We’ve been using the Grab App for years now, and we’ve witnessed how it grew from being a simple ride-hailing app in the Philippines into a super-app that it is today. The year 2020 has really brought it big for Grab, specifically GrabFood, as people found food delivery the safer option than dining out amidst the pandemic.
Food delivery is actually not something new; but making the whole process digital from ordering, to payments, to delivery, changed the whole ball game; and technology played a big role in making all this possible.
How Technology Enriches Customer Experience on GrabFood
We joined-in a recent “Grab Tech Insider” international press conference with a presentation by Ms. Xiaole Kuang, Head of Engineering for Grab Deliveries, and these are some interesting matters we learned about the Super App:
1. GrabFood Enables Localisation At Scale
The GrabFood Homepage is customized for each market depending on your source country across SouthEast Asia. Various sections such as categories and carousel are highlighted by the country teams depending on relevance as a result of habit analysis and culture preference.
In the Philippines, I think we are actually ‘more picky’ customers tend to browse longer vertically into the mobile app user interface (see below).
2. Alternative Options Recommended based on Ranking & AI
In case you haven’t noticed yet, after searching for a dish or restaurant, the app finds similar merchants based on the keyword similarities you typed, based on artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities.
The ranking logic includes numerous factors such as merchant popularity, Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA), driver availability, past browsing, and ordering history (e.g. cuisine / budget / food preferences)
3. There are 5 Ways to Order from GrabFood
The app currently offer 5 ordering types within the app. The main method which is the most common is ‘Delivery on Demand’. The others are Self Pick-Up, Scheduled Delivery, Group Order, and Mix-and-Match.
This feature will be discussed more extensively in Woman In Digital very soon.
4. GrabFood Provides an Efficient Order Platform for the Merchants
Aside from the ordering convenience of the customers, GrabFood also makes sure ordering is also efficient on the Merchant Partner side.
GrabFood provides:
- a 360 view of all incoming orders regardless of the order type
- Enables merchants to keep their restaurant information updated (e.g.if item is out of stock, operating hours, etc)
- Analytics Tools for customers’ purchasing behaviours and more
- Open Platform tools to improve operational efficiency and integration process
5. GrabFood Offers Integration for the Merchants POS
Integration with Point-Of-Sale (POS) systems is so important as previously, Merchant’s staff have to manually transfer GrabFood orders from the GrabMerchant app into their restaurant POS which can result to error input via human error.
Now, GrabFood orders flow straight into the restaurant POS, and right into the kitchen. Whenever merchants update their menus in the restaurant POS system, it will be reflected in the GrabFood app immediately. This means that merchants only need to manage one system, and helps them save time and improve accuracy
6. GrabFood Optimise Fleet-Batching
With order batching, the GrabFood system can assign two or more consumer orders with nearby drop-off or pick-up points for a driver to complete in a single trip.
Although it may have some disadvantages, Order Batching was developed to help fleet optimisation in general, especially during peak hours and supply crunch time, or when there’s a heavy downpour at dinner time.
7. GrabFood Optimise Radius Reduction
This feature surprised me the most. Think – in supply crunch times when there’s too many orders and too few delivery riders in an area, eaters may have to wait very long for a delivery-rider. Chances of merchants cancelling an order is also higher as they may be operating at maximum capacities.
This means that when driver allocation rate and order completion rate decline severely, system can kick in to start gradually reducing the delivery radius. This helps to concentrate delivery-riders within a smaller area, to help improve order completion rates.This is applied until order completion rate stabilises and more delivery-partners are available in the area.
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