Anastasia Zdoroviak is senior manager of customer experience (CX) at food delivery technology company DoorDash. We spoke about the approach of the CX team and how they make sense of the different customer types that influence each other’s experiences.

AG: What is the structure of the DoorDash CX team?

AZ: When I joined DoorDash as the first employee on this team, the idea was we would have one experience team, but the scope of work was so big we ended up with three teams owning different audiences. If you think about issues consumers experience, the root cause is somewhere in either Dasher (delivery professional) behavior, merchant behavior, or DoorDash communication. At the same time, we can’t demand Dashers change behaviors: If they’re not happy, it affects the consumer experience. So, we have to think about it in terms of win-wins.

AG: So, three teams to really understand the different audiences; but even with three teams, you need to work closely together. Who else do you partner with?

AZ: We also partner with the user research and support team. Those are the two best sources of information in terms of how consumers feel. [We] combine this qualitative understanding with insights from the analytics team and work with product teams and engineering to design the best solutions, improve processes, and prevent issues. For example, we’ve focused on the Dasher onboarding experience by listening to feedback, analyzing issues in support, and determining root causes of problems. We worked to improve communications so candidates know where they are in the application process earlier. We knew [the] Net Promoter Score (NPS) wasn’t the right metric to indicate improvement, so we tracked number of support interactions and observed that fewer candidates dropped during the application process.

AG: We assume CX teams at tech companies have so much data to know their customers. Is that true?

AZ: We listen to our customers by reading every comment from the NPS survey, every comment from a support interaction, everything people say about us on social media. We share consumer feedback with restaurants. We are constantly increasing the number of channels and ways to get feedback. But we are limited in tracking consumer experience to the point of making it inconvenient. For example, we don’t want restaurants to have to scan everything that goes into the delivery bag, because that would add too much time and effort. We focus on the feedback consumers are happy to give, and restaurants are interested to hear [what they should] improve upon.

AG: At Forrester, we talk about ease, effectiveness, and emotion as drivers of loyalty. How does that apply for Dashers?

AZ: We don’t want to add any extra steps to the Dasher experience that are meaningless to them. That means we don’t add screens or additional questions in the app. We only focus on clear next steps to do their job. We collect the same feedback from Dashers as we do from consumers and have learned that food delivery is a highly emotional experience for everyone involved. You’d think it’s “just pizza,” but behind every order there is a story, like a tired mom feeding hungry kids, an elderly person who doesn’t feel well and can’t go out for groceries. This gives the Dashers purpose and motivation. It’s up to us to be effective by creating the right algorithm to make sure the restaurant prepares the food on time, and that we assigned the right driver to it.

AG: What recommendations do you have for CX teams just starting out, trying to make sense of the ecosystem of customers and partners?

AZ: I would recommend five things:

  1. Analyze all the data you have, and make sure you are tagging, categorizing, and tracking it efficiently. You would want to make sure you are looking at the feedback that customers are providing: surveys, textual feedback, support in-bounds by topics, etc.
  2. Make sure that the quality of the data you are collecting is good. If agents are categorizing in-bounds incorrectly, it’s useless. If survey responses can’t be tied back to consumer accounts, they are useless.
  3. Get a great omnichannel analytical tool that will help read all the feedback and support interactions, highlight trend breaks, but, most importantly, have all that feedback in one place instead of the research team looking at surveys, the support team looking at support interactions, and the marketing team looking at social media mentions.
  4. Combine qualitative feedback with quantitative data: What are your most profitable customers saying? What issues are coming from first-time users? How do customers behave after they complain? Do they churn or reduce their order rate, and by how much?
  5. While you are doing [steps] one through three, make sure to spend at least 30% of your time talking to customers: calling them, reading through their feedback, understanding their perspective, and root-causing their experiences.

AG: Great recommendations — thanks for contributing your insights, Anastasia!

If you’re interested in learning more, look for my two upcoming reports about how to conduct research for — and improve — B2B2C experiences. If you have experience with improving B2B2C CX and would like to be included in the research, reach out to me on LinkedIn. We will gladly share our findings with you when we publish them, as a token of our appreciation for your input!