Zomato to share customer contact with restaurants

MUMBAI: In a win for the restaurant industry, Zomato has agreed to share customers’ phone numbers with eateries after seeking consent from users, the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) said. The restaurant industry had been at loggerheads with food delivery platforms – Zomato and Swiggy – over their refusal to share consumer data, which the eateries claimed to be an unfair practice. The move, restaurateurs said, will allow them to know who their customers are and offer a better experience by fixing issues that cannot be addressed adequately through online aggregator platforms. For instance, restaurants can now step in if there’s a problem with the order or if the eateries want to confirm some order details with consumers, Gauri Devidayal, partner at Food Matters told TOI. Currently, there’s an option for consumers to call a restaurant, but the eateries cannot contact them directly. Zomato couldn’t be immediately reached for a comment. Getting consumers’ phone number will also allow restaurants to figure out if the consumer visits their offline stores besides giving them data about the area from which they are getting orders. To be sure, Zomato and Swiggy currently share select macro-level data with restaurants like the number of people ordering from a certain radius, the time taken by a restaurant to prepare orders but not consumer-specific details, said Devidayal.“As of now, we didn’t know how often a customer is ordering on Zomato and Swiggy. In a way, we are blind-sighted and our marketing costs are not funneled properly. When a customer walks into our offline store, we get all the data,” said Sagar Daryani, president at NRAI and co-founder and CEO at Wow! Momo Foods, adding that the association is in talks with Swiggy to implement a similar move. Restaurants and food delivery platforms can work together to make consumer transactions more personalised going ahead, said Daryani.