Hot Lips is a popular fine dining multi-cuisine restaurant chain in Ranchi. With over 30 years in the industry, Hot Lips has come a long way in the foodservice sector. It is situated at a mere few kilometres from the city in an open, cool and tranquil environment. The ultra-modern infrastructure and latest interiors give a royal feel of the dining and bar experience for the customers. From traditional clay food to mouth-watering Mughlai Delicacies, Hot Lips has it all.
Hot Lips does banqueting and catering as well. Some of their valuable customers include Jharkhand Government, JharCraft, Indian Oil Corporation, IRCTC, UNICEF.
Their mission is to develop an extraordinary dining experience that satisfies their guests’ grown-up tastes by understanding their culinary pulse and establishing strong relationships with people who share the same commitment towards customer service, quality, and competitive pricing.
Hot Lips has received various awards for their extraordinary performance and maintaining high standards of hygiene. Some of them include- Most Promising Multi-Cuisine Restaurant of Ranchi by Hospitality Excellence Award 2014, Best Restaurant of Ranchi presented by Big FM Ranchi and Most Hygienic Restaurant of The City presented by Ranchi Municipal Corporation. With the support from their loyal customer base and the consistency offered in their food items, they continue to flourish and be one of the top restaurants in Ranchi. It offers an accurate mix of taste, health and ambience for that enduring experience!
In Conversation With Ranjan Kumar of Hot Lips
In an exclusive conversation with The Restaurant Times, Ranjan Kumar talks of his journey in the industry, the story behind Hot Lips, ensuring employees satisfaction, and a lot more.
How To Keep Employees Happy
It is apparent that employees’ satisfaction in a restaurant plays a vital aspect of the achievement of successfully managing a restaurant. If employees are satisfied and happy with their management and workplace environment, the employees’ commitment towards the restaurant will increase and they will definitely put their best efforts in their work in order to make the company successful.
Employee turnover hurts. Not only does it create staff shortages, but it also costs restaurants significant amounts of money each year to advertise, interview, and train new employees. Kumar feels blessed to have an amazing team which has been there with him for the past 30 years.
According to Kumar, some of the ways restaurants can bolster engagement efforts to create happier, more loyal employees:
- Building a family environment:
Kumar tells that it is essential to create a workspace, where the employees feel like the members of a family. Establishing that personal relationship is very essential in the long run. He caters to the needs of his employees by personally helping them with their personal problems, which may include assistance regarding higher education for the employee’s child or assistance in building a house for the employee. This has helped him to cut down the attrition rate to a massive level.
- Financial Security:
Employees are considered the most important resource of the organisation. Restaurants spend profuse amounts of time recruiting, training and maintaining sufficient staff for their restaurant business. Kumar tells that employees need to be able to rely on being paid on a consistent basis without delays. Irrespective of the size of the restaurant business, compensation plays a huge role in maintaining the morale of employees. Kumar adds that he makes sure to increase the salaries of the employees on a yearly basis.
- Prioritizing Employee Feedback:
Most restauranteurs prioritize taking feedback from the customers, but forget about the employees. Restaurants should roll out a feedback system that’s convenient both for employee submission and administrative review. Restauranteurs can take advantage of digital platforms that use analytics to transform employee insight into actionable change.
This helps the employees to express their views and also, the restaurateurs to track good work of the employees and recognize them for the same. Overall, it aids to build a loyal workforce and keeps the employees motivated.
Take On Online Delivery Partners
According to NRAI Food and Services Report 2019, the food and beverage industry is expected to grow at a rate of 10% annually, and the online food delivery and the takeaway market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 15.25% till 2021. Identifying the opportunity, Swiggy, and Zomato decided to expand their business to smaller cities.
Hot Lips were the first ones in Ranchi to provide home delivery for their customers. According to Kumar, he is not very satisfied with the online delivery partners at the moment. Initially, he was using Zomato and Swiggy both, but then he opted out of Zomato. Kumar tells that the response was good and they would get a lot of sales per day. But the main problem was with the offers, which they used to run on their portal every month at least twice or thrice, without Kumar’s notice.
“At the time of payment, they would take their 20% commission, in addition to that the 50% charge for the offers they would run on the portal, would leave us with hardly anything for us. This was not a part of our agreement and when I questioned them, they would assure me that it wouldn’t happen the next time. But this incident happened thrice and that is when I decided to opt-out of Zomato,” says Kumar.
Since there is a huge gap between the way of having food outside in metropolitan and Tier-II/Tier-III cities, there is an imperative need for the change to happen. While there is a huge demand for on-demand food delivery in the cities, there also is a need to create job opportunities. Kumar tells that the foodservice market in Ranchi is pretty good, as people like to go out with their families twice a week to have food outside. He adds that he is just using Swiggy at the moment. They receive an average of 150 orders per day and they do not promote any offers or discounts on Swiggy.
Technology Bedding
For any restaurant across the globe, be it small or big, in a metropolitan city or in a small city, its point of sale (POS) system is its heart and soul, in fact, forty-one percent of restaurants have or will start using server handheld tablets to improve the guest experience. However, a restaurant POS does more than just order-taking.
POS systems not only helpful for operational activities but also provide a database for long-term marketing campaigns like a restaurant loyalty program, CRM solutions and customer retention.
POS systems basically function the daily task of a restaurant and initially, in traditional pos, it was only a restaurant billing software that used only for accepting orders and generating a receipt. Now the cloud-based POS system is in trend which facilitates Billing, Reporting & Analytics, Inventory Management, Customer Relationship Management and more. It reduces time, efforts and simplifies the task. Kumar has been using Posist at his outlet. It has helped him immensely to track the sales efficiently and get useful data in the form of daily reports to analyze his business more closely for successful restaurant management.
Kumar concludes by saying that the restaurant industry is a lucrative market to work in and he absolutely enjoys serving his customers by providing them with fresh, high-quality food!
