Do things that don’t scale, urges Deliveroo boss

octomedia

3rd Mar 2016

Deliveroo Australian country manager, Levi Aron, spends about one hour a week on the bike delivering orders and another hour on the phone calling customers to ask how the service was.

Speaking at Inside Retail Academy’s event last week, Aron urged the attendees to, “do things that don’t scale”.

One of those things is keeping head office in direct contact with customers by picking up the phone to ask how their experience was. 

“When you hear it from a customer, when you hear their pain or their excitement, depending on what the situation is, it really resonates with you and you do something about it,” he said.

Deliveroo, a global restaurant delivery platform that launched in Australia late last year, recommends its business managers allocate an hour a week to call customers at random.

“If you are a smaller retailer, you have the ability to do things that don’t scale. Once you become really big you are unable to make big changes, you are unable to call a customer every single day of the week.

“Fix and find those problems now which are going to help scale later. I’m not saying don’t scale, I’m saying initially you need to do these things that will allow you the right foundations before you scale.”

Aron said that Deliveroo obsesses over details. Live data from Deliveroo’s driver app, restaurant app and a customer app show precisely how long it takes for a restaurant to receive the order, prepare the order, how long it takes for a rider to reach a restaurant and how long they will wait to receive the order before taking it to the customer. The average time from order to delivery is 32 minutes.

If things go awry, Deliveroo HQ can see if there is going to be a delay during the process and will call customers to let them know their food is going to be late, or in some cases, earlier than anticipated.

“It’s about being proactive,” Aron said. “You should know when things are about to go wrong.”