Postmates laid off all its city managers yesterday
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I once ordered food from a place maybe 10-15 blocks away. It took ~hours~ for the food to arrive because the delivery driver decided to take an hour phone call right down the street, food in hand. We had to go find him, as support was non-existent. A little while later they offered to credit $3 for the issue: not even covering the delivery fee we paid to go hunt down our own food. This is a typical experience: anytime anything goes wrong Postmates support is worthless.
Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc.
Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong.
The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it).
In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc.
It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is.
EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost.
Honestly, I just refused to run customer service like Comcast. I didn't want to contribute to what I think is one of the worst trends in business today. I didn't really care if it was good for the business or not.
>>Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help?
I worked for a year or so in call centers and I've worked a lot of crappy retail jobs in my life, so that was its own form of training I found very useful.
As for technology, we use Help Scout, Google Voice, Acuity Scheduling, Stitch, and Agile CRM. I can't remember what we use for postage and printing labels... it's pretty decent though. Nothing that spectacular or groundbreaking. Our online shop is powered by WordPress and various plugins, which works pretty well and is funny to talk about here on Hacker News.
Our warehouse manager reconfigured all of our USPS packaging and saved us a lot of money using various different types of flat rate based on zip code, that was a big cost savings with no impact to delivery time. That probably took the longest; getting logistics software to work well with our inventory management system and printing labels/postage properly. We did it by hand on USPS.com for months and managed inventory in Excel. But like anything else, you do it that way as a startup until it's too painful then you figure out a solution.
There is one notable exception, and they seem to be destroying their competition. Scaling doesn't appear to be a problem either. Amazon are doing pretty well. Bezos is known to indoctrinate his employees with a few strong principles, and customer obsession is #1.
Their straight-up customer support is outsourced, but works well enough from a scaling perspective. Given how large the company is, I also agree that they get an A- at worst.
But more importantly, their domination of logistics is a truly impressive feat. There is a constant flow of articles on HN, reddit, and everywhere else about how Amazon's prices are no longer the cheapest and how they are a monopoly and how you should shop around and JET.com and blah blah.
No one cares that it's not the cheapest. It's almost like people forgot that 10 years ago, buying things online and dealing with horrendous shipping was a nightmare, complete pain in the ass, and took forever. Amazon decided to grab USPS by the neck and make them work Sundays (how do you get a government institution to do that?!) and develop their own logistics network to deliver many items same-day, or even within an hour. It's truly an amazing feat that puts customers' minds at ease; there is no wonder why there is such loyalty to Amazon.
Solving that customer problem is like an act of God to the masses.
Also, customer service in that space is costly, particularly because these businesses already operate at a loss to gain market share.
I am not surprised their customer service has gone further downhill.
Conway's law is pretty evident there in that the lack of care for customers is reflected in the lack of engagement between management and the agents and team leads.
I'm not sure which which service for finding cheap airline tickets was posted here, HN will jump on this for me I'm sure, but I recall them saying from day 1 that CS was their focus.
As I set up my own service based business I got a CS phone number and when asked why before I have customers, I said: "We need to be ready to respond to issues long before we're needed".
Postmates, on the other hand, has absolutely disastrous support and consistently laughable "resolutions" as the parent comment noted. Postmates is one of those things that felt like magic the first time I used it in the early days when they were the only game in town, but they just got so surpassed by competitors to the point where I hate it. Their "taxes+fees" are ridiculous for an inferior product. UberEats gives me a flat $4.99 plus taxes that actually reflect legitimate taxes. Postmates, on the other hand, is a minimum of $3.99, often more, plus maybe it's surging, plus the "taxes and fees" is often some obscene amount (Tacolicious seems to have a $4-5 "fee" on Postmates), oh and if you're treating yourself to a small fast food order there will be another $2 "small order fee."
The last straw for me was when they started adding "walking" postmates, who would literally walk an order from ~40 minutes away when I'm paying them $10-ish to deliver it. Then when I complained and (half-jokingly) suggested they give people paying $10 for delivery the option to not have a walking postmate deliver it because my food was extremely cold, I got the typical Postmates support brush-off. Utter joke of a service.
