Why Data is Important to Understand Customer Demand

With restaurant being the highest rate of failure by not meeting a customer need. There have been certain measures to combat this failure rate and understand the customer demand. India's most-accomplished restaurateurs who have managed their human, financial, and technological resources to expand their business, and enhance shareholder value have worked on some unique measures and concepts to understand the market potentials.

Capturing the Data:  “I think the smarter restaurants are really doing it well. They are capturing the data, understanding what their customer wants and actually building a product which is required in the market in a right proportion,” shared Sahil Jain, Co-Founder, Dineout who believes that the basic problem comes when restaurants do not have the tool to capture that data. We are trying to give those restaurants a tool to capture those data. The biggest problem is the mindset shift. Today, the restaurants are spending crores of rupees in building up a nice jazzy ambience but what about the actual process, what is that consumer want. Studying that and consuming that is a biggest sort of takeaway. But if this economy gets more data driven this will be solved. There will be lesser failure rates. If we talk about US, open table has that data where restaurants can look into and refer to where if they are opening up a restaurant at an X place does it will give them a sense about what kind of restaurant they need to open. The restaurants need to have capturing these data and value these data.

With almost 70 per cent people visiting a restaurant as a form of entertainment, it has also become important for restaurant brands and consultant to educate the investor about where they would want their money to be rightly invested. Not only this, 47 per cent of millenials are more loyal to restaurants that have themes, provide entertainment.

Educating the Investor: “As a consultant it becomes our role to first educate the investor and how important is technology and data is actually. It becomes an oversight for somebody whose principle aim is to invest his money from another business and hospitality seems to be the so called ‘IT’ domain. Baking the entire operations down and making him understand that this is all going to happen is the most critical challenge for us,” said Tarun Sibal, Co-Founder, One Fine Meal who is also opening his own restaurant called ‘Titli’ in Goa soon. For this young restaurateur and consultant data has worked for multiple levels. “I have been blessed that data has always substantiated my own gut feel at times and has helped me make really informed decision,” he pointed.

Setting the Right Customer Expectation: “If I am opening a restaurant I need to set an expectation but the problem begins when we are not able to meet that expectation,” added Ajit Singh, Owner, Bareback Hospitality who ventured into the food business about nine years back with a small café at Shahpur Jat and today they have got four restaurants and a couple of delivery outlet. Anglow at Khan Market is their recent restaurant which is an Anglow-Indian restaurant and a whisky bar. So, when people walk into any restaurant and they don’t enjoy the experience and they didn’t have the kind of the experience that the restaurateur hope they would have, the restaurant will fail. “I honestly believe that everyone has a decision to make for themselves before they setup a restaurant,’’ pointed Singh.

Thus, we can say that before anyone enters into the restaurant business or start a new concept, they need to be very particular about what market potential the brand holds.