How does Delivery Hero succeed at managing vendor experiences at scale?
Vendor success is at the heart of Delivery Hero’s unassailable competitive advantage in the food delivery industry. Our unwavering commitment to identifying and pursuing collaboration with our partners has catapulted both Delivery Hero and its network of 1 million partners, across 70 countries to newer heights of success. In this blog post, we look at different facets to our approach of building memorable vendor relationships that translate to unforgettable consumer experiences.
Our Philosophy towards Digital Transformation
Every business has historically tried to hone one or more of the below competencies to drive profitability:
- Product/service differentiation: An offering in the market that is unique in catering to the needs of one or more customer segments. Businesses taking this route often focus on building expertise in a certain domain that helps them build differentiated products and service lines. The pharmaceutical industry can be cited as an industry that has traditionally relied on this approach.
- Operation efficiency: This entails the ability of a business to ‘do most with the least’ possible resources, in a sustainable manner. Businesses in markets with several players bringing out similar products take this route to grow their bottom line. Businesses in industries such as manufacturing, FMCG, and the automobile often focus on this approach.
- Customer experience: This involves finding a superior way to engage with the end customers and business partners to drive brand credibility and preference. The commercial aviation sector is a popular example of an industry that has historically focussed on customer intimacy as a key business differentiator.
While businesses in the industries mentioned above have relied heavily on other forms of technology to drive differentiation and growth, their adoption of IT / Software technology has been relatively recent and often siloed.
Businesses in the food delivery space like Delivery Hero, rely on software technology to build an advantage in all the above competencies. This makes IT not just a tool to augment business processes but a backbone to our very existence and growth in this crowded space. Let us see how with the example of our Vendor Relationship Management tribe.
The Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) Tribe
The success of our platform is evidenced by the tens of thousands of partners who onboard every month. Our products and services are truly differentiated from the competition, thanks to intuitive products, self-service portals, quality logistics, and a commitment to help partners reach 50x more consumers through digital channels.
The VRM tribe ensures our partners are able to discover, understand, evaluate synergies and derive value out of our products and services as they grow their business.
Traditionally, businesses in the food commerce space relied on sales teams to manage these processes. But with our tech-savvy partners, we’ve evolved our tech stack to support both self-service and sales-assisted models. Our system streamlines processes, accelerates time to success, and delivers a differentiated vendor experience.
Achieving operational excellence has never been easier. Our go-to platform for vendor acquisition and relationship management, is the key to success.
Brijesh Tiwari, Senior Director, Vendor Relationship Management
Our product supports multiple touchpoints, from registration and KYB to upsell and account management. It also acts as a data source to other systems, such as billing and rider applications. To handle the complexity of expanding partner verticals and evolving use cases, we’ve implemented automation to drive operational excellence and deliver memorable vendor experiences every time.
Looking ahead
As you would imagine, no vendor can go through their entire lifetime operating on our platform, in an entirely touchless manner. Our energetic team of thousands of agents across sales, finance, legal, quality check, photography and logistics teams globally help make the magic happen. Be it as a central driving force in the sales-assisted flow or in the background in the self-service model.
Here are a few examples:
- Mobile app for sales agents: Our field sales representatives can now make use of a dedicated mobile app, where they can manage the entire vendor registration and activation process from start to finish in less than an hour, right from the vendor’s location. They can get notified of key updates, next best actions, upcoming meetings and more while entering required data into the app on the fly.
- Whatsapp business integration for Sales teams: This nifty provision allows our agents to initiate conversations with vendors through templatized messages and activity handlers that guide vendor conversations with minimal human intervention and handover conversations to actual agents as required. This acts as another self-service channel for vendors with an option to quickly get in touch with an agent as required. All these conversations and information collected from our partners automatically get logged into the CRM and consequently the downstream systems.
- AI-led recommendations for next best actions: All our agents get notified of the next best actions and key upcoming events both within their CRM system as well as within their Slack and Whatsapp, allowing them to plan and manage their activities on the go while providing for a truly omnichannel experience. Our algorithms churn an array of factors to pick out the best prospects to engage with, the best packages to pitch to a vendor based on their scale or simply the best time to contact a certain vendor and their preferred channel.
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