NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

THIRUCHIRAPPALLI 620015
Department of Management Studies
MB724 Information Strategy and Management

Assignment Report on

RATER MODEL IN THE FOOD-TECH INDUSTRY

EFFECT OF IT ON THE 3Ps
By
Pooja S Benedict
215121059

Under the Guidance of

Dr B. Janarthanan
Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies

National Institute of Technology
Tiruchirappalli
27-04-2022
RATER MODEL IN THE FOOD-TECH
INDUSTRY
INTRODUCTION
As food outlets are easily accessible to consumers, India's foodservice business is expanding
quickly. The expansion is fuelled by rising household earnings and increasing the number of
working women who have made eating out necessary. As a result of the globalisation period,
numerous multinational enterprises are emerging with a diverse range of cuisines and flavours,
creating a desire among consumers to sample them. India's "food services market may reach
$48 billion by 2022," according to estimates.
Zomato is a global platform that links over 55 million consumers with restaurants in 24
countries. Every day, they strive to provide better meals to a more significant number of people
through restaurants. To ensure that restaurants are viable for home cooking, they emphasise
quality, accessibility, variety, and cost. Every day, Zomato aligns itself to four parameters:
QAAA. Zomato began as a website that supplied restaurant content to help consumers make
informed decisions before dining out, founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in
2008. Zomato is currently on a mission to become a farm to table company rather than just a
food tech company. Zomato was launched in 2008. It has about 5000 employees operating in
32 countries, helping millions of users choose where to eat from 1.4 million restaurants listed
or delivering over 28 million food orders per month. With a billion-dollar valuation in 2015,
Zomato was designated as a unicorn, and its value has since doubled. Zomato now offers
services across the whole food value chain, including restaurant ratings and reviews.
Discovering New Restaurants, ordering over the internet: Delivery of Food, ordering and
pickup, take away, and reservations for tables are other services.

RATER MODEL

The RATER Model is a method for evaluating your company's service quality. It stands for
Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy, and Responsiveness, each of which is a distinct
dimension against which your service's quality is assessed.

The RATER Model is a valuable tool for identifying and filling service shortages. The five
dimensions of the RATER model are as follows:

Reliability: This score evaluates your company's ability to consistently and reliably deliver on
its promises.

Assurance: Assurance refers to a staff member's ability to provide adequate customer service
and their ability to inspire consumers' trust and confidence.
Tangibles: The physical aspects of your stores, products, services, and marketing materials are
tangibles, and they must be appealing and of excellent quality.

Empathy is defined as the capability of workers to form positive relationships with consumers
and show sympathy and compassion for their needs.

Responsiveness: Responsiveness refers to your company's ability to provide prompt customer

service.

A gap analysis across all five dimensions can reveal the organisation’s current state, desired
future state, and necessary improvements.

OBJECTIVES
In particular, the analysis aims to:
• To look at the service quality given by Zomato.
• To explain RATER in the services of Zomato.
• To identify the extension of RATER, which can be applied in Zomato
• To identify changes in RATER in the services of Zomato over the past five years.

RATER IN THE SERVICES OF ZOMATO

RELIABILITY
• Various factors define the reliability of a foodservice sector. When a restaurant search
website promises to do something by a specific time, and they do it accordingly, the
reliability of the customer increases. In the case of Zomato, the promised time of delivery
of food to the consumers is often not accurate to the actual time it takes. As per the reports
and complaints of the customer, the delay in delivery is usually higher than 20-30 minutes.

• A reputable restaurant search website will genuinely care about resolving customer issues.
Zomato has made earnest efforts to resolve customer issues. It would refund the entire or
partial cost of stale foods delivered or if a different food item than what we bought was
returned.

• Reliability is higher when restaurant search websites insist on error-free records or

understandable information to the users. Zomato’s ratings about the restaurants, their
location and all the information concerning the restaurants are accurate. Moreover, the app
is glitch-free, unlike other popular food-delivery apps.

So, we can rate the reliability of Zomato as moderate.

ASSURANCE
• A restaurant search website is considered to show high assurance if it instils confidence in
users. The behaviour of employees, as well as the Zomato website, instils confidence in the
users. Individual attention is provided to each order placed. The status of the order set, live
tracking of the order and details of the delivery boy are all accurate.

• A customer expects safe transactions with a restaurant search website. As per the
customer’s experience, Zomato users feel safe in the transactions. It is entirely safe to use
a debit card or credit card in Zomato payment. Two-way security and OTP entering before
payment made Zomato safer.

• Customers want the search website to treat them with respect. Customers with the entered
data to be corrected and transmitted quickly. The user experience demonstrates that Zomato
cares about its customers.

