Daily Times

LAHORE: Clarity in approach, realistic expectations, and building a strong team are some of the obligatory exercises necessary to sustain and excel in the ever-changing market, said cheetay.pk CEO Ahmed Khan on Friday.

Cheetay.pk, launched earlier this year, is an innovative and contemporary delivery service that has an extremely comprehensive website, with menus of all partner restaurants available for users to order from.

“A year ago, we asked ourselves a simple question, ‘Kya Chahiye?’ Those two words now form the basis for Cheetay’s customer-oriented business philosophy. In technical terms, we are an order facilitation and delivery service. In simpler terms, we get our customers what they want, from wherever they want from and deliver it right to their doorstep,” the CEO said during an exclusive interview with Daily Times. “It is cheaper and quicker than other delivery services as well as more flexible, according to the needs of our consumers.”

In the early days of launch, Khan said, the primary hurdle was to manage expectations both internally and externally, making sure the team was aware of what needs to be done and when, as well as managing our customer’s expectations. Other than that, he added, we constantly had to evolve our business processes to stay on top of our game.

On a query, the CEO said product as a whole and the superior technology that we are using is what makes us different from other services, as Cheetay is the only delivery service that offers real time tracking of the riders, allowing users to track their order from the time they place their order to the moment they receive it. “After my experience as MD Asia at Rocket Internet, I realised that there was a massive void in the eco-system in Pakistan and that logistics and payments were two things missing in our services industry,” he said, adding that the idea behind cheetay.pk was to fill that void and offer a comprehensive service to consumers, by starting off with logistics and then moving on to payments.

Explaining the pros and cons of launching such services, he said after realising that a lot of people were reluctant to order through a website, we had to set up a fully functioning call centre to tap into that sector of the market. “Furthermore, one obviously has to deal with daily logistical issues such as keeping the food warm in extreme cold and preventing cold food from melting in extreme heat. All of these issues combined have kept us on our toes from day one, but as a team, we have always faced them head on and resolved them rather than shying away from them,” he added.

Cheetay.pk Marketing Head Umar Sahi told Daily Times that the services were officially launched in February this year, and the response has been phenomenal. “Not only are we receiving exceedingly high number of orders on a daily basis, we have already managed to create brand evangelists in such a short period of time. The fact that we are still a very young company and have still managed to penetrate the market in the way that we have, is a testament to the remarkable response we have received from our customers,” he asserted.

On a query, Sahi said being a service that interacts with consumers on a daily basis, we knew our marketing strategy had to not just hit the mark, but absolutely burst through it. “We didn’t just want people to know what Cheetay was; we wanted to make Cheetay an inherent part of their buying behaviour. In order to do that, we didn’t just think outside the box, we stepped out of the box and trampled all over it. The idea behind our strategy is to compel people to use our service, giving them a few laughs and memorable experiences along the way,” he added.