Internet Making Money: Selling Lunch On MSN

During lunch, there was a lot of noise in the Beijing Information Industry Park.

The staff members came out of the office building in groups, and began eating in all kinds of restaurants with different grades and flavors.

Their faces look very young, most of them work in IT enterprises.

These natural, free and individualistic young people often have different preferences and overtime habits. Most people do not like the staff canteens of enterprises. They like and look forward to new things.

Li Jiaxi: information technology helps us achieve business model innovation. It is not easy to figure out the tastes of these young people.

However, the fast food company's "noon plate" simply won their trust and favor without any effort.

The small company, which opened in June last year, is also plain and simple. It only sends out the menu to pedestrians under the office floor.

But then the situation changed very quickly. In a few days, the number of orders it received increased to 200 at once. At the end of last year, the number of "plate" branches increased to 5, and the number of people eating "plates" every day reached 3000.

There is no physical shop in the "plate", but the only way to leave it is MSN Messenger ID.

In fact, it also has a phone number on its menu, but it is printed in a small, invisible typeface, and there are not many customers who dial this telephone to order meals.

The rapid growth of "plate" surprised colleagues. "I don't believe that MSN is their main way of ordering meals."

Liu Liceng, the boss of Wuhan duo rice bag fast food company, has browsed the home page of the plate. He thought that ordering a meal with MSN was not a good idea. The answer he got was that "over 95% of the plate" was ordered through MSN.

"MSN" helps us attract customers, and "plate" has become their good friend.

Li Jiaxi, the founder of plate, said.

Let's see how "plate" captures the group of individual target customers.

First of all, the "plate" customers are all fond of "chatting culture". The first minute they were writing code for a software outsourcing project of an American company, the cursor on the screen kept blinking, full of lines of code, and then they switched to the chat interface of instant messaging tools in the next minute, and entered in the dialog box: "Hey, buddy, what do you want to eat today?"

The relaxed way of work is generally recognized by IT enterprises. Management believes that this can stimulate the enthusiasm and creativity of employees, including allowing employees to wear slippers to work and chat at work.

Then, a nickname is called "de plate at noon (life goes forward!").

MSN began to attract their attention.

"I can't remember when I started talking to" plates, "as if the whole company was chatting with the MSN.

Qiu Yingtao, engineer of Beijing Dingxin information System Development Corp, is a "plate" Fans.

Through "paste and copy MSN ID", the customers of "plate" begin to pass word by mouth, one pass ten, ten pass hundred.

Gradually, everyone had a "lunch Secretary" in the MSN chat list.

This is actually a MSN robot program, which not only completes most of the routine ordering commands, such as "DC", which is the Chinese Pinyin command for meals, but also saves a large number of manual operator seats.

When these IT employees on robots (in fact, many customers still do not know that they face "plate" is a robot) for the first time to say, "Hello!"

The business of "plate" began.

Hello, I want to order a fast food.

"No problem. What would you like to eat?"

(MSN the robot will give a prompt to help customers switch to the menu). "Your fast food will be delivered in half an hour, thank you."

With the MSN robot working together, there are also a few artificial operators. They should be careful that some customers will suddenly come up with such unreasonable requests as "send me a hot pot".

At the same time, they have to monitor the 10:30~13:00 and 17:00~19:00 of the peak daily meals, and whether the orders processed by MSN robots can be sent to each distribution center accurately.

The business of "plate" has become a big deal when orders are processed thousands of times a day.

The production team made up of 16 chef stands in a closed kitchen several kilometers away, producing thousands of food for thousands of people here, and will arrive at the distribution center before the rush hour, and then pport the troops from each distribution center to the front of each office building.

At this time, the waiting clerk at the door began to rush towards the goal. When they appeared in front of the customer, the conversation between the customer and the plate may not be over yet. "What would you like to eat tomorrow?"

"Can I have an extra coke?"

The business model of "plate" seems simple, but copying is not easy.

A young employee of HUAWEI found that "plate" was popular and resigned immediately.

He copied MSN robots, fixed meal pages and even publicize slogans, and he didn't make money.

Finally, he found Li Jiaxi and asked, "why can't I?"

Many people think we are an e-commerce company. Actually, we are a traditional enterprise.

Li Jiaxi said.

At the beginning of the establishment of the dish, it was suggested that she should register an e-commerce company, because the delivery of fast food through the Internet was very much like B2C's e-commerce mode, but Li Jiaxi thought it was two different things.

Before the establishment of the company, Li Jiaxi carefully studied the eating habits of the "target" group of "plate". "Adding branches to the computer city is not appropriate."

Li Jiaxi said, because the small businesses there are not too fond of ordering meals online, and it is very troublesome to break through the barriers created by computer city managers.

Therefore, the business area of "plate" is much smaller than that of the network.

Not only that, but the "dish" is faced with the market which is difficult to meet, and customers will make various requests to the MSN robot every day, such as salty, cold and hot degree, beverage matching, and so on.

Behind every network meal, it is supported by a double background workload.

