• Technology

If you are a world traveler of sorts, and also a foodie, we guess you would have noticed the stark difference in service levels between restaurants in India and abroad; and that it does not really hold our hospitality in shining light. Outside of the five star hotels in India, service levels at restaurants are woeful. This is not to say that Indians as hosts are bad, in fact otherwise, but it can be agreed upon that not enough attention is paid to how important it is to serve the customer right.
The reasons for this are many. For one, the restaurant industry suffers from a crippling shortage of talent. The best people are trained and absorbed by the hotel industry, and restaurants are left with slim pickings. You can then argue that restaurants can focus on training their own staff, but there are a couple of major roadblocks to that. Firstly, the restaurant business is easily one of the most cutthroat ones in urban India, with low margins, high input costs, and not to mention, debilitating real estate rental rates. After all that, there is hardly anything left for training the staff in an organized manner. The second problem is the sector’s high attrition rate. What is the point of spending on training when the staff is not likely to stick around for more than a year at best?
Here’s a thought. Why not transfer some of the onus of how good or bad the service could be on to the customer? And why not use technology to do so? This is the basic concept behind Titbit, an iPad app that has been developed and commercialized in India by Titbit Inc, a division of the Valuable Group.
Valuable Group has been operating in India for a while, and this is not the first time that the company has been leveraging technology to disrupt an existing sector. Its most widely known, executive director Ameya Hate tells us, for UFO Movies – a nation-wide digital cinema network that has upended the old way of distributing films.
People familiar with the cinema sector would tell you how UFO helps distributors expand into smaller centers on time, and with scale, with its digital delivery model as against the old and prohibitive way of sending prints across India. Hate is hoping for a similar sort of intervention with Titbit in the restaurants business, which has been traditionally rigid with
service processes.

Titbit is an app that solves the problems of the waiting process and does it with style that the iPad tends to bring with all its uses. A B2B offering, the Titbit app is preloaded on to iPads that are offered as digital menus to diners at the company’s client restaurants. Diners are then able to scope through the digital menu, choose their dishes and drinks, and place their order.
This sounds very simple and ordinary in text, but in operation (refer to pictures) it is beautiful-easy and superbly tailored to how the process of ordering, waiting tables, and cooking processes in kitchens work in tandem at a restaurant.

Dine easy
For the diner, Titbit helps overcome the problem of menus not saying much about the dish. Food has a lot to do with sight. If a dish looks good, you are
that much eager to order it, right? Titbit lets the diner see actual pictures of all dishes on the menu, something not possible with regular paper menus. In addition, Titbit also lets the diner to read a wider description of what the dish will have in terms of ingredients and make a better decision. This is something that a regular menu can’t and also, most waiters would not be helping you out with. An Indian waiter with complete knowledge of what a dish contains, and then being able to communicate it right, is a rare commodity.
One of the most common complaints diners have all over India is that the waiter is unable to remember and ensure that their special requests–less salt, more chili, no sugar etc.–are met with. With Titbit, the diner is in complete charge of these requests as he is able place these at the time of selecting a dish.
Moreover, dishes in a Titbit menu would have the most common requests attached to them. For example, if you are ordering a beef steak, the app would automatically ask you if want the steak rare, well done, or medium. As such, it takes the possibly busy or forgetful waiter out of the equation.

Tailor Made
The ordering process comes to a close when the diner chooses his beverages, and then checks his order out. At this time, Hate tells us, there comes a chink that cannot be overcome with technology, but can be smoothened over. He says that the logical way of developing Titbit would have been to send the order directly to the kitchen to make it a faster process. Or so it would seem.
“Working with the restaurants, we realized that waiters play one crucial role in the whole ordering process besides interfacing with the diner. He also queues up the food as best suited for both the diner and the kitchen,” says Hate.
For example, a diner may order a soup, a salad, a bottle of wine, and a plate of lamb chops. However, he is not asking for them all together, and the kitchen too can’t rustle them up altogether. Only the waiter is able to best handle in what order the food will be served in.
To get around this, Hate says, Titbit also puts an iPod Touch in the hands of the waiter. After the diner checks out his order, the order is sent to the waiter’s iPod Touch from where he is able to queue up, with timings, in what order the food would be needed.
The final step of the Titbit process is the billing process, where the restaurant can go two ways. The first is to have the billing done separately by the waiter and using the Titbit only as the ordering
tool. The second and more preferred option is to integrate with the restaurant’s POS process, where the billing is automated.

And then the Tidbits
Having seen Titbit in action, we can safely say that it does completely change the way one will order food at a restaurant. It makes the whole eating out process simpler and definitely easier. By automating how the diner looks at, researches, and orders food in a restaurant, Titbit is able to fix the huge service quality problem prevalent in Indian restaurants.
Hate tells us that restaurants also benefit from social integration into the menu, by the way of Facebook. By logging into Facebook on the Titbit app, a diner is able to share the dish he or she is having at a certain restaurant and rate it as well. That’s word-of-mouth marketing driven straight from the tables.
Of course, Titbit is a business and so there are costs for the restaurant. Hate says, however, that these costs are minimal in the long run. For one, Hate adds that his company has taken away the cost of buying iPads away from the restaurant by deploying iPads it has bought on its own costs. So the initial capital investment headache is no more there.
The restaurant pays Titbit on per billing transaction, approximately Rs.40 to Rs.45, which would be a flat charge. This cost though is easily recoverable by the restaurant, says Hate, which would benefit from a rise in the number of walk-ins, savings made on better table management, and a rise in the number of orders as it would save on ordering time.
Titbit already has about three restaurants as its clients, including one abroad. Hate says the intention is to spread to 60-odd restaurants in India by the end of the year. Once he has enough clients, he has revenue plans for brand placements e.g. placing Sula’s wines first in the wines menu. Also on the cards is a consumer-centric mobile and online food ordering app by the end of the year, where Hate hopes he will finally be able to intervene again in the painful process of ordering food online. Office folk rejoice!

Tags:
iPad, restaurant, Titbit