Maya, the AI that now answers the phones in our own stores, Spanish was not a feature we added at the end. It was one of the first things we tested, because English-only answering was failing in our stores in ways we could see every week.
What breaks when the phone only speaks English
Before Maya, the Spanish-language call at our stores went one of three ways, and none of them were good.
The first way: whoever picked up didn't speak Spanish, did their best, and the call ended with a guess. A sandwich order with the wrong bread is annoying. A catering order for a job site with the wrong count or the wrong pickup time is a lost customer, and that customer does not call back to explain why.
The second way: whoever picked up went looking for the one person on shift who speaks Spanish. That person was usually on the line, mid-rush, with their hands in an order. So now two people are off what they were doing, the customer is on hold, and the ticket times at the counter slip. Do that a few times over lunch and you feel it.
The third way: nobody picked up at all. That was already the most common outcome for every caller, in any language. Roughly 30% of restaurant calls go unanswered, and ours were no exception before we fixed it. A caller who is already less comfortable leaving a voicemail in English is even less likely to leave one. They just order somewhere else.
None of this shows up on a report. You don't get a line item for "Spanish-speaking caller hung up." You only notice it if you stand near the phone for a week, which is what we did.
Why it matters more on catering calls
The everyday order is a few dollars at stake. The catering call is where language problems get expensive. The average catering order runs $500 or more, and it comes with details that have to be right: headcount, the mix of items, dietary notes, the delivery or pickup time, a callback number, sometimes a purchase order or a name for the invoice.
Here is the arithmetic, as an illustration rather than a measured result from our stores. Say one store misses or garbles just one Spanish-language catering call a month because nobody on shift could take it properly. At a $500+ average order, that is $500 or more walking out the door each month from that one gap. Across several stores, it is more than most operators would guess, and it is money you have already paid for, through the marketing and the reputation that made the customer call you in the first place. If you want to run that math with your own call volume, the per-call value breakdown is here.
How Maya switches mid-call
We didn't want a phone menu that says "press 2 for Spanish." In our experience, a lot of callers never get past the menu, and the ones who do are already annoyed. So Maya listens to how the caller speaks and answers in that language. If a customer starts in English and switches to Spanish halfway through, which happens all the time in our stores, Maya switches with them. No transfer, no hold music, no starting over.
A typical exchange sounds something like this, as an illustration:
"Hi, I need to order for my crew tomorrow... ¿puedo hacer el pedido en español?" "Claro que sí. ¿Para cuántas personas y a qué hora lo necesita?"
From there she takes the order the same way she would in English: the items, the count, the time, the name and number. She uses the same menu, hours and pricing we set up for that store, because each store gets its own configuration. When the order is done, it is texted to the store so the team only has to make it. Maya does not push orders straight into the register; the crew still rings it in. That is deliberate for now, and it is the honest version of how it works.
Every call comes with a full transcript and recording, so a manager can go back and see exactly what was asked and what was agreed, whatever language the call was in. And if a caller asks for a person, has a complaint, or is a catering lead that deserves a personal touch, Maya warm-transfers to the manager. She introduces the situation before bridging the call, so the manager is never picking up cold.
Staff relief is the part nobody expects
The benefit I underestimated was what this did for our own people.
In most stores, the bilingual employee becomes the unofficial phone person. It isn't in their job description and they aren't paid more for it, but every Spanish-language call gets handed to them. They get pulled off the line during the rush. They get called on their day off by a coworker who needs help with a customer. Over time that wears on a person, and in this business the people who carry extra weight are the ones you can least afford to lose.
Once Maya was answering in both languages, that pressure mostly went away. Our bilingual staff still help customers at the counter, in whatever language the customer wants. They just aren't the store's only translator anymore, and the rest of the crew isn't stuck either. Nobody has to apologize to a caller for not understanding them.
There is a second, quieter benefit. A customer who gets a clear, friendly answer in their own language on the first ring tends to call back. That is a regular, and regulars are what a neighborhood store is built on.
What this is, and what it isn't
Maya answers in English and Spanish. That is what we built, tested and run today. She is not a general translation service, and we are not going to claim languages we haven't tested in our own stores.
She also isn't a replacement for a good crew. She is the reason the phone gets answered, in the caller's language, when the crew is busy doing the job they are actually there for. Across our own stores she has answered 5,200 real customer calls as of this month. Setup doesn't change your number either: you keep the store's existing line and forward it.
If you run stores in a city like ours, the question isn't really whether you have Spanish-speaking customers. You do. The question is what happens when they call and nobody can take the order. For us, the answer used to be "it depends who's on shift." Now it doesn't. If you want to hear it for yourself, book a call and we'll walk you through it, and the plans are on the pricing page.