How ConverseNow Drove Double-Digit Gains in Guest Engagement with Rime

How ConverseNow powers major consumer brands with Rime

ConverseNow is a leader in Voice AI for restaurants, powering phone and drive-thru ordering for major brands like Domino's, Hardee’s, and Wingstop. Known for their relentless focus on customer satisfaction, the ConverseNow team has built an AI platform that delivers reliable, high-quality voice ordering experiences at a national scale.

As ConverseNow expanded into new regions, they noticed something essential: store owners and their guests in different parts of the country have different expectations for ordering. What feels natural and familiar in one region can feel out of place in another.

For a company committed to delivering consistently delightful experiences across millions of interactions, this presented a meaningful opportunity. The team began looking for a solution that could support an authentic experience for every store and operate at enterprise scale.

This line of thinking led them toward one of the most foundational elements of an interaction: the voice that the guests hear when they call in or go through the drive-thru.

Discovering Rime: Authentic Voices, Built for the Real World

As the ConverseNow team explored solutions that could support more authentic, context-appropriate ordering experiences, they evaluated a wide range of voice models. Many sounded impressive in polished online demos, smooth, expressive, and technically sophisticated. But when the team tested those same voices on their actual phone lines, something changed.

The voices that felt great on a website didn’t translate well to an 8 kHz phone channel. They lost warmth, clarity, and naturalness, and sounded staticky or compressed. It became clear that not all voice models are designed for real-world, high-volume phone environments.

Rime offered something different: voices that sounded like real people with natural cadence and authenticity, but also something more. Rime’s voice models were built for high-volume phone interactions and had proven performance in large call centers.

For ConverseNow, this was a breakthrough. When they heard Rime’s voices in their phone ordering environment, they immediately recognized how different the experience felt. It sounded more natural, familiar, and authentic to the experience they were creating.

Building with Rime: Engagement and CSAT Results

Once the team validated that Rime’s voices held up in real-world phone conditions, they began introducing the new voices into their phone ordering flows. The phone channel is one of the most demanding environments for Voice AI; callers may be driving or multitasking, and the first few seconds determine whether they will stay in the flow of the interaction. At the same time, the phone channel is the only one where ConverseNow collects a formal CSAT survey at the end of the call, making it the most direct window into guest sentiment.  With Rime’s voices, the team saw an immediate difference in how guests entered the conversation. The opening greeting felt smoother. The tone felt more comfortable. And the data reflected that shift. Across deployments, engagement in the first seconds of the call improved by double digits, a meaningful outcome for a channel where tiny differences in comfort and tone can determine whether the guest continues or abandons the interaction.

“When you’re already at a 4.5 out of 5, moving to a 4.6 or 4.7 is the hard part. That’s where nuance matters, the tone, the naturalness, the first few seconds of the call. It was clear that the voice made a real impact on the phone. When guests feel comfortable right away, everything else in the call goes more smoothly.”

The result: More guests staying in the conversation, more completed orders, and higher-quality interactions and customer satisfaction across thousands of locations.

Building with Rime: Accurate, Deterministic Pronunciation for Branded Menus

In restaurant ordering, getting menu items right isn’t optional; it’s part of the brand. National chains rely on specific names, signature items, and regional specials that must sound correct every time. Many text-to-speech voice models struggle with these words. They might mispronounce items like Hand-Tossed, Green Chile, or ExtravaganZZa, which can feel jarring or unprofessional to guests.

For ConverseNow, accuracy and consistency matter, especially across thousands of stores and millions of orders per month. They needed a system that could reliably pronounce branded menu terms, without waiting for model re-training or questionable workarounds.

That’s where Rime’s unique phonetic architecture made a meaningful difference. When ConverseNow needed to adjust or refine a pronunciation, Rime made it simple. The team could record how a word should sound, add it to the Rime’s lexicon, and know with confidence that it would be used consistently across every interaction.

“Rime gave us precise control over the pronunciations that mattered to our brands. Whenever a menu term didn’t sound quite right, their team helped us update it within hours. Because it’s deterministic, we knew it would say the word correctly every time. That reliability really matters at a national scale.”

For national restaurant brands, that level of control reinforces guest trust, protects brand language, and ensures that every ordering interaction, no matter where it happens, respects the vocabulary that defines the menu.

