Improving the Shopper Support Experience
Three key initiatives to improve the Shopper support experience.
Instacart’s Community Support (the team formerly known as Happiness) is responsible for providing support to shoppers, customers and retail partners. Given our premise of delivery in as little as 1 hour, answering shopper concerns quickly and accurately is critical. We can also admit — as business has grown rapidly over the last few years — our support team hasn’t always kept up.
We’re dedicated to improving the Shopper Support experience and are excited to share 3 major initiatives that we believe will help get us there. In future installments, we’ll dive deeper into each initiative, highlighting the work, progress and ongoing plans to improve Shopper Support.
1) Support Quality
We strive for consistent, high quality support with every request. Over the past several months, we have revamped the support agent hiring, training, and ongoing coaching programs to ensure our support team is prepared to help you. We’ve seen promising results from this recent effort: the number of support agents passing our weekly quality checks has increased by 3x. That said, we know there is more work to do to make sure you get consistent, accurate answers from the support team.
2) Support Availability
When you contact us for help, we know that every minute of wait time is a minute wasted. While we’re not there yet, we’ve set aggressive goals to achieve significantly shorter wait times on the phone (80% of calls answered in 20 seconds) and faster email response times (100% of emails answered in 2 hours). To do this, we’ve been growing our support team in 2018! We’ve brought on additional partners to our existing support network, and we’re launching a new support site. We’re also expanding our internal team, hiring new folks to handle the most complex and sensitive issues that arise. We’ve already seen a reduction in email response times — from days to just a few hours, and wait times on the phones have gone from minutes to seconds. We haven’t reached this consistently, yet, though. Plenty more to come as we improve our responsiveness for Shoppers. Wasted minutes aren’t good for anyone.
3) Reducing Contacts
While it’s great to respond to issues accurately and quickly, the best thing we can do for shoppers is to prevent problems in the first place. Over the past months, we’ve created brand new Operations and Product teams. The sole purpose of these teams is to track shopper feedback, assess what’s not working and fix it. Some issues we’re attacking right now are payment cards being declined at checkout, handling an order when the customer’s not home, and self-service features, like requesting a new payment card. Your observations, via email, calls, post-shift comments and survey responses, is how we know what needs fixing. Thank you for the honest and detailed feedback!
Over the coming months, we’ll share more details on our progress and wins within each of the support themes above. Thanks, as always, for being part of the Shopper community.
Nick Friedrich
Community Operations
