'Ensuring Customer Delight Through Home Delivery'

The concept of home delivery in food segment was difficult in India when Dominoes entered the market in late 90s with its 30 minutes delivery scheme. Though most of the big restaurants are still counting on Dine-ins, with the recent hike in startups the concept of delivery is on a rise. A young organization Done Solutions has geared up towards transforming Indian home delivery segment.

Himanshu Khona- Director, Done Solutions in an exclusive discussion with Faiz Askari of SMEStreet. In the discussion, Himanshu highlighted the cutting edge trends that are evolving in this segment and his company’s vision and plan for capturing this market.

According to you, what are the key drivers of home delivery segment in India?

Because of high property prices and shortage of space, these startups are focusing more on takeaways and deliveries. The middle-class population now have higher spending capacity so they are always looking for new food experience. But rush and waiting for seat availability during peak time has caused them to prefer home-delivery.

How mobile technology is gaining momentum in this space?

Mobile is now a necessary part of everyone’s life. Most of us never allow ourselves to be separated from our mobile phones for too long. If you see the rise in mobile technology in the past 4 years, with the introduction of smart phones in Indian market the use of mobile phones have increased exponentially. With this increase in mobile technology most of the work is now being done via phones. Be it online payments, shopping, surfing, booking movie tickets or ordering food. Also, customers find it more convenient to order via website or mobile apps as they can take their time in customizing and deciding the order.

As an entrepreneur in this domain, what are the key challenges you are facing in this?

The concept of delivery is clearly on a rise. But managing orders and ensuring timely deliveries is a challenge for QSRs and food outlets. Another important aspect for surviving in the market is to do proper market analysis, track existing customers and have actionable analytics where restaurants are still struggling due to unorganized data.

Customer engagement is driving the services domain. What are your views on the same?

Attracting a new customer is always a difficult task, but the more difficult and also the important one is retaining the existing ones. With too many choices for customer, there are high chances of customer churning. You have to keep your customers engaged with latest offers and discounts. If you don’t let your customers know that you remember and value them, you can’t expect your customers to remember you. And for any business to flourish, especially in the F&B industry, the success depends 20% on new customers and 80% on retaining the existing ones.

What are the key exclusive offerings of your application?

As I told earlier, order management and actionable analytics is the area where QSRs are struggling. This is where DONE helps such businesses in order management by providing a cloud based order management, CRM & Analytics platform. Our in-house infrastructure to manage orders gives us an edge, and we become the last mile to process the order.

How did you start the business? Please share your experience as an entrepreneur in brief.

This began in 2010 when our team created few apps for restaurants to order food from mobile. However at that time we were too early to the market so we kept this idea on hold. In 2013, Box8 (poncho then) came to us seeking an effective solution for marking their digital presence and enhancing their order management. This gave us a thought that there might be many brands looking for similar solution. And there you go, we created a web and app ordering for them which is now called as DONE.

What are the key milestones you achieved so far?

In a short span of time, DONE has on-boarded 20 brands, 150 outlets across 3 cities, viz. Mumbai, Pune & Bangalore. Our clientele already includes Box8, Pizza Corner, Juno’s Pizza, Hangla’s, Naturals Ice-cream, RushHrs, Wok in the Box, Baskin Robbins, 6th Street Yogurt, Torrp it up, Eatsome, Khans, Zaffran, Dumadum Biryani, Kaati Zone, Eatlo etc. And I’m happy to share that we have recently accomplished the breakthrough of 1 lakh order requests too.

What is your performance or penetration level in the market?

At the moment, we have around 80k end users and monthly orders of 20k. A sign up rate of 10 new monthly customers demonstrates our steady growth and customers’ faith in us. In future, we are aiming to achieve 70% of the Chained food service market.