Problem
Dasher and Consumer communication is key to successful deliveries. Among other thing, it primarily facilitates successful deliveries at difficult drop-offs, and sets expectations when order is getting delayed. At the time of the project, the entry point is in app however the actual communication happens outside the app via phone calls/text messages (actual phone numbers are masked by Twilio). This takes the experience outside our control and exposes our users to a variety of reliability issues that are inherent with those channels like message latency and no send / read receipts.
Opportunity
By creating an in app / native communication experience we can increase successful contacts rates between Dashers and Consumers which in turn can help reduce delivery errors like “never delivered”. By making it easier to initiate conversations between the two parties, there’s an opportunity to improve CSAT ratings, and reduce contact rates to our support teams as well. And lastly, by building the first ever chat system within DD, other teams across our marketplace can potentially leverage chat across their use cases as well ie: chat with support agents or merchants.
Research
Some of our key takeaways from usability testing included participants feeling that the new chat experience was positive and simple. All participants when shown pre-canned responses understood how they were used, and compared it to that of other services like messenger and gmail that uses a similar prompt.
Participants also mentioned that finding the entry point for chat was easy, and that it was contextually closer to where they were looking for their Dashers information on the tracker card.
“Usually I receive texts to my direct cell number from the drivers random number, I much prefer having the convo happen in the app.”
“I will be very comfortable sending an image that would make the delivery process easier. I know that my personal information is protected because I am communicating with the dasher via the "Doordash" app so it is secure and safe to use.”
Results
The feature drove a clear reduction in our primary metric - Never Delivered Rate decreased by 0.05% or 11.25% relative. This translates to $11.5M in annualized cost savings.
This was primarily driven by creating an easier communication experience for Dashers and Consumers and a faster, more reliable communication channel
The percent of text messages successfully delivered increased from 83.3% to 93.8%, and the percent of delivered messages with < 1 minute of latency increased from 92.4% to 99.0%