Research in Unprecedented Times
How the Instacart research team adapted to the unprecedented challenges of 2020.
By Shreya Gupta, Research Manager
At the beginning of each year, our research team takes time to reflect on the things we need to achieve, and what creates the most value for our customers and business. 2020 began the same way — we planned out the year ahead and created our roadmap on what we needed to accomplish.
But you don’t need me to tell you that 2020 was different.
As the world began to quarantine, everything that comprised a typical day or week became an unexpected obstacle. Would we be able to go to the office? Would kids be able to go to school? And how are we going to get our groceries if we’re all quarantined at home? As people began to adjust to the reality of the pandemic and social distancing measures increased, we knew that customers would be leaning on services like Instacart to help them get through this time. We also understood that our role, responsibility and ability to have an impact dramatically increased.
So we took a step back to reflect and thought about what would need to be true for us to deliver a great experience in this time. While behaviors were changing, the need for research hadn’t. We were seeing behavior changes instantly; not only were existing Instacart customers placing larger orders than usual, but we also saw an enormous spike in first-time users. We started asking ourselves — how can we adapt our business to meet our customer needs? How have our customers’ expectations changed?
With these questions in mind, we decided to prioritize our research in two areas: we needed to understand what our customers — new and existing — were experiencing on the platform. Second, we had to learn how to coordinate and align on all this new research entirely remotely.It was our first time operating as a distributed team, and we needed to adapt quickly to keep up.
Re-prioritizing our research efforts
Under the circumstances, our new research strategy needed to serve customers better through the pandemic. With the new changes in people’s needs, we began by updating our research roadmap first and identifying what needed to change. We went through a prioritization exercise to determine the most important research in the given timeframe, and created the following four workstreams.
1. Customer sentiment
We knew that there had been a massive surge in Instacart usage, but we had to learn how our customers felt about using Instacart during this uncertain time. Were they only motivated by the pandemic? Did they see Instacart as a stopover solution until things returned to “normal?” Getting real insights would tell us how we could best serve our new customers. We partnered with the Consumer Insights and Marketing Research team to kick off this workstream to understand how our customers’ needs were evolving during this time.
2. Customer experience
Due to the demand surge in the early days of the pandemic, Instacart delivery slots were limited and stores were experiencing inventory challenges. We wanted to understand what the customer experience was once someone placed an order. Were they getting different items than what they hoped for? Were they getting different time slots than what they wanted? Did it matter? Or was this within their set of expectations while grocery shopping remotely in a pandemic?
3. Online shopping expectations
Speaking of expectations, before we could start trying to meet and manage expectations during this time, we needed to understand what they were expecting. We wanted to understand how much and what type of communication customers expected, and how we could help mitigate anxiety.
We couldn’t know how to improve the customer experience without first discovering what our new customers expected when they started using this service. We also needed to understand whether or not their experience was living up to those expectations.
4. Understanding our new customers
Finally, amid this massive influx of new customers, we didn’t know much about who they were. We needed to understand and identify what differentiated them from our existing customer base. So we set out to learn which levers we could optimize to ensure customers continued using the benefits of Instacart.
Where our research led us
The four workstreams I mentioned above gave us a direction in which to move. Our findings helped us develop an action plan and strategy. Here is a glimpse of some of the insights we used to drive our business forward.
Seniors made up a large portion of our new users
Our research led us to an interesting discovery: many of our new users were senior citizens — and some were family members of seniors who were ordering on their behalf.
Since we knew that seniors are among the most at-risk group to develop complications from the coronavirus, this made sense. These customers chose Instacart because it was a safer option. If we could make groceries more accessible to this cohort, then we were serving our larger mission of making groceries accessible to everyone. We made it our priority to provide the safest and easiest possible experience for our most vulnerable customers. One example of a feature launch based on these insights is our Senior Support Service, a high-touch support offering for customers over the age of 60.
Contactless delivery would become table stakes
Our research also showed us there was a real case for a contactless delivery feature. Before, a key component of the Instacart service was a careful and personal hand-off of the customer’s grocery order. We discovered that with the pandemic surging across the country, customers wanted to have the option of a truly contactless experience.
The idea of “contactless” delivery has become table stakes for any company in the business of delivering goods to people’s homes. Food, pharmaceutical, and parcel delivery services have all adopted some form of a contactless drop-off system. Instacart was one of the first to launch it across the board.
There was an opportunity to improve our help center
Rather than using the online self help tool available to find answers, we saw new customers opting to call our customer service line instead, which resulted in a substantial increase in call volume.
We needed to determine why our customers weren’t able to find solutions on our website.
Our research showed that our help center would benefit from a redesign. The help center is now more actionable, because it links users to pages where they can solve the issue directly. Redesigning our help center was a major project that was accelerated due to the pandemic, but will serve us (and our customers) well in the future.
What we learned about working under pressure
I want to end by touching on some lessons we learned that I think might help other teams in similar situations.
When it comes to communication, impact wins over frequency
It was clear from the start that our team would have to be very deliberate with our communication — both with each other and to the stakeholders who depend on our research to inform their work. While it’s tempting to send frequent updates, it became evident that messages would get buried, and emails might go unread due to the sheer volume of emails filling inboxes during this time.
We started building out well-paced, well-structured, top-line emails to let everyone know our focus and where we were in the process. This created one source of truth to refer to to understand what our focus was, and how close we were as a team to reaching our goals.
Centralizing knowledge is essential
Our team had a massive volume of work to complete in a short time, which meant that we needed to be as organized as possible. Since we were compiling all of this data remotely, it was even more important to establish a centralized system for knowledge sharing.
We created a master folder of coronavirus insights for our stakeholders, and we made sure to keep it well-organized and up-to-date. We organized folders by area of research and clearly labeled the newest insights and documents. The rest got archived.
Sometimes being reactive is the right approach
In the world of research, being reactive feels counter-intuitive to driving product strategy and having a lasting impact on user needs. As I mentioned earlier, under normal circumstances, our team would build a plan well in advance. In other words, we’d put research into our research — making sure we were focusing on topics that would impact our customers and improve our business.
In 2020, there was no time for that — and honestly, there was no need. Being in such an intense situation meant that the problems we were facing were right in front of us and impossible to miss. It felt strange at first to embrace being reactive, but it proved to be much more useful to direct our research in a way that addressed issues as they cropped up.
Preparing for the future
The Research team has gained so much from the work we put in over the past year. Not only did we acquire deep knowledge of our customers’ needs, but we also discovered what our team is capable of. It was gratifying to launch features that supported our customers and made their lives easier through an unpredictable time. The solutions we created were a real, tangible way to make a global event feel more manageable — and being able to influence that through our work was a tremendous opportunity.
Though the early pandemic conditions necessitated many of our research findings, many of the solutions we found to address them are ones that we’ll use in the future. And while I always like to have a plan, this time did prove that sometimes the best work comes out of having to adapt under pressure.
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Interested in joining the Research team at Instacart? We’re hiring! Check out our current openings.
Read “Beyond the Cart, A Year of Essential Insights” to learn more about how the past year of pandemic living has transformed 100 years of consumer grocery habits.
