Growing Pains: Instacart Struggles to Meet Customer Demand
Why customer happiness matters
One way to describe customer happiness is as the life source of a business. Customers who are happy with a product or service are likely to keep using said product or service and if they like it enough, they will recommend it to their friends who may become potential customers of the business.
Customer happiness is measured by a metric called the Customer Happiness Index or CHI for short (not to be confused with chai — which is very delicious and something you can probably find on Instacart). To learn more about how CHI is calculated, please read this article written by Jess Iandiorio.
Instawhat?
The San Francisco based grocery delivery startup, Instacart, has been disrupting the grocery industry since 2012, bringing back the opportunity for customers to purchase groceries online and have them delivered to their doorstep. Evidently, on-demand grocery service was provided nearly 20 years ago but was short lived. Read more about why grocery delivery 1.0 failed but why Instacart and companies in today’s on-demand delivery industry will prevail in this article written by Tanner Hackett.
The Big Cheese
Instacart’s CEO, Apoorva Mehta, was awarded “Grocery Executive of the Year” by Food Dive, an online news publisher for the food industry. Think HuffPost for food.
Despite all the credit Instacart has received for bringing innovation and convenience to how groceries are purchased, customers are claiming the grocery delivery service just isn’t all that and a bag of chips. Approximately 160 customers have reported their experience on Yelp and BBB (Better Business Bureau), contributing to Instacart’s 2 out of 5 star average.
Based on their number of stars (or lack thereof), I’d say some quality assurance is in order.
Crunchbase has not yet updated the contact e-mail for Instacart. Customers are still able to reach Instacart through the e-mail shown above but the company now advises customers to e-mail help@instacart.com.
Let’s take a closer look into what some notsohappycustomers@instacart.com are saying by reading some 1 star reviews pulled from Yelp and BBB.
Crunchbase has not yet updated the contact e-mail for Instacart. Customers are still able to reach Instacart through the e-mail shown above but the company now advises customers to e-mail help@instacart.com.
Let’s take a closer look into what some notsohappycustomers@instacart.com are saying by reading some 1 star reviews pulled from Yelp and BBB.
We repeatedly hear from Instacart customers that the quality of the produce some shoppers pick at the grocery market are spoiled despite the amount of training shoppers have to undergo as part of the hiring process. After analyzing a sample of over 2000 orders, I found that produce is what Instacart shoppers order most frequently.
We repeatedly hear from Instacart customers that the quality of the produce some shoppers pick at the grocery market are spoiled despite the amount of training shoppers have to undergo as part of the hiring process. After analyzing a sample of over 2000 orders, I found that produce is what Instacart shoppers order most frequently.
In addition to food quality, other customers are not happy about having to wait longer than expected for their food. If Instacart’s sole purpose is to provide users convenience, it would explain why these next customers give Instacart 1 star.
Customer review of Instacart from BBB.org
Customer review of Instacart from Yelp.com
What do we want? Groceries! When do we want it? Now!
One of the differentiating qualities that Instacart advertises is their ability to make same-day deliveries but according to reviews above and many more that share a similar experience, some grocery orders don’t get delivered. If “same day delivery” is advertised to be the bread and butter of the company, it begs the question: why are some customers not receiving their groceries when they want them?
A possible answer to this question can be found in the Yelp review above: “not enough shoppers in the area”. Well, with an opportunity to set your own schedule to make extra income shopping for groceries, why aren’t there enough shoppers on the platform?
After reading some shopper reviews from this article by Joseph Erbentraut, we discover that some shoppers spend time waiting for orders to come in, wasting time that could otherwise be spent making money on a different gig-economy platform. Given this information, Instacart must find a way to incentivize their shoppers to continue accepting grocery orders. How do they do this?
Also mentioned in the article by Erbentraut, shoppers are able to make $20-$25 per hour when the platform becomes busy. Instead of raising the base pay during these times, shoppers could just be informed of when Instacart expects to be busy. This next data visualization is a chart that predicts what times of day the platform is busiest. If one of the goals of Instacart is to keep current and increase the number of shoppers they have, they might consider incentivizing shoppers during peak times.
I expect some will take my analysis and insights with a grain of salt but I hope it will help encourage shoppers to gain shopper happiness, which may in turn transfer over into customer happiness.