How will you improve the worst customer experience post a successful order placement on Instacart?

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How will you improve the worst customer experience post a successful order placement on Instacart?

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sowjanya yaddanapudi · Answer 1 · 2022-02-15T00:01:01+0000

Before I get into the problem approach, I would like to seek a couple of clarifications on the context and the situation

Instacart helps deliver and pick up products from your local retail stores. Although Instacart is famous for grocery delivery, it’s venturing into electronics, pharmaceuticals and other types of retail store deliveries.

Clarifying scope

1. Is my role to design and work on fending off a worst customer experience as an insta cart product manager – Yes

2. Are there any resource / market constraints that I should consider - No?

3. Can I work on the problem scope in US market and expand later based on the culture of other regions – Yes

4. Instacart works in collaboration and has an experience built into Individual merchant apps, do we want to build this experience into Instacart alone and not merchant apps - > Yes

Business Goal – Our business goal is to improve the customer experience by mitigating some of the problems after a customer place an order in Instacart which will drive user engagement. A happy customer is always expected to come back and our goal is to drive engagement. Please let me know if I can proceed further.

Users:

1. Customers

2. Instacart deliveries

3. Merchants

I would like to focus on the customers as we would like to solve customers’ delivery experience in this scenario

I would like to approach the above problem by first, identifying customer needs, I would like to then look through the most prioirtized needs, secondly, think of solutions that could be implemented and recommend a solution with a metric to see help us meet our goal.

Ideally, It would be great to look into the data and see which are is being impacted the most and since we do not have the data here, I would like to go through each of these needs and prioirtized based on my customer instinct, I would like myself to stand in the shoes of a customer placing an order

Customer Needs

Needs	Priority	Possible alternatives
Order not arrived on time	P2	Yes
Damaged items delivered	P1	No
Wrong order delivered	P1	Yes
Incorrect quantity delivered	P2	No
Delivered to the wrong address	P1	Yes
Item goes out of stock due to inventory issues after order is placed	P1	No

While all the above is a priority to the customer, I would like to focus on the damaged items delivered as generally that leads to a bad customer experience and refrains them from leveraging the service again, customers expect quality in the product being delivered.

Here are some of the solutions that come to my mind for avoiding damaged items being delivered

Solution	Effort	Impact	Pro’s	Con’s
Replace the damaged items upon reporting an issue	M	M	Retain customer satisfaction	Reactive customer engagement
Refund & replace the amount to the card	M	L	Customer feels they are important	Reactive customer engagement
Build an ML model on the items with the damaged items and the local stores and other climatic conditions with which it generally happens to ensure a proactive check or a reminder to the Instacart delivery folks to incorporate a special packing to ensure item safety	H	H	In this scenario, we are trying to eliminate delivering damaged items based on the historical data available on the damaged items reported and special instructions to Instacart to ensure Item safety

Of all the solutions above, I would like to recommend the 3rd option where we are being proactive and addressing one of the issues with deliveries. We can do a A/B testing on the special instructions surfaced vs not.

North Star metric

1. # Of issues reported on damaged Items – Take a baseline metric and observe improvement with the ML model in place.

2. DAU – Secondary metric to track is the increase in the daily active usage

maryamahmad · Answer 2 · 2023-09-14T15:09:37+0000

Clarifying questions and assumptions:

Which geo are we solving for? I would assume its in the context of Instacart in USA/Canada
Are the problems new or have always existed? Assume that the problems have existed and not new

I will first start with mapping the customer journey. Then make assumption about what might be biggest pain points.

A user journey post placing an order looks like and what the pain point associated with each might be

Shopping for order begins and incases where order replacement is needed or cannot be found one needs to chat. Some pain points associated with it would be (a) There are many items that need a replacement (b) Takes investment of time. One has to continuously chat with the shopper to decide which items would need replacement
Order receival by person: In this case, the pain point might be that the order is not dropped at the right location or it takes too long to get the order
Quality of items/check against order that was placed - In this case, the pain points might be (a) that items received are abt to expire (b) items are rotten like fruits (c) it states online that item was received but in actual the item was not received

Amongst these pain-points mentioned, I believe points in 3 are the biggest pain points. One of the hardest thing with online shopping is that you cannot see the items and are placing the trust in the person shopping items for you. Here are possible product solutions to explore

Instructing employees on ensuring items being delivered are fresh vs. not fresh. This can be done by building in-product notifications or training to shoppers that they should be selecting fresh items for employees. Instacart can also take a look at data if this problem is specific to a certain set of instacart shoppers and cater these reminders/notifications to them
In certain cases, like milk/fruits/non-frozen foods, letting ppl enter by when they expect to consume so that the freshness can be gauged
Also, Instacart should look at the data if this problem is specific to a certain set of grocery shops where there might not be as many fresh items. In that case, one should let those stores know and work on building partnerships with other stores

Measuring success:

In measuring success, if the measures put in place are working or not one should look at the consumer ratings and if there is improvement in that. Today, Instacart does provide an option to rate what they liked abt the experience and one such thing to grade on are Quality of items.
We should also look at how the Instacart shoppers who are getting notificaition engaging with it. Are they engaging more with these notifications?
Similarly from consumer end we should look at how many times ppl are entering notes on when they expect to consume the item etc.

