Research pick: Eating out in India - "The role of sacrifice and service quality in the Indian restaurant industry"

Modern life in India with the emergence of the nuclear family, single-person households, late marriage, busy schedules, and more time spent away from home mean that more and more people eat alone in restaurants than ever before. A new analysis in this social shift is published in the International Journal of Business Excellence and looks at this change from the perspective of sacrifice, service value, customer satisfaction, and behavioural intentions.

Prabhat Kumar Singh Kushwah of the Department of Management at the Prestige Institute of Management in Gwalior and Pankaj Kumar Singh of the ICFAI Business School at IFHE Hyderabad (Deemed to be University), India, suggest that customers are more willing to “sacrifice” in terms of paying a higher price for their food if the service is better than that experienced in a rival establishment. However, in conflict with earlier findings by others sacrifice is not a predictor of service value, they report. This, they suggest, may be down to the fact that in an increasingly customer-led competitive environment, many restaurants are offering a lot of incentives to attract new clientele but are not working sufficiently hard to retain their original customers.

The team suggests that restaurants must innovate in terms of increasing service quality offered and service value perceived by old customers. “The right strategy for restaurants would be to provide loyalty benefits to the current customers to retain them with the restaurants and increase the utility of their services of the restaurants so that what they are receiving for what they are giving can increase in other words they need to focus on increasing service value,” the team writes.

The next step in the work will be to extend the study beyond the original clutch of restaurants examined in Delhi and Bangalore to draw more general conclusions that might apply to other cities across India. Similar work might also next consider business sectors in the service industries other than restaurants using the same tools to examine the collated data.

Kushwah, P.K.S. and Singh, P.K. (2021) ‘The role of sacrifice and service quality in the Indian restaurant industry’, Int. J. Business Excellence, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp.153–170.