How Customer Rating on Digital Restaurant Guides Influence Consumer Satisfaction: The Zomato Platform Experience

Nowadays, anybody is a potential food critic, only requiring a smartphone to write an opinion and evaluate a restaurant through a digital app. As people trust other people's opinions - even strangers - more than the service provider's own marketing strategies, restaurant recommendation apps are great tools to analyze and improve performance. This keeps up with a recent consumer behaviour: gathering opinions that have impact on both ends of the consumer-organization relationship. This research aims to identify the relevant factors when classifying a restaurant and understand if Zomato app influences a restaurant choice, by identifying the features that lead a consumer to choose restaurant X over Y, whether it's a workday lunch, family lunches, dinners with friends or a romantic dinner. The chapter analyzes Zomato's case study: competition along catering industry dimension and the competitive position. Results point to how consumers perceive restaurant experience and how they influence others' decisions with online evaluating.