• The users expect a foodservice industry to have adequate knowledge to answer the
customers' queries. Zomato has a team of experts specifically hired to handle customer
queries. As per the reports, this team would handle all customer problems efficiently.

So, we can rate assurance in the services of Zomato as high.

TANGIBILITY

• In terms of tangibility, a customer wants a restaurant search website to be modern in

appearance. Zomato is a website with a lot of features. Thanks to cutting-edge technology
such as Core PHP, the website is the most advanced.

• It is expected that the website's functions and alternatives be visually appealing. In 2020,
Zomato implemented new modern visual trends into the app to make it look fresh and
provide a pleasant experience for users.

• Customers want elements like navigation and notification to be easy to discover. The
homepage, search page, and restaurant page of Zomato were recently overhauled. It
designed a new modern and scalable UI kit to go with it. In February 2021, the app was
redesigned.

• The materials related to the services, such as apps and online orders, shall be visually
appealing, according to expectations. To create aesthetically appealing page headers,
Zomato established multiple levels of H1 and H2 subheadings in typography.

Zomato’s service quality under the tangibility dimension is rated as moderate.

EMPATHY
• It is considered to have high empathy when the foodservice industry gives users individual
attention, i.e., concerning inter-user information. Zomato gives users individual attention
by drawing data analytics and behaviour patterns.

• Users hope that the restaurant search website will have convenient operating hours for all
users. Zomato works 24 hours every day. Users can order from Zomato at their convenient
hours.

• Customers want personnel to pay attention to them individually and be aware of their
unique demands. Personalisation is one of Zomato's main focuses for its products and
engineering team. Big data analytics is assisting the food tech industry in precisely
understand client preferences.

• Expectations are that the website will have the user’s best interest at heart. As per the
reports and customer survey, Zomato doesn’t work in the user’s best interest. It charges
prices higher than the actual with the sole motive of making profits.

Customers’ perception of the service quality of Zomato under the empathy dimension is
moderate.

RESPONSIVENESS
• Employees should make information freely accessible to users, according to the
expectations. Customers want personnel to respond quickly to their requests. With big data
analytics, Zomato attempts to give quick services to its consumers. Prompt services are
feasible because of automation and machine learning.

• Customers hope that the employees will always be willing to help the users. Zomato, let go
of its 540 staff in 2021. Due to advancements in technology, most of its routine tasks like
solving customer queries are automated. So, the process is fast.

• Employees should never be too busy to react to user requests according to expectations. If
chatbots cannot resolve client issues, it takes Zomato more than a week to respond. It
usually takes more than five days to receive a refund.

According to consumer feedback, Zomato services have a low level of responsiveness.

EXTENSION OF RATER IN ZOMATO

COMMUNICATION
It is the clarity and understandability of the information given to the users. As far as Zomato is
concerned, it constantly engages with the audience by posting trendy topics, new offers and
coupons etc.

COMPETENCE
The technical expertise of the service provider is defined as competence. Zomato is an expert
in its field. It contains a vast database of restaurants and customers and is a powerful analytical
tool. The brand is aware of specific areas' culinary preferences, ordering patterns, and
behaviour through its database.

HOW HAS RATER CHANGED IN THE SERVICES OF ZOMATO IN THE PAST 5

YEARS?

The foodservice industry's service quality has changed over the past five years. With the
advancement of technology, digitalisation, and Artificial Intelligence's popularity, the quality
of service improved.

Zomato has grown its user base exponentially with the help of AI, employing data analytics to
give a curated list of restaurants on the customer's landing page depending on their location
and tastes.

They also utilise an image classifier to sort photographs into food categories and Natural
Language Processing (NLP) to allow users to search for culinary products using vernacular
phrases.

The first design system for Zomato was built in 2017. It was created to improve upon existing
features; however, it was not scalable. With the evolution of technology, Zomato began
developing a more flexible and durable solution. Designers, developers, product managers, and
other stakeholders will now be able to focus on quickly turning ideas into living products thanks
to the newest sushi design system. Zomato mapped their design system spectrum in 2022 using
Brad Frost's atomic design methodology. So, we can observe how the tangibility component of
service quality has changed over the last five years.

In 2022, Zomato will concentrate on using data and behavioural trends to personalise users'
ordering experiences on Zomato, making it easier for them to create their meals from all those
lengthy fifteen-page menus. As a result, the quality of service provided in the empathy
dimension has improved.

The security and safety of Zomato transactions have improved over time. Over 2 million users
reported losing their data in 2017. Zomato, on the other hand, improved its security measures
in 2021. For added security, additional tiers of authorisation were introduced. This phase has
increased the level of trustworthiness and assurance.
Widespread use of this technology changes how a company communicates with its customers,
allowing for more meaningful interactions and engagement. Technology advancement over the
years improved the Reliability, Assurance, Tangibility, Empathy, and Responsiveness of
Zomato services.

