Logistics conference

At Swiggy, enabling our Delivery Executives to fulfill their deliveries in a hassle free and quick manner is at the core of our objectives. In order to ensure the same, we keep a constant tab at understanding the key pain points via regular qualitative and quantitative data analysis and user-research. That’s how we found that a significant number of delivery executives were getting affected due to network connectivity issues leading to avoidable delays while attempting to call the customer after reaching the customer location. This also caused anxiety among the delivery executives and bad customer experience (a significant percentage of orders were getting cancelled in cases where DE had raised a request saying the customer did not respond). Network connectivity issues is an ubiquitous problem faced by multiple players in the logistics ecosystem in India. The talk would cover the various steps taken in order to solve the problem.

Outline

At Swiggy, enabling our Delivery Executives to fulfill their deliveries in a hassle free and quick manner is at the core of our objectives. In order to ensure the same, we keep a constant tab at understanding the key pain points via regular qualitative and quantitative data analysis and user-research. That’s how we found that a significant number of delivery executives were getting affected due to network connectivity issues leading to avoidable delays while attempting to call the customer after reaching the customer location. This also caused anxiety among the delivery executives and bad customer experience (~15% of orders were getting cancelled in cases where DE had raised a request saying the customer did not respond). Network connectivity issues is an ubiquitous problem faced by multiple players in the logistics ecosystem in India.

We decided to solve this problem and tackled it along multiple angles. Firstly, based on the customer number masking system (customer’s number is masked in order to ensure customer safety / privacy) that was in place, we found that drivers were hanging up calls before we could connect them to the customers and this was an awareness issue. We tackled this by adding in-app GIFs and audios educating the Delivery Executive to stay on the line till they got connected to the customer

Secondly part of the problem was due to the telephony infra, where we decided to add intelligence in the way we try to call the customers. This included sub-steps like integrating with Truecaller to increase the success rate of the calls made by our delivery executives (the customer would now see “Swiggy Priority Call” when a delivery executive called them instead of other descriptions).

We also added our own intelligence to switch the calls automatically via a different telephony player whenever we saw the success rates of calls go down. This was done at an aggregate call level as well as an individual call level.

Finally we reduced the time delivery executives had to wait after placing a call request (call request is a pre-requisite before connecting to a customer from a Customer safety / privacy point of view) to get connected to an agent who then tried calling the customer. We automated the call workflows (keeping customer privacy intact) and eliminated the need for the delivery executive to wait. Additionally we also started updating the Delivery Executive about the statuses of the call tries that were happening in the background (since known waiting times are much less painful than unknown waiting times).

Overall, after these multiple interventions we have been able to reduce the Customer not responding instances by more than 33% and bring down the average waiting times by over 2 minutes. The call success percentages increased by more than 20%.

Speaker bio

Working in the product function at Swiggy