A month or so ago, I was at a newly opened restaurant in Gurgaon and I had a chance to speak to the entrepreneur behind it. I almost never miss an opportunity to speak to restaurant owners to get their feedback on whether Zomato is helpful to their business, and to understand if we are enabling them to make the right decisions about their business.

While most of our discussion centred around product improvements, and where the restaurant industry is heading, he said something that struck a chord with me. He said, “While Zomato has helped us get a lot of new customers, it wasn’t always easy. When I had just started a few months ago, I had to almost shut down because of Zomato, until I pulled up my socks and worked my a** off to survive, and succeed.”

When I asked him to elaborate, he said that when he opened his first restaurant a few months ago, he was new to everything. So new that he had to juggle 600 things at the same time. 75% of his days were spent learning and reacting to things that he didn’t know were going to break during the day. He was the chef, the ops guy, table service guy, the delivery boy, all rolled into one – a full stack employee. And with all the teething issues, Zomato made his life very hard. He said that the online presence on Zomato is relentless and was stressful for him as a new restaurant owner. Why? Because during his first week of operations (he was of course listed on Zomato), he got 16 reviews which weren’t particularly kind to him. All because of the teething issues that he was facing. He fully believed that his restaurant wasn’t worth just the 2.9 rating that it got during the first two weeks. Proof? The restaurant is now rated a healthy 4.2 on Zomato, and has more than 500 reviews.

He didn’t get an opportunity to fully stabilise his operations early on before his restaurant’s rating started to drop. While he emphasised that the feedback was necessary for him to grow, he also argued that the penalty from a bad review could have been a death sentence, especially for a new place. We heard this sentiment echoed by other partners too. Along with trying to resolve the teething issues, this becomes a huge problem and an existential worry for entrepreneurs, as a low rating may prevent new customers from visiting the restaurant.

Since one of our core missions at Zomato has been to help restaurants achieve long term success and sustainability, we decided to do something about it.

What are we doing?

Hospitality is the most fleeting of industries. A large number of restaurants cease operations within the first few months of opening. It’s extremely disappointing for us to see this, as a lot of people work very hard to get things off the ground, and then don’t get to enjoy the fruits of their labour for very long.

Along with Skillet, which will allow us to engage more openly and directly with restaurant owners, we have been making a few changes to our product, especially for new restaurants owners and start-ups.

To make sure they navigate these early days better and more productively, new restaurants will get a “beta period” on Zomato – their overall rating will only start showing after 60 days, regardless of the reviews and ratings they receive in that time. Further, the initial few reviews gathered during that 60 day period will not count towards overall rating forever – although these reviews will remain visible on their Zomato pages.

During this phase, these restaurants will get a ‘New’ tag on Zomato to help users identify them (this will be in place of the rating tag shown against a restaurant name on Zomato). This way, restaurants will get direct, valuable feedback from their customers to fix any problems that may crop up during the very early days, without worrying about the existential concern of a low restaurant rating.

This beta period will be given to all restaurants that are new on the platform, with an important exception being chain restaurants with more than 2 outlets. Chains with 2 or more outlets are usually not expected to have teething issues based on our conversations with various industry experts. The ‘New’ label will still appear on every new restaurant page, whether it’s a part of a chain or not.

Why are we doing this?

Simply put, we understand teething issues, and we need to account for that. By introducing this “beta period”, we believe new restaurants will have a better opportunity to stabilise, plug any gaps that may appear in the early days, and build great experiences for diners in the long term.

We hope that this effort will help more restaurants get that initial foothold they need, to learn and grow to their potential. And we’ll be there, every step of the way, learning and growing with them.