Delivery

Does your delivery experience offer these 3 things?

To drive profitable growth, restaurants need to simplify and optimize both the customer and employee experience, from menu design to how tickets are consolidated and processed in the back of the house

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September 20, 2021 by Jacqueline Mueller — SVP, smg

The consumer's food delivery habits have changed in profound ways. Yet, the quality of the food delivery experience is still lagging. When things go wrong on a third-party order, brands feel powerless to make it right. It hurts loyalty to both the brand and the third-party service. There also isn't a scalable, effective solution for managing the experience daily, weekly and monthly across this growth channel.

To solve that problem, SMG has been collecting and analyzing consumer behavior and feedback on the delivery experience since 2017. We've captured more than 500,000 data points from 20,000 consumers and non-purchasers in the US and UK — including data from restaurants and third-party delivery services like DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats and Postmates.

In this year's study, we found that nearly half of consumers ordered food for delivery in the last three months — either directly from a restaurant or from a third-party delivery service — a figure that jumps to 74% in the UK!

Below are three other findings and insights to help restaurant improve the increasingly essential delivery experience to drive business outcomes.

1. Focus on delivery order accuracy — every time.
When customers experience a problem, the party that takes the blame depends on the type of issue. If the customer had to wait 45 minutes and it was supposed to be there in 10, they blame the third-party provider. However, accuracy is the top complaint and the consumer is far more likely to blame the restaurant — by a factor of almost two — over the delivery service.

The industry is working feverishly to tackle accuracy challenges with varying degrees of success. For example, in a recent success story from Church's Chicken, we shared how the brand made specific changes to its delivery process and drove a five-point increase in both order accuracy and overall satisfaction while decreasing refunded orders despite increased order volume.

To drive profitable growth, restaurants need to simplify and optimize both the customer and employee experience, from menu design to how tickets are consolidated and processed in the back of the house. If there's a mistake on the order, the first place consumers said they go to to fix their issue is the driver themselves. That means there's no time like the present to invest in getting the right order in their hands at the outset to protect and grow loyalty.

2. Evaluate use of in-house delivery.
U.S. consumers are splitting delivery orders about half-and-half between third-party and in-house services. However, consumers who order food directly from the restaurant tend to be both considerably more satisfied and significantly more likely to order from the same restaurant again.

While half of customers overall are ordering delivery (graphic 1), that means half of customers aren't — yet. Expanding services to offer in-house delivery presents an opportunity not only to expand business to those potential customers, but to do so in a way that tends to see higher satisfaction and likelihood to return.

3. Use all delivery channels to expand your business.
For the restaurant industry as a whole, incremental third-party delivery sales growth continues to offset cannibalization. Third-party delivery platforms often enable brands to drive incremental sales by securing higher ticket prices (and sometimes even reduced discounting), access to delivery options, and exposure to new consumer audiences they might have had to pay millions in advertising to appeal to.

Delivery sales are often coming from a growing base of high-frequency restaurant consumers. More than half of U.S. consumers indicate they order four or more times per month from both a restaurant directly and third-party services. More than half of that group says third-party delivery services allow them to increase their business with restaurants.

Consider third-party delivery an extension of your business. Find ways to lean into every channel and every touchpoint to drive overall satisfaction and convert new delivery orders into highly satisfied, loyal customers. Think like a logistics company and find the fastest, best paths to get your brand to consumers and drive long-term delivery growth.