RESEARCH PROPOSAL

REG. AREA OF
AREA OF
NAME EMPIRICAL SIGNATURE
NO SPECIALISATION
STUDY
MARKETING
161356 Valavala Manikrishna MARKETING
&OPERATIONS

TITLE OF THE STUDY: “A study on service gaps with reference to select food delivery
applications”. (Foodpanda, swiggy)
NAME OF THE GUIDE: Lakshmi Kannan
QUALIFICATION: MA, MBA, M.Phil.
SIGNATURE OF THE GUIDE:

RAMAIAH INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT

BANGALORE - 560 054.
Batch 2016 - 2018
 INTRODUCTION
Introduction about the sector:
Food delivery market in India worth over 12.5 billion, Online food delivery is
contributing more than 7% to this market. More than 50,000 restaurants in India provides
home delivery, indicates a very high potential and untapped market in online food
delivery space. Players in the industry broadly classified into three categories.
 Fully integrated: Those who process food and delivers (Dominos, McDonalds, etc.)
 Delivery as a Service
 Aggregators: Provides a platform for customers where they could discover restaurants,
navigate through menus of different cuisines, and select the food. Delivery made by the
restaurant. In short, aggregates information about food for customers and function as an
order-generating channel for restaurants. (Swiggy, Zomato, FoodPanda etc.)
Reasons for growth in online food delivery industry:
 Increase in disposable income and deeper internet penetration of customer s
(web/mobile) .
 Restaurants tying up with online food delivery platforms claim to get a profit margin of
more than 2 to 3% than dine- INS
Marketing strategies:
Online food delivery platforms largely try to be present in all the channels that drive awareness.
For example, newspapers, television, hoardings and billboards to the social networking sites like
Facebook and Twitter, they advertise in all. “We give about 15 -30 percent discounts on ordering
through us. At the same time we have also organized several campaigns including the food
gifting programmers and buy one get one free deals
Service gaps
 Gap 1 is the distance between what customers expect and what managers think they
expect - Clearly, survey research is a key way to narrow this gap.
 Gap 2 is between management perception and the actual specification of the customer
experience - Managers need to make sure the organization is defining the level of service
they believe is needed.
 Gap 3 is from the experience specification to the delivery of the experience - Managers
need to audit the customer experience that their organization currently delivers in order to
make sure it lives up to the spec.
 Gap 4 is the gap between the delivery of the customer experience and what is
communicated to customers - All too often organizations exaggerate what will be
provided to customers, or discuss the best case rather than the likely case, raising
customer expectations and harming customer perceptions.
 Finally, Gap 5 is the gap between a customer's perception of the experience and the
customer's expectation of the service - Customers' expectations have been shaped by
 word of mouth, their personal needs and their own experiences. Routine transactional
surveys after delivering the customer experience are important for an organization to
measure customer perceptions of service.
Review of Previous literature
 Goh See-Kwong (2017) in his research paper “Consumer experiences, attitude and
behavioral intention toward online food delivery (OFD) service” Purpose - There are two
main purposes for this study. The first aims to provide a comprehensive review on the
past literature review on outsourcing in the food service business sector by identifying the
commonalities and filling in the gaps. This study adopted a qualitative research method
with data collected through physical interviews with F&B business owners based on their
knowledge, attitudes, perspectives, and needs on outsourcing to online food delivery
services. The continuous and drastic changes in the restaurant business reflects the
worthiness for further researches considering the booming potential in the foodservice
industry where online delivery service is taking up a big part of the market share.
Technology has been creating new dining experience and it has a significant role in
changing the ways customers choose to dine. It is essential for restaurant businesses to be
constantly aware of the changes occurring in consumer trend and preference as there
would be new consumerism surfacing resulted from the changes of generation.
Restaurants would also be presented with new entrants and offerings, leading to higher
expectations on the quality and benefits of the delivery service. They would be seeking
for more perceived benefits associated with the online delivery service due to the
emergence of new entrants. It is also a driving factor for businesses to keep searching for
new ways in adapting to the changes in the foodservice industry. service to their business
functions. Besides that, food related factors are hindering them from outsourcing their
delivery service to third-party online delivery services as it is deemed affect the freshness
of the meals.
 According to Emin Babakus and Gregory W. Boller (1992) in their paper “An
empirical of the SERVQUAL scale” they interpreted that the definition of servqual
suffers from a number of methodological shortcomings. The findings suggest that the
dimensionality of service quality may depend on the type of service under study. The uses
of current operationalization of service quality on the basis of gape scores and mixed-
items wording appear in the process of using SERVQUAL, the results of this study also
suggest exercising caution. Suggestions are provided along with implications for theory
development and measurement in the service marketing area.
Many propriety service quality studies have productively used SERQUAL (Parasuraman,
Zeithaml,and berry) to measure the user perception about the service and a number of
published studies have assigned the scales reliability and validity. Despite considerable
work undertaken in the area, there is no consensuses as to which of the measurement
scale is robust enough for measuring and comparing the service quality. One of the major
contributions of Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1998 was to provide a terse definition
of service quality as a global judgement, or attitude relating to the superiority of the
service, and explicated it as involving evaluation of the outcome.
 Yun Lok Lee, Nerilee Hing, 1995 The easy and inexpensive approach towards the
applicability of the servqual instruments helps in identifying the strengths and
 weaknesses of the restaurant for the management to review and refine there marketing
strategies and reduce their weaknesses. It helps restaurants in identifying the service
which need to be considered very important and the service quality to be delivered.
Zomato started by focusing in restaurant search and discovery model and has gradually
progressed by providing accurate and valuable data to its users. It has expanded itself to
own the entire food experience and has started offering cashless payment mechanism,
table reservation, online ordering, white label app and zomato base. It has expended its
base in the user service-providing sector and is keen in keeping the quality of service
provided up to the mark. In this research paper we aim to apply the 5 parameters of
service quality to analysis the deviations between the expected and perceived service
quality offered by zomato to its clients.
 Patabandige, G.M.J.,1 and Yapa, S.T.W.S (2016) in there research paper “consumer
satisfaction of multinational fast food outlets with the service quality and other
influencing factors in the western province of sri lanka” have analyzed about the
knowledge gap regarding the outcomes of any researched carried out in the same context;
this research aimed on to identify expected and actual service quality separately in fast
food outlets in Sri Lanka, to examine the customer satisfaction in the fast food outlets in
Sri Lanka and to identify the most expected service quality dimension by Sri Lankans
when it comes to fast food. According to the analysis, the gaps in all dimensions are
significantly important.