The Drive-Thru Experience with Rime: Short, Fast, and Still Dependent on Authenticity

While the phone channel highlighted how a warm, natural voice improves early engagement, the drive-thru introduced a different set of requirements. Drive-thru ordering is short, fast-paced, and highly transactional. Guests arrive expecting quick clarity and a seamless flow from greeting to order, not a long conversational ramp-up.

“Different ordering channels and geographical regions require different conversational dynamics to maximize performance and create the best possible guest experience. Being able to customize the experience for our brand partners based on these variables has helped ConverseNow stand out!”

The drive-thru also involves a unique operational layer: an employee is always listening in and can step into the interaction if the guest needs something the AI can’t handle. Stores wanted that handoff to feel seamless, not jarring, so the AI voice had to blend naturally with how team members speak at that location.

What made Rime a strong fit for ConverseNow’s drive-thru channel was the combination of authentic voices at the store level and enterprise-class performance at scale. Rime’s voices helped each location sound right for its guests, while integrating cleanly into ConverseNow’s high-reliability architecture, built to run under real-world pressure, at busy times, across thousands of stores. This isn’t demo software; it’s a high-performance ordering system where every interaction must be consistent, predictable, and fast.

With Rime delivering authentic voices that hold up in high-volume drive-thru conditions, ConverseNow was able to provide a drive-thru experience that felt natural, familiar, and right for each location, while remaining seamless and reliable across a nationwide footprint.

Built for Enterprise Scale: Rime Fits the ConverseNow Architecture

ConverseNow operates an advanced Voice AI platform with a modular, enterprise-grade architecture that handles high-volume ordering across thousands of locations. Every component in the system needs to be reliable under load, predictable in behavior, and easy to update without introducing regressions. The platform isn’t built for demos or studio voice-overs; it’s built for real-world, real-time volume, day after day.

When evaluating voice model partners, ConverseNow needed a solution that could plug into this architecture without sacrificing performance, reliability, or control. Rime stood out not only for its unique phonetic foundation but also for its models, which can be self-hosted in the customer’s cloud environment. For ConverseNow, that meant tighter control over customer data, clearer governance, and the ability to monitor and optimize model performance directly within their own enterprise stack, without forcing sensitive traffic through third-party infrastructure.

Rime didn’t just provide better voices. It offered a technical and operational match for ConverseNow’s enterprise platform: authentic voice experiences, deterministic performance under real-world pressure, and a deployment model that preserves control over data and reliability where it matters most.

The results: Authentic Experiences, Higher Engagement, and Stronger Outcomes at Scale

With Rime integrated into both phone and drive-thru ordering, ConverseNow delivered voice experiences that felt natural, context-appropriate, and aligned with what guests expect from their local restaurant, no matter the region, store format, or channel. Across deployments, the outcomes were clear:

✔ Double-digit improvement in early-call engagement on the phone channel
Rime’s phone-optimized voices helped callers settle into the interaction more comfortably, reducing early drop-off and improving the flow of each call.

✔ Higher guest sentiment on phone orders
At already high satisfaction levels, small gains are meaningful. The nuance of an authentic, comfortable voice, especially over 8 kHz phone audio, helped lift sentiment in a channel where the first seconds shape the entire experience.

✔ A smoother, more natural drive-thru flow
A neutral, steady voice that “felt right” for each store supported clearer communication and minimized friction in short, time-sensitive drive-thru interactions.

✔ Brand-accurate pronunciations delivered instantly and consistently
Rime’s phonetic architecture and pronunciation lexicon ensured menu terms, regional items, and branded language were spoken correctly every time, reinforcing trust and protecting brand identity at scale.

✔ Predictability and reliability across ConverseNow’s national footprint
Rime fit cleanly into ConverseNow’s modular enterprise architecture, delivering deterministic behavior under load and enabling rapid updates without introducing operational risk.

Rime helped ConverseNow deliver a rare combination: authentic voices that feel right for each store, and enterprise-class reliability that holds up nationwide. The partnership allowed ConverseNow to keep pushing a world-class experience higher, especially on the phone channel, where nuance is what moves CSAT from great to exceptional. The power of Rime’s models and architecture ensured those nuances weren’t just present in a demo, but delivered consistently in the real world, at scale, in every market they serve.