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Recovering poor user experiences through design of new touchpoint

Deliveroo

Consumer product

Objective

Improve retention for the most dissatisfied customers after a poor order experience.

Success metrics

Customer retention, lifetime value, order frequency & transaction value, return on investment.

My approach

I was responsible for the research, design and set-up of the pilot. I collaborated closely with the Operations team who were responsible for the execution of the pilot. I also worked with the survey provider and data scientists to define technical requirements.

My responsibilities

Qualitative & quantitative research, service blueprinting, pilot design, monitoring and analysing pilot performance.

User & competitor research

I conducted quantitative research on customer order and interaction data to understand which customers are the least likely to reorder. I also conducted qualitative research including sentiment analysis, to understand how users were feeling and why they might not wish to reorder using Deliveroo.
I also conducted competitor research to understand how other organisations with a strong reputation for customer experience try to recover dissatisfied customers.

A mindmap showing the two research questions posed and the different sources I used.
A mindmap of the research I conducted, consisting of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an industry standard measure of customer sentiment. This project focused on detractors.

Insights

In my quantitative analysis, I uncovered a strong correlation between retention and customer satisfaction measured using Net Promoter Score (NPS). This meant that customers who were the most dissatisfied with their experience were also very unlikely to reorder using Deliveroo. This also presented an effective means to quickly identify customers who were likely to have low retention.
I also found that many NPS survey detractors were driven to submit the survey because they were very upset by their experience. Many in this group were expecting Deliveroo to take action to solve their complaint.
Through my competitor research, I found that a lot of companies that have strong reputations for good customer service provide an extra touchpoint to dissatisfied customers.

Synthesis

These insights challenged us to consider: how might we recover poor experiences by offering customers an additional touchpoint?

Ideation

Customer service best practice in this type of scenario is to offer dissatisfied customers a call back. In order to test the viability of a call back in improving retention, we decided on a small pilot in one market. The Operations team members were responsible for the call script, and training a pool of agents in making these calls.

A screenshot of the email sent out to customers after their order. A low score on this survey would trigger the call-back service loop.
A screenshot from the FigJam board detailing the call-back service in terms of the actions by the customer as well as by the Deliveroo agent and IT systems. 

Solution

I designed the pilot, including the parameters for eligible customers based on their NPS feedback. I structured the pilot as an A/B test where half of eligible customers would receive a call and the other half would not. I worked with our survey provider and data science team to ensure that the necessary data flows were in place to support the agents and to capture the pilot performance.

Evaluating the solution

This pilot ran for two months in order to accurately capture customer retention after receiving a call back. I was able to see a strong positive indication that the call-back improved customer retention, where the customers who received a call-back were significantly more likely to re-order, but also at a higher frequency and with larger basket sizes, contributing to a large difference in customer lifetime value.

This project focused on recovering retention for consumer users, which form one side of Deliveroo's three-sided marketplace.

Success metrics

Using the increased customer lifetime value and the additional operational cost for agents to make the call-backs, I was able to estimate that the return on investment for the pilot was positive.

Result

The initiative was evaluated to be a resounding success, and was scaled across the all countries Deliveroo operates in as an enduring service offering.