Our business runs on technology

Technology breakup

1. Call center backend.
2. Logistics Software.

What does Tastykhana do:

We provide online food ordering and delivery logistics solutions to restaurants across Pune, we handle the entire delivery process which involves

a. Taking orders from customers – phone, online, or mobile

b. Sending orders to the restaurant.

c. Providing the logistics to deliver the order to customer.

Challenges faced and how technology has helped

Call center:
Since this is a very niche segment, employing the right people for the job was a difficult task. We needed people who not only had good verbal communication skills, but also had good food knowledge..

To overcome the problem of finding people with both skill sets, we decided to build an intelligent customer ordering system that assisted the customer care representative to process customer orders quickly even if they did not have food knowledge.

The system included the following features

Customer profiles:

1. 1. Easy retrieval of customers profile using a mobile number
   2. Store multiple addresses for each customer to avoid having to re-type the address
   3. Customer order history since many customers want to repeat past orders
   4. Customer location-based searching of restaurant, cuisine, delivery options, etc.

Restaurant Menu:

This is one of the most comprehensive and detailed part of the system. To make it easy for customer care representatives to recommend an item we have categorized each food item by:

1. Preparation style (Thick gravy, semi gravy, dry etc)
2. Color (green, brown, red, white etc)
3. Spice level (spicy, medium spicy, sweet etc)
4. Availability of item (restaurants prepare certain items at specific times, so system alerts the executive if the item is available at this time or not)

Other menu related features include:

1. 1. Linking of menu items to both the Indian as well as English versions. So search for an item like Tandoori Chicken or Murgh Tandoori returns the same result
   2. Most popular menu items for a particular restaurant based on past orders which is used to upsell to customers who are ordering from a particular restaurant for the first time
   3. which.

Online order process:

1. 1. 1. Push notification system in place to alert our customer care representatives about a lead.
      2. Automated order assignments combined with availability to ensure balanced distribution across customer care representative.
      3. Intelligent rules engine that uses customer profile to automate the order placement directly to the restaurant without any human involvement

Restaurant order process:

1. Configurable order transmission technology options based on restaurant characteristics
   1. Email for restuarants using Blackberry
   2. SMS for restaurants using mobiles
   3. Real-time order dashboard with instant order print for restaurants using computer terminals
   4. Telephone ordering, when no other technology options are viable or reliable

Delivery Logistics:

1. Auto assign algorithm
2. SMS alert system for delivery boys

Some of the major issues we face for delivery logistics are the manual processes involved such as:

1. Selecting a boy to deliver the order.
2. Giving the delivery address to boy on phone.
3. Making multiple calls to multiple delivery boys to find out status of their orders.
4. Maintaining Food Delivery Representatives shifts.

We needed to automate a significant portion of this process to make it efficient and scalable..

Solution:
We introduced detailed mapping software in our system which divides a city into multiple zones and each zone then has road level mapping. Then each zone is also associated to their nearest neighboring zones..

Food Delivery Representatives are associated to a zone where they will operate from. The system maintains scheduling details for Food Delivery Representatives to ensure accurate order assignment process based on their working schedule.(solves point 4)

To solve points 1 and 2 we created an algorithm that helped pick up the most optimal resource for the delivery of the order based on:

1. Which zone is the order originating from
2. Which zone does the order need to be delivered to.
3. How long will the order take to prepare (Again based on the order amount).

We then created an automated order notification process for our Food Delivery Representatives

To enhance the customer experience, we also created an order tracking process so that the customer is aware of his real time order status – Placed – Prepared – In route orDelivered..

Similarly, our Food Delivery Representatives also interact with our server through SMS to tell their real time status – On the Way to the Restaurant, Picked Up Parcel or Order Delivered. Only in case of SMS returning the status as ‘Issue, please call’ do our delivery managers call the concerned representative. This innovative technology has saved our company huge time, effort and money w.r.t. thousands of calls every month.