What improvements would you suggest for the Zomato app?

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What improvements would you suggest for the Zomato app?

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Ujjwald · Answer 1 · 2024-06-06T15:22:55+0000

Step 1 - Describe the product

Zomato started off as a dining discovery app, where you could discover restaurants that you may want to visit. Since then, it has expanded its offering and now offers restaurant delivery, and also quick commerce through its acquisition of Blinkit

Step 2 - Scope the question

Is there a specific reason to improve? Was there any feedback on any part of the app?

If there isn't I would like to focus on improving Zomato's delivery offering, because I think there are some interesting things we can do there.

When we look at Zomato's delivery offering, there are 3 sides to it :

The customer placing the order
The restaurant preparing the order
The rider picking up the order from the restaurant and delivering the order to the restaurant

Is there any specific side you want me to focus on or can I pick the customer side?

What do we mean by improvement here? Is it engagement or something else? I would look at increase in average cart value of the order placed, because that will have a direct line to revenue, but let me know if there is any other business objective.

I will try to focus on improvements that would come on both the app as well as the website.

So, to reiterate, I will focus on improvements that can be made to the customer side of the Zomato app and the main objective of this improvement is to increase the average cart value of the user in the app.

Step 3 - List user groups and finalize a user group to focus on

If we segment user groups by age, we can have the following groups

12 - 18 years
18 - 35 years
36 - 60 years
Over 60 years

For the purposes of this interview, I will focus on the 18 - 35 year age group

If we look at the attributes of this age group, we come up with the following

They are very busy and love convenience
Work hard. Party harder.
They love exploring new places/restaurants/etc.
A large user group (by number)
They are conscious of things like climate change

Let's double click on the party goers here.

Step 4 - Identify and prioritize pain points

Journey	Pain Points	Severity
Invite guests	Unable to decide who to invite to the party	NA (This is a pain point but not part of Zomato's core value proposition as of now)
Ask them what they want to eat	I don't know or forgot someone is a vegetarian or has some allergies	L ( This is a big issue because different people have different preferences)
	I am unable to curate the menu	M (There are other avenues like looking up bestselling dishes etc to curate the menu)
	I don't know what kind of foods / drinks so many people may like	L (This is something that is an issue in parties)
Order food	I can't order from so many restaurants in one go so I need to place multiple orders	L (Placing so many orders especially for people with diverse preferences is a challenge)
	I got into a meeting and completely forgot about ordering food.	S (Usually these are parties that people remember, and there will be reminders with people calling to find out about the time of the party etc.)
Food arrives and being served	There are not enough plates/glasses for the food/drinks that arrives	L ( Happens many time, and cutlery will not be provided with the restaurant)
	Food arrives late. The main course may arrive before the starters	M (People will wait and this age group doesn't really care all that much that the food has to be had in a certain order)

Based on the above, I would focus on 3 main pain points, viz.

Getting the preferences from the people invited to the party
Unable to order from multiple restaurants in one go
Not enough plates/glasses

Step 5 - Identify and prioritize solutions

Pain Point	Solution	Impact	Engineering Effort
Getting the preferences from the people invited to the party	Ask for the friends list and send them a message via whatsapp asking for their preferences	M (The whatsapp experience cannot be controlled and that is more of a chat interface)	S (A simple whatsapp integration with a custom template)
	Add your friends phone numbers from your contacts list so that we can ask them to give their preferences in the Zomato app itself	L (We can control the experience here and we can ask for things like Veg/Non-veg, allergies, cuisine recommendations)	M (A couple of screens will need to built at the hosts end as well as the invitees end)
	Input your friends' phone numbers and then read their order history (if available) to understand their preferences (dishes they want and restaurants they frequently order from). Give them the option to change their preferences before submitting to the host	L ( We can check their order history and make some decisions)	L ( We can look at the recommendation service that is being used but we will still need to add a layer on top of that
	Create a chat app, and have people added to that so that you can finalize the menu	S (People would much rather chat on whatsapp than on Zomato)	L ( We will need to build this from scratch as this is not a customer support app)
Unable to order from multiple restaurants in one go	Recommend certain carts(that will order from restaurants nearby so that the same person can go and pick it up). Have about 5 carts recommended based on the dishes to be ordered so that the host can choose 1 and that order can be placed	L (Giving some cart recommendations to the host would help. Also we can ask for the budgets and recommend carts accordingly)	L ( Creating entire carts will probably need some modelling and this will take time)
	Allow the user to create a multi-restauarnt single order and split those orders internally.	L (allow them to order multiple items from multiple restaurants and place order in one go)	M (should not be too tough from an engineering POV, seems more like an Ops issue)
Not enough plates/glasses	If it is a party order, ask if the restaurant should provide disposable cutlery	S (charges will be higher)	S (should be just an option at their end)
	In the cart, ask to add cutlery and glasses, and make an estimate to place an order on Blinkit. Just give the user the chance to edit the numbers. So you can load 20 plates in the cart, and let the user decide before finally placing the order	L (They can place an order and not forget. This could also lead to other impulse purchases like cigarettes for eg.)	S (should be a simple option on the cart page)

From the above, the following is what I would recommend.

In the restaurants page, I would have a party option

Add cutlery - Allows you to add cutlery to party orders
Multiple Restaurants One Order - You can place an order from multiple restaurants in just one
Collaborative Ordering - Give your preferences so that you can place the order based on the preferences chosen by your invitees.

But in the long term, I would invest on developing a solution where we can recommend carts based on the ordering history of all the invitees.

Step 6 - Identify Risks

With the "Multiple Restaurants One Order" feature, I would think Operations would be a challenge, especially if they are ordering from far away places. It would be good to allow orders from a certain geo location so that the same person can pick up the order on the way

In general another risk is how many people will be needed for the order. If it is an order for 20 odd people, we anyway may need more people than 1 rider.

Step 7 - Metrics

From a metrics POV, I would look at the following :

The average cart value increase pre and post this feature launch
The frequency of the party feature being used
The number of restaurants being ordered from (if this is very high in the pilot we may want to restrict orders from only 2-5)