Consumer is king. And rightly so!
When we started Holachef, it was to provide a great solution to a very basic problem in our household – what to eat today and where to get it from? Being a working couple, we ended up ordering food from outside very often (4 days a week, to be precise). While it was a convenient option – we knew we could not sustain it for long. After all, who wants to eat restaurant food every day – it wasn’t doing any good to our health conscious mindset.
The idea to start Holachef was exciting and since day 0 my vision for the brand was very simple – we can serve to others only the food that we can eat – on a daily basis.
I am a finicky customer and that was the whole premise of building Holachef. As Confucius had said, “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you.” Our customer service philosophy could not be described better than that.
As a food-tech company, we have focused on building a tech system through which all forms of feedback, queries, reviews, etc that we receive from our customers are collated and worked upon by our internal team and chefs alike.
For example, when a customer tells us that a particular dish was not great, it sets in motion a lot of things at our end – speaking with others who ordered the same food, speaking with the chef who made that meal, etc. This helps us pinpoint the exact issue and based on that our food team lists / de-lists that dish in future.
In the last one year of our existence, our spends on infrastructure, food improvement and tech systems have surpassed our marketing spends many times over. Our belief is that if the consumer experience is great, marketing will take care of itself; which is true since word-of-mouth has worked brilliantly for us.
As we turn one, our biggest learnings have been:
- Everyone takes their food very seriously. If a consumer has a great meal, we make their day. So it’s not just food that we are selling, we are also responsible for their day-to-day happiness.
- Like everything else, we are not perfect. No matter how hard we try and how superior we make our processes, we will be imperfect in a certain way. It makes us restless. The good part is that in pursuit of achieving perfection, we do the best that we can.
- Hardwork is the only way to succeed – be it deliveries or planning the daily menu – one wrong decision can spoil the user experience at many levels. Hard work cannot be discounted even for a minute.
- We are because our consumers are. Everything we do must add to their delight.
Good reviews, a positive tweet, a happy Facebook post or a cheerful image on Instagram is our daily dope. Since everything is closely monitored by our entire team, each positive feedback is applauded and cherished. A happy customer is always, ALWAYS a delight. That’s what we live for – that’s what we aimed for when we first began.
Personally, for me, the biggest joy is when my 3 year old daughter sees the Holachef menu and points to a dish and says, “I want to eat this, daddy!”
As for my wife and me, I am happy to share that being a half Maharashtrian and half Rajasthani family; we are just glad that today we have an option to enjoy a homely Puranpoli alongside a Daal Baati Churma even though we aren’t equipped to make either of it at home.