Restaurant phone-ordering software, built ticket-first.

The last three items separate serious systems from marketing sites. A voice AI that promises "order confirmed" without proof of authoritative state is not a system, it's a demo.

Pizzas with whole/left/right topping placement. Combo pricing. Required drink selections in a lunch special. Time-of-day coupons. All of these are expressible as configured menu rules, not model prompts. That's why the agent's behavior is predictable across shifts and days — you're not tuning a personality, you're tuning a schema.

The software is one half. The other half is the workflow: who fires tickets, who owns POS failures, who reviews called-in coupons. Fire It's dashboard exposes those hooks, but the operational shift on your team is real. See our implementation checklist for a walkthrough.

You can tell a phone-ordering system's design orientation by what it hands off to the kitchen. Message-first systems produce a paragraph. Voicemail-first systems produce audio. Ticket-first systems produce a structured record where every field the make-line reads matches a field the caller confirmed. Fire It is in that third camp, and the difference isn't cosmetic — it's the reason the expeditor can trust a phone ticket at the same tempo as a POS ticket and never has to translate at the pass.

There are two common ways a phone-ordering system loses money quietly. One is under-pricing modifiers because the model didn't know about a topping upcharge. The other is over-pricing a combo because the model applied a modifier price that a combo already included. Fire It routes every ticket through a server-side pricer that knows your menu's specials, combos, and modifier deltas. The caller hears the same total the ticket carries into the kitchen, and the daily reconciliation between phone tickets and POS totals stays clean.

A phone-ordering dashboard is only useful if a busy owner opens it twice a week. Fire It's reports lead with three numbers: captured tickets, average ticket size, and confirmation-latency. Everything else is a drill-down. That deliberately narrow surface exists because operators don't need forty-eight metrics — they need to know whether the system is capturing the volume it's supposed to and whether the kitchen queue is confirming quickly enough for the promise window to hold.

Feature matrices are how phone-ordering vendors are marketed and the wrong tool for how they should be evaluated. Every reasonably funded vendor has voice, aliases, and POS integrations on the list. What separates them is what happens when something goes wrong. Ask a vendor: what does the caller hear if your POS integration is down? What state does the ticket enter if the acknowledgment never arrives? What does the SMS worker do if the confirmation event fires twice? A vendor with clean answers has thought about the failure modes; a vendor with hand-waving answers has thought about the demo. Fire It's answers are documented on /features/order-accuracy and /features/live-menu-accuracy, and the behaviors are exercised in the smoke suite that runs before every deploy. Judging a phone-ordering platform on failure modes rather than feature counts is the single change that most reliably prevents the buyer's-remorse call six months into a contract.