FEBRUARY 20189As the customer purchase cycle for food evolves in India, businesses in the space will need to look at factors that influence their decisions and overall service experience with leveraging technology to build optimal solutions to these challengessuch disruptive forces playing up in the food tech space, successful companies are the ones that are not just driving sustainable growth through technology but also deliv-ering on fulfilling these customer expectations while keeping opera-tional costs in check.As the customer purchase cycle for food evolves in India, business-es in the space will need to look at factors that influence their de-cisions - quality of food, delivery time, recommenda-tions, ease and accuracy of order and overall service expe-rience - and leverage technology to build optimal solutions to these challenges. Technology must be used to optimize traditional solu-tions, by streamlining and man-aging operations, utilize resourc-es more efficiently and improve communications. Employing data and analytics to identify new tech-niques of customer satisfaction is one such avenue that is yet to be exploited to its fullest. Gathering, analyzing and implementing cus-tomer data opens a world of oppor-tunities and is the key to unlocking success for the next generation of food delivery service. Brands can leverage it to understand their customers better to offer person-alized recommendations based on their habits and preferences from his or her profile. Using data such as food preparation time, delivery location, GPS, and real-time traf-fic updates to help dispatch driv-ers, find the most efficient route, and reducing average wait time for customers can help business build a competitive advantage and stay top of mind. The power of data can go a long way in offering unique and customized experiences and a massive potential to increase ef-ficiency. Not just better customer experiences, big data and predic-tive analytics can even help busi-nesses in expansion, by estimat-ing the profitability of a potential launch or adding a delivery zone. These are just few of the possibil-ities of how data can transform the future of food, and missing out on the data opportunity means miss-ing the opportunity to offer cus-tomer centric experiences and ROI for your business. By harnessing the power of technology across de-partments and using innovation to tap into customer megatrends, we can drive solutions to some of the tough challenges that exist today.Even though machine learn-ing engines and big data are at a nascent stage for the food busi-ness, as scale and adoption are still a challenge, it is imperative for brands to bet big on these tech solu-tions. As the space evolves, more tech advances such as ar-tificial intelligence, wearables and augmented reality are expected to make their way to the mainstream food service business. We have only witnessed the beginning of a mas-sive transformation across the en-tire food making and food delivery industry and bigger transformation is still underway. It won't be long before on-demand food delivery will be executed by, well, a robot. We will just have to wait and find out how and when consumers will embrace these advances.
< Page 8 | Page 10 >