Real-time Reservations at ClickTable

CLICKTABLE, an online restaurant reservation platform, recently launched in New Delhi. The online app founded in 2015, is building up a place where diners have real-time reservation confirmation at their chosen restaurants. ClickTable is the brain child of 33-year-old Varun Gupta, a computer engineer from Purdue University, USA and an MBA from Columbia University, New York.

Gupta initially worked at his family’s business, Kent RO Systems Ltd for 8 years, but always wanted to do something under on his own. Speaking about his company, Gupta told us, “the idea for starting ClickTable clicked when I was repeatedly denied a reservation because of unavailability at an award-winning restaurant in South Delhi. I realised that table availability should be more transparent with prospective diners. I decided to find such platform, but none existed in India.”

“While the restaurant industry has developed at a healthy pace in terms of technological advancements over the last few years, one area that still requires some work is the front desk and customer relationship management” said Gupta while explaining what he felt was a gap in the industry.

ClickTable aims to streamline restaurant reservation process by removing the hassles of calling restaurants for availability and reservation. One of the features that make ClickTable standout is that only actual diners can review restaurants on the ClickTable platform, preventing bloggers and spammers from creating false ratings, he added.

According to Gupta the difference between expectation and reality is the biggest challenge. “We built this product after gathering information from 250 plus restaurants and internally, we believed that it’s a well thought of product. But when we launched the app, we were taken aback by the resistance shown by restaurants to implement our product. They were just not ready to make a paradigm shift from manually managing their reservations, waitlist, guest data, etc. and move to a cloud based product,” Gupta said.

This prompt realisation of the adversities pushed Gupta to initiate unlimited free on-field training to the staff as part of the sign-up process.

The company is now charting out its launch plans in major metros.  There are roughly 7000 restaurants across 10 big cities in India. ClickTable has set their target to capture five per cent of this market. “Today we have around 600 restaurants on our platform. We have started operations in Bangalore and Mumbai a few months ago and are planning to begin in Pune and Hyderabad soon,” he said.