 C.P Rahul Raj and Seshu Babu (2012) in there research paper “A study on approaches
to build cross-platform mobile applications and criteria to select appropriate approach”.
They said that Tolety Mobile phones have become an inevitable part of day-to-day life
and so do the mobile phone applications. User expectations about the applications are
remarkably high. It is a challenge for the application vendors to provide versatile
applications in this competitive market in a short time. The challenge is even more if the
application is targeted for multiple platforms. Cross platform mobile application, tools are
of great help in this scenario. These tools support to develop the applications for multiple
platforms in less time. However cross platform application development is also not
seamless, it has its own fallacies and pitfalls. The application vendors have to face many
challenges in cross platform application development. The article targets at bringing
awareness on such issues and provides information to make a suitable choice.

Note: I wrote the above review to relate mobile applications used for online food delivery

Statement of the problem

Keeping in view the significance of service gaps and customer satisfaction, a study is designed to
examine the impact of service delivery as an independent variable on dependent variable i.e. customer
satisfaction. Organization tries to have constant customer satisfaction with the service provided by
them. Hence, services gaps are considered as most important aspect. Even though, customer
satisfaction is a feeling, which is differed person to person. The present study is initiated to find out the
impact of service gaps on customer satisfaction by using Gap analysis.

Objectives of the study:

1).To ascertain the factors affecting the choice of food delivery applications.

2).To identify the performed food delivery app.

3).To understand the widest service gap with reference to food delivery app.

Scope of the study:

This study will be undertaken with the objective of finding out the impact of the service quality
on customer‘s satisfaction in online food delivery applications (fooodpanda, swiggy). For this
study, GAP (SERVQUAL) analyses is evaluated. Service facility and accessories, convenience
and supporting service, customer value, customer loyalty, appraise customer satisfaction.

Hypothesis:
H0: Timely delivery is not a significant factor affecting the choice of food delivery app.

H1: Timely delivery is a significant factor affecting the choice of food delivery app.

Methodology:
Sources of data:

Primary data from the customers who are using app based food services by using questionnaire

Secondary data provided by various websites, magazines, Journals, Research papers

Sample Units: 100

Research Design: Descriptive

Tools for testing/Plan for analysis

Chi-square

Limitations of the study:

This paper attempts to illustrate the factors that might affect customer satisfaction in the food
applications.

 The impact of the certain environmental variables and their influence in shaping services need
to be further explored.

 Time constraint

 This study also does not separate the population sample into separate geographical locations.
 Questionnaire

Dear Respondent,
I Valavala Manikrishna pursuing PGDM from Ramaiah Institute of
Management conducting a research study titled “A study on service gaps with reference to
select food delivery applications”. Please fill the questionnaire for the collection of primary
data. I assure you that the information will be kept confidential and only be used for academic
purposes.

Name:
Gender
 Male
 Female
 Other
Age
 16-25 Years
 26-35 Years
 36-45 Years
 46-60 Years
 Above 60 Years
Educational Qualification
 Less than secondary school
 Secondary school
 Bachelor Degree
 Master Degree or Above
Occupation
 Student
 Employee
 Home maker
Monthly Income
 Rs.5000 to 15000
 Rs.15001 to 30000
 Rs.30001 to 40000
 Above Rs.40000
1. Are you a smartphone or tablet user?
 Yes
 No
2. Where do you prefer ordering food
 Mobile applications
  Websites
 Telephone
3. Do you order food on applications?
 Yes
 No
4. What are the food delivery applications do you prefer to order food
 .Foodpanda
 Swiggy
 Zomato
 Box8
 Others:
5. How often do you think you would use this app service?
a).Everyday
b).Two or three times a week
c).Once a week
d).Once a month
e).Never
6. What days of the week would you mostly likely use the app service?
a).Weekdays
b).Weekends
7. When you would most likely use food delivery service:
 Mornings (breakfast)
 Noontime (lunch)
 Evening (break/snacks)
 Night (dinner)

8. Please rate the factors that would most influence your decision to use food delivery app:
Strongly Strongly
Disagree Agree

1 2 3 4 5

1 2 3 4 5

Price

Service quality
Menu
Quality of food delivery

9. Rate our food delivery person on the following:

1 2 3 4 5

Appearance

On-time delivery
Accuracy of package

10. Rate customer service representatives of food delivery applicant on the following:
1 2 3 4 5

Ability to answer questions

On-hold time
Friendliness

11. How do you rank different food delivery service providers?(rank from 1 to 5)
Foodpanda ( )
Swiggy ( )
Zomato ( )
BOX8 ( )
Faasos ( )