Yes, I am Mad On The Internet.
Are you sure it was an UberEats order and not their own lunch or something?
You may disagree (for yourself as a customer), but there's no reason to believe your preference is held by a majority of the total addressable market (by user count or profit margin), let alone that everyone else has a blind spot.
It may be that relatively few users share your willingness to pay for support (which seems very possible to me), or even that they've tested different approaches to support and measured how much support actually affects a customer's future purchases - ie, revealed preferences/values. In that case, it wouldn't be a blind spot, it would be that they have better data than any of us do.
I find that companies driven more by hubris and marketing's version of data science, are inherently opposed to boots-on-the-ground service operations. Is the company's valuation driven by its customers or by promises to investors? I don't Postmates but I suspect it's the later. It's almost as if the more you focus on the customer, the more you expose the weaknesses and assumptions built into a years-old sketch of a business plan. So the customer issues get swept under the rug.
What they typically don't realize is that those 50 are going to leave too, but hey, at least they have big numbers for their reports!
I've also noticed their emails trying to get me to refer friends have increased to almost daily. Which is obnoxious. And they aren't even good deals - get 5 friends to order within a week for $15 delivery credit? It used to be I get $10 credit, my friend got $10 credit.
I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver.
A year ago they delivered food right to my hospital room. I'm about to head back in for an extended stay, so I'm hoping they still do that.
2015 Postmates was great. 2017 Postmates is almost useless.
This is basically every order on Postmates at this point. No one is actually paying their insane delivery fees. I worked as a driver for a few weeks in Berkeley and it was like clockwork. Postmates sends out a free credit promo, get a bunch of ultra cheap short orders, and make like $6 to deliver someone an Iced Tea. There's no possible way the economics can work out for this.
Pretty much says that they are walking dead. As a service business, service is the only differentiation and it costs. That is why these businesses spend huge amounts of time on process to minimize service problems, monitoring and metrics to get to problems before they become service issues, and then maximizing the likelihood that a service call can be resolved satisfactorily in short order.
It does not sound like they have internalized any of those requirements.
In this case, after 60 minutes or so, I'd just call up and say, "it's been 1 hour since the meal was picked up. If you don't refund my money I'm charging back."
(Edit) I should add that I only threaten about once every 5-6 years, and it needs to be obvious that the company is just not taking responsibility for their goofs. It's not something that I do because the delivery boy showed up 5 minutes late.
I ordered a meal which Postmates estimated to be ~$16. When they finally billed me it was charged at $32.
When I contacted them they told me that the prices reflected aren't always accurate, but I'd say a price going up double is a bit of a goof on their part. They were unwilling to refund the payment, and so I called my bank and explained the situation. The bank associate on the phone took care of the charge back as a measure against them.
After that, I've never ordered from postmates again. I get that prices can vary, I'd forgive it to a certain degree. But double the price? Nope.
? What does that mean
Edit: I understand the investors could have taken a conscious high risk bet on an unsustainable business model, but how it comes the founding team didn't raise any red flag to the investors before?
Yeah, about that. We run repair shops, and were approached by Favor (Postmates competitor) about doing this. We love Favor; they are local to us in Austin and we'd like to do more business with them.
The problem was insurance. Our insurance refused to cover it as the phone wouldn't be in our possession. And (at least at the time) Favor's insurance also was not covering if a phone was lost or stolen during a "run."
When it's a small food order (most of the food orders they run are around $20-$30, or even less), it's not the end of the world if something gets lost or stolen. It's a lot bigger deal if it's a $969 iPhone 7+. Even with a broken screen and iCloud locked, they're still (unfortunately) worth significant money on the black market.
As far as I know, no delivery company has overcome this hurdle.
Why? You can schedule pickups for Fedex and UPS for no fee, and have same-day pickup in some areas.
http://www.fedex.com/us/fcl/pckgenvlp/pickup/ https://wwwapps.ups.com/pickup/schedule?loc=en_US
Unfortunately, Apple doesn't make it easy to see whether a phone is iCloud locked. They used to have a convenient online tool for this, but took it down. So a lot of folks, repair shops or not, get suckered into buying one.
