Use Case
B2C
Operating in
40 Countries
Key Channel
Chat
Chat CSAT
90%
Products Used
It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. Foodpanda, a global online food delivery marketplace, connects hungry customers with their favourite food by enabling users to place orders from a huge selection of local restaurants, either online or via their mobile app. The company has quickly grown in popularity and is now operating in 40 countries.
Connected to over 580,000 restaurants worldwide, users are spoilt for choice, making Foodpanda one of the most successful food delivery services in the market.
The company manages all their customer service inquiries through Zendesk Support and Zendesk Chat, and although Foodpanda is relatively new to providing live chat, they already maintain a customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating of 90 percent in that channel. They’ve also developed a sound strategy to manage their large, international support team.
When rolling out live chat, Foodpanda wanted to provide chat support in multiple languages and across multiple countries. Ensuring that customer requests are handled by the right agent for the right country is no easy feat.
“We realized that in order to manage our global support team, we’d require a unique support strategy,” explained Jorge Vernetta, Global Operations Manager at Foodpanda. “That’s when we considered live chat. Using Chat, we set up each country as a different department, so our support operation is centrally managed and properly organized.”
Zendesk Chat allows support leadership to keep international teams organized, consistent, and connected—and it also provides a great user experience.
Although monitoring the performance of different regions can be challenging, Vernetta and his team are able to quickly compare the success of each of their international websites. “It’s easy to identify countries that are performing better by filtering statistics like Chat Satisfaction or Wait Times by Department,” Vernetta said. “For example, we noticed that the support team in Spain maintains a high customer satisfaction score (97 percent) on an almost daily basis.”
Hungry customers can be angry customers. This means every second spent waiting for support results in unhappiness, and that speed of response is a huge priority for Foodpanda’s support team.
Hungry customers can be angry customers. This means every second spent waiting for support results in unhappiness, and that speed of response is a huge priority for Foodpanda’s support team. The ‘hangry’ customer is why email support isn’t the best channel for Foodpanda. In fact, Foodpanda’s email satisfaction is 80 percent globally, compared to chat’s 90 percent rating.
A majority of Foodpanda’s support requests come in during peak meal-time hours over lunch and dinner. And 80 percent of their requests take place post-order when customers worry that their food won’t arrive on time. Since Foodpanda doesn’t actually know how orders are progressing, agents need to communicate with partner restaurants and delivery riders whenever a customer asks about their order status. This is when live chat comes in particularly handy, as they don’t have to put customers on hold to track down orders via a separate phone call. While phone support, as a fast and personal channel, can be a viable option for handling pressing support requests, they’ve found it requires more resources than live chat.
“Live chat is the easiest and fastest way for the customer to contact Foodpanda whenever there is a problem. Agents can handle multiple chats at once, so the wait time is reduced and customers have a better experience,” Vernetta said.
After first launching Chat, Foodpanda had difficulty coping with the increase in volume during meal-times and they missed many chats. However, by observing the chat volumes and reorder rates in the chat analytics, they were able to schedule and prepare agents to handle the increased chat loads. Today, missed chats are no longer an issue.
Foodpanda recently launched live chat support via their mobile application as well, using the Zendesk Chat SDK. In addition to making the support experience seamless to customers, this also helped deflect mobile customers from leaving negative reviews in the app store. While the review might have nothing to do with the mobile app experience, customers intuitively turned to writing reviews on the app when they were unable to find a communication channel native to the app. Today, the continuity of in-app live chat provides mobile users with the same great support experience they receive online.
From here, Foodpanda continues to grow and aims to achieve a 95 percent CSAT rating globally. In this case, speedy support and full, satisfied bellies lead to happy customers.