Shreyas Sali · Answer 3 · 2023-04-27T21:16:13+0000

Improve the worst customer experience post a successful order placement on Instacart

Clarifying questions

What is our goal?
Why are we improving the post-order experience?
did we hear any complaints from customers that we want to fix?

Instacarts's Mission / Vision

Instacart's mission is to ensure everyone in the world will have food, and no one will be hungry. Partner with nonprofit organizations to make this vision reality.

How Instacart operates

End users or consumers generally use the Instacart mobile or web app and place an order for groceries they are looking for. Once they place and order, the order is delivered to their doorstep or destination mentioned in the orders. Instacart is a marketplace and has two sides demand and supply. On the demand side, we have end consumers, supply side, we have grocery retail shops such as Walmart and Wholefoods, or wholesalers such as Costco. There is also a 3rd component to this marketplace app, which is a delivery person. The delivery person is responsible for picking up and delivering customer orders. These are individuals who are looking for on-will gigs and have free time to do side work and earn money.

Stakeholders

End users
Supplier or grocery retailers
Shoppers - pick up and delivery person

Prioritization - We are considering the post-order experience, and we want to prioritize end users.

Instacart has over 10MM users and considering the usage and engagement, Instacart wants to improver their overall experience so that they can become repeat customers. This will not only help end users but also Instacart to increase their engagement and eventually revenue.

Pain points - PostOrder Issues

Related orders

Wrong order delivered
Deliver to a wrong address
Quantity is incorrect
Damaged items
Bad packaging
Quality is bad
The order did not arrive on time
Unable to know the exact order status
Items are not in stock after the order placed
Order not at all delivered

Related to Shopper or delivery person

Different person deliver the order
I am not able to trust the shopper
A person is not ready to deliver to the address at the mentioned location
A person is arguing and asking for the extra tip
A person is not ready to deliver an order, or he is a fraud - For example, he is taking an order and not responding

Prioritization

I would look at volume and value to prioritize the problem. I would analyze various data points and consider the network effect of the problem and prioritize the problem. Based on that I would go with "Items are not in stock after the order is placed".

Solution

Do not deliver the out of stock items and do not do any updates and refund the remaining money [Efforts: L and Impact: L]
Proactively send a notification and inform them we will not deliver OOS items [Efforts: L and Impact: L]
Proactively send a notification and ask them if they would like to update the order with anything else instead of OOS items. [Efforts: L and Impact: M]
Take input from users proactively while taking an order [Effort: M and Impact: H]
Send a question with in-app suggestions of another store as an alternative place to pick up same item or another item from the same store [Efforts: M and Impact: M]
1. Use ML and based on the data come up with the solution.
Start a conversational channel between the end user and the bot to pick if we could get the end user's thoughts if they need alternative items, the same items from another store, or any additional items. [Efforts: H and Impact: H]

I would go with #4 as it will have M efforts and H impact.

Note: We always want to send a notification proactively to customer's to inform about any missing or OOS items.

Summary

Overall I would like to fix the Items that are not in stock after the order is placed and solve them by creating in-app suggestions for alternative stores or alternative items.

ataj · Answer 4 · 2021-04-21T14:50:09+0000

First I would start off by explaining what Instacart does. It's a marketplace where customers can order groceries, utilities etc. and we have delivery folks who go to to the markets and buy the items for the customers
Then I would clarify what worst experiences entail post order placement
1. The order gets cancelled
2. The order does not come on time and is delayed significantly
3. The order the customer gets has several wrong items or rotten items
If the interviewer says go ahead and choose the any worse experience, I can focus on giving 2-3 solutions to each of the above
1. The order gets cancelled
  1. Notify the customer ASAP about the cancellation and offer a $ coupon code as a measure of forgiveness
  2. If a customer has had bad experience and is not back on instacart, we send them reminder emails to come back with a coupon code
2. The order does not come on time and is delayed significantly
  1. Notify the customer of the delay and ETA for order delivery
  2. Before they place the order, ask the customer if it's okay to leave the delivered items in a way that they don't need to be at home
3. The order the customer gets has several wrong items or rotten items
  1. If the user is a repeat customer, give them $ back ASAP
  2. If we see some users reporting many cases like this - provide a easy way for customers to upload pictures of the rotten items and give them $ back for those items post verification ( I would likely use some sort of CV to quickly analyse if the items are rotten or not)