Fig.1 Gap between the expectation score and perception score (Source: Survey of India)

Figure 1 shows the gap between the expected score and perception score. That is the gap score.
As per the survey conducted, 100 respondents were asked to fill the questionnaire to measure
the service quality of Zomato against the factors, Reliability, Assurance, Tangibility, Empathy,
and Responsiveness. As per the survey, there is a considerable gap between what customers
expect from the foodservice sector and the customers' experience with Zomato.

Table 1: Average Gap score against various factors (Source: Survey of India)
Average Reliability gap score 0.1805
Average Assurance gap score 0.0486
Average Tangibility gap score 0.1388
Average Empathy gap score 0.144
Average Responsiveness gap score 0.25
Total 0.7619
Average 0.15238

The table shows that the average empathy gap score is the highest, and the average assurance
gap score is the lowest. So, we can infer that Zomato’s services offer high assurance, but
Responsiveness is lacking. We can also analyse that the Reliability, Tangibility and Empathy
of the benefits of Zomato are moderate. Overall, the quality of service is fair, but still,
improvements can be made.

CONCLUSION
We can deduce from the RATER results in the ZOMATO services that the User's perceptions
of ZOMATO's service quality fall short of his expectations of what an excellent service should
be. As a result, ZOMATO cannot be considered a top service provider. Any category, including
Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, and Empathy, falls short of the users'
expectations. This indicates that:

• In the instance of ZOMATO, the capacity to offer pertinent information reliably and
accurately falls short of the users' expectations.

• The personnel of ZOMATO are uncaring and do not pay attention to their customers
individually.

• The ZOMATO must improve on the aspects above to improve its service quality and boost
user happiness by improving physical arrangements, offering timely services by promises
made, more desire to assist users, and providing individual attention.

HOW HAS 3P CHANGED IN THE EMERGING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY?

People, physical evidence, and process are the extensions added to the 4 Ps of the marketing
mix (Product, Price, Place and Promotion).
PEOPLE
Jobs are being displaced by robots, artificial intelligence, and new machines because of rapid
digitisation in the real world. As a result, the demand for highly qualified employees has
increased. Does this, however, suggest that future jobs will be lost? No! The focus is now on
humans and their knowledge. Programmers will operate on machines and procedures in the
background. Tasks that are done regularly will be automated. A human will handle planning
and organisation. He will organise the robot's functions and oversee the software and
machinery. Employees conduct design thinking workshops in the production hall while robots
perform assembly work. The goal is to improve processes and goods. Furthermore, progress,
in my opinion, is critical. Tomorrow's innovation will be driven by research and development,
guided by digitalisation. The issue is how humans and technology interact. People and
technology, in my opinion, need to collaborate more aggressively. As a result, a strategic man-
machine partnership arises, capable of speeding up the future. The most valuable resource,
time, is now well utilised.
PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
For decades, the nature of digital change has been changing. We've progressed from turning
paper into numbers to using software to optimise operations, networking, software as a service
(SaaS), and the new digital economy. Before the pandemic, we were just a few years away
from reaching a tipping point where digital transformation will transition from optimising to
revolutionising business. This transformation has been fuelled by various external forces,
including climate change, trade conflicts, social upheaval, and a march toward more innovative
automation in manufacturing and supply chains. Then came the pandemic, which spurred
digital spending even more.
Digital Evolution provides the necessary development model and cultural and organisational
shift to assure a company's continued success in the digital marketplace as a digital business
approach. We've seen firms expand because of technological adoption, and we've also seen
organisations shrink due to a lack of persistence in leaping. We've seen businesses proliferate
as they adapt to the changing digital landscape, and we've also watched companies close their
doors when they fail to do so.
PROCESS
Consumers can now compare items or brand customer service based on reviews from people
who choose to share their online experiences in the digital age.
Let's pretend they're looking for a Netflix show to watch. Consumers can either read a
journalist's blog about the next hit show or rely on social media suggestions from individuals
they trust (despite having never met them in person).

Consumers today don't have to drag themselves over town in the rain seeking a unique item in
a store that isn't well-stocked. They may look for anything on the worldwide market from the
comfort of their sofa — on Amazon or similar sites – and have it delivered within an hour.

Then there's the option that Google and, increasingly, eCommerce Retail Search provides,
where consumers see listings or material depending on their online activities.

The initial consideration, functional evaluation, prospective purchases, closure, i.e., when
consumers buy brands, and post-purchase, i.e., when consumers experience them, are now all
part of the decision-making process.