Each fast food is made up of a series of closely linked small tasks, such as bad weather, elevator failure, mismatched meals, and so on. If there is a detail problem, the quality of fast food that customers will get at the end will be greatly reduced.

According to statistics, 10% of Beijing's catering companies fail every month, and 10% of the new catering companies are born.

For the fast-food industry with fierce competition, the new way of publicity is only the first step to success.

In fact, those customers who love "plate" have begun to worry about the future of this small company.

IBM Research Institute in Zhongguancun software park has a large number of "plate" Fans. They kindly said to Li Jiaxi, "look at our IBM service, always put the internal management in the first place. You sometimes send the wrong meal, can you learn us?"

Li Jiaxi thinks so.

"A good idea can not guarantee the stable development of the company."

Li Jiaxi is leading a young entrepreneurial team to improve the company's operation and management capabilities. Most of them are 20 years old college graduates, full of passion and entrepreneurial ideals. Every Friday we will be together to put forward new ideas and summarize.

"Plate" operation department head Guan Peng said.

Each seminar will be late, covering topics ranging from company culture, management process to the color of lunch boxes, and prizes to old customers.

The biggest advantage of these efforts is to promote the development of this small company to specialized catering management companies.

"Plate" did not start with the cheap "shop front kitchen" mode at the beginning, "that will make us unable to get rid of the small workshop type production."

Li Jiaxi said.

The "dish" separated the kitchen and established specialized human resources, market, operation management and distribution departments.

The move has also attracted many investors and competitors. Some people have left a message on their MSN, hoping to discuss cooperation. Others say, "we also use MSN robots, we also have e-mail to make meals, you are almost done!"

In fact, there are several "plate" copies appearing every month in the park, but they will soon disappear.

"They think that MSN can be successful by replicating the meal, but that's just the tip of the iceberg."

Li Jiaxi said.

For example, after 1 years of "self-learning", the MSN robot has started to work like a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Behind it, it is a huge customer database, which is associated with each customer's address, preferences and points.

In addition, the materials used in "plate" kitchens are higher cost independent small packages, or directly from supermarkets. The ingredients used in the fast food industry such as oil, salt and monosodium glutamate are all purchased bulk "barrel" for cost reasons.

Although "plate" has not specifically publicizing this point, but Li Jiaxi firmly believes that the ultimate attraction to customers is the quality of the meal, rather than the MSN robot who is very "talk".

The "CRM" of the "plate" is only something new, and there will be more room for imagination.

Logo is a golf girl with a large plate.

The designer wants to use this Logo to express the idea of "white collar life and enjoying lunch time".

This is more like the taste of some "lazy culture", so that a MSN robot who is attentive to the host will always be able to keep up with customers and send lunch and chat.

This new approach is quite attractive to many IT employees.

Compared with 1 years ago, the IT system and management level of "plate" has been on a big step, and the biggest performance of the "plate" is that the IT system and the management process are almost completely integrated.

"Plate business" is simple, but orders from MSN robots, until fast food is delivered to customers, all information is dispatcher and analysis by IT system.

Li Jiaxi said.

In fact, as MS. Li Jiaxi said, MSN robot is just the tip of iceberg, which is characterized by "plate". It really attracts customers and is the background management.

After using the "plate" ordering system, you will find that there will be a lot of changes in the next scheduled meals. When you come to the MSN again, you are already an "acquaintance". You need not enter any more contact information.

Technically, this is not difficult at all, but this idea is a good application of CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Compared with many companies that spend a lot of money on CRM software and are always hard to assess CRM's ROI (ROI) and feel that CRM is just a "showcase" business, the CRM application of "tray" should give them a lot of inspiration.

Why do the imitators of "plate" fail to reproduce its success?

Zhang Rong, an CRM consultant at Oracle Asia Research and development center, seems that there is no barrier to technology in "plate". MSN will be used by everyone, and the ordering website is also very simple.

The secret weapon for the success of "plate" is to seize the core point of service enterprises -- customer centered, and integrate this idea into the IT system composed of MSN robot and ordering platform, thus forming a very practical CRM system, providing convenient, fast and personalized service for specific target customers, improving customer satisfaction, and effectively retaining customers.

So, after 1 years of operation, "plate" has begun to enter the stage of "stable operation" from "grabbing the market".

However, "plate" wants to make "big plate" from "small plate". It will face more challenges. "Industry competition has no absolute advantage."

Liu Li, the boss of Wuhan duo Bao Bao, said: "at present," plate "has many advantages such as market entry, new ordering mode and so on, but the trouble will also increase. For example, MSN robot is not a reliable ordering system.

What about information loss?

Compared with the real CRM system, there are still many problems to deal with.

The target group of "CRM" system "target" market is very clear. It is the IT family of Beijing Zhongguancun, Shang Di information industry base, Zhongguancun software park and so on.

This group of people, because of their busy work, did not have time to enjoy the food properly, they were the biggest consumers of lunch boxes.

In addition, their location is concentrated, and there is a great demand for ordering.

The "plate" is only aimed at the area where IT people gather, mainly through websites and customers, and a small number of publicity leaflets. The marketing cost is very low, but the effect is very good.