From my perspective as someone who owns several stores, the majority of them get sold to people who don't know any better through platforms like Craigslist or Facebook marketplace.
A lot of repair shop owners do lurk on, say, FB Marketplace and comment on posts where people are obviously trying to sell stolen goods, but there will unfortunately always be someone willing to buy something because they got "such a good deal."
Typically repair shops aren't going to put used parts in a customer phone, so an iCloud locked phone isn't much use "for parts."
Can't speak for all of them, but one that I visited in Hong Kong to do a screen replacement definitely had a guy sitting at a counter breaking down a stack of used iPhones for parts.
Huh, that seems like an obvious thing for Apple to not just provide, but to make extremely easy to use and actually promote. Run a simple stolen/not stolen check from NFC by tapping another phone, or something like that. Perhaps be able to put a message on the check from iCloud to enable easy positive proof of ownership.
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2017/01/31/apple-probably-took-...
Homeowner's insurance/renter's insurance would likely cover it. I'm not sure I'd want to make a claim against my homeowner's policy for such a small amount though. I've fortunately never had to rely on it but i've heard rumor of not using it on small ticket items.
Some argue that you should always buy it because there's always the possibility of bad things happening that could be very expensive. But personally I (like I assume most people) am very selective.
That said, if you've been planning an African Safari for a decade, and everything is pre-paid to the tune of $20k, the $100 on trip insurance is probably money well-spent! For example, I did a long motorcycle trip where I paid $250 for a year's worth of medical evacuation coverage, which was nice peace of mind.
Of course, the more "stuff" a policy covers, the more expensive it is, but you bring up a good point about pre-paid expenses. My last trip was on airline miles, with $25/night AirBnBs that could be cancelled the day before.. train tickets weren't bought until I was in-country, and naturally no food/drink/museum entry/subway passes were prepurchased.
If my phone is broken, how will I even use the Postmates app?
Maybe the actual expected loss from theft is too high?
Also, their app user experience is simply terrible. Just the fact that they are constantly and aggressively pushing their referral program and subscription plan, makes the app feel like a cheap adware.
I never pay over $3 to deliver food. Oh and it is delivered by the same delivery people who know the building, know where the buzzer is, know how the customer looks like. And they work for the restaurant from which the food is being ordered.
Seamless for the win.
My experience with Seamless is only in a few major markets. In every one of them the delivery people were the people who worked for the restaurants, which is why different restaurants in the same general area delivered or did not deliver to the same address, had different delivery fees and had different minimum orders.
Yes, there was a time when there were so few drivers for Uber and Lyft here that it was hit or miss. That went away though. At the same time, the little local versions of Instacart and Postmates started showing up. Missed opportunity for growth. Uber and Lyft got it done
It used to be that you used Postmates if you wanted your food hot, and DoorDash for other deliveries.
I've literally never had a DoorDash order arrive not stone cold. Maybe they've changed?
Full-time drivers and house-related help are very common in some countries. In the US, you're pretty wealthy at that point.
As a business, they have the strong brand among restaurants and customers (maybe except few HN'ers). They can certainly use some help with couriers.
They will be fine all the people whining has the same reasons when Amazon got started (this will never work, this is a bad business model, shipping cost alone is bad etc). I have been hearing these arguments for past 20 years about Amazon they have grown to be the powerhouse. It always seems impossible until its done. I am pretty sure these same people still think Amazon is on verge of collapsing next day.
There are people who point fingers and whine. If you listen to them they make very good convincing arguments but in the end, accomplish nothing and then there are people who go make things happen, who make impossible possible.
I applaud Postmates efforts to help little guys compete with big guys. We are better off not living in Amazon monopoly.
UberEATS and Amazon PrimeNow will probably survive, but their parent companies can afford to run them at a loss pretty much forever.
And grocery delivery works too. But it's mostly just an adjunct to B&M.
I am not even kidding about that comment. I have heard him scream and seen him physically throw things around the office over the tiniest things and threaten to fire the entire Customer Service team because a VC's order was late.