Christine Lino has been in the restaurant business her entire life.
Her parents moved from Brooklyn to Hopetown over 45 years ago, opened Big Apple Pizza with family recipes from her Italian grandmother, and built it into a 12-location operation. Christine was working shifts by the time she was five or six. Everything is still made from scratch, the same way her grandmother taught her mother, and her mother taught her.
Today, Christine and her sister run the business together. They know every corner of the operation - but for years, one problem kept getting worse: the phones.
Before Loman, phone chaos was just part of the job at Big Apple Pizza.
The restaurant ran three phone lines, and during peak hours - Friday nights, lunch rushes, the height of season - every one of them would be ringing nonstop.
Christine was often in the kitchen cooking while simultaneously fielding calls. Her servers would abandon the dining room floor to grab phones. On busy nights, she'd have to pull two or three staff members off the floor just to manage the lines. And even then, calls got missed.
"How many phone calls do you think you missed or put on hold? A lot. You have to. There's definitely times where calls were lost."
The hold times created a brutal math problem. When you've only got three people in the restaurant and a line on hold during lunch, customers aren't going to wait. "People only have a certain amount of time. I don't think you're going to wait more than a minute or two," Christine says. "I know I wouldn't."
The phones also forced an impossible triage. Do you help the customer sitting in front of you, or the one who's been on hold for three minutes? "Our phones would start beeping really loud after they're on hold for a while," Christine recalls. "So then you'd be running around and you hear the beep beep beep - I can't even imagine doing that again."
And behind all of it, the staffing crisis made everything worse. Finding reliable employees to dedicate to the phones was getting harder and more expensive every year.
Christine's decision to try Loman AI came down to three things: she couldn't find employees, she needed to cut costs, and she refused to keep putting customers on hold.
"A win-win for both parties. People didn't have to wait."
The impact on the front of the house was immediate. With Loman answering calls, Christine's team could stop the constant phone juggling and focus on the guests standing right in front of them.
No more servers abandoning tables to grab a ringing line. No more beeping hold alerts echoing through the restaurant. No more choosing between the customer on the phone and the one at the counter.
"We're able to focus on customer service when they're here in front of us rather than running crazy."
Christine didn't just hand the phones off and walk away, though. For the first couple of months, she reviewed every single call that came through Loman. She personally called back every customer who hung up or didn't place an order - not because there were problems, but because she wanted to stay ahead of any friction during the transition.
"People will adapt, you just got to trust and give it time," she explains.
That hands-on approach during the rollout paid off. Today, Christine and her team rarely think about the phones at all unless a customer specifically asks to speak with someone.
"I can attend to the customers better. We can have less staff, save money there, and I don't typically have to worry about the phone as much. Otherwise, I'd be on the phone all night, and I need to be up here with the customers making sure they're happy."
For a family restaurant that's been operating for over four decades, the shift has been transformative. Big Apple Pizza now runs with fewer front-of-house staff during peak hours without sacrificing service quality - in fact, the service has improved because the team can give their full attention to in-person guests.
Christine no longer has to choose between cooking and answering phones. Her servers no longer have to abandon tables. And the stress that came with three lines ringing off the hook during a Friday night dinner rush? Gone.
"Just the stress level of everybody, especially the girls in the front of the house and myself, is tremendously less. It's made my life a lot easier."
For Christine, who's spent nearly her entire life in this business, Loman didn't just solve a phone problem. It gave her the space to do what she's always done best: take care of her customers and keep her family's legacy alive.
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