Grubhub for Drivers:
Restaurant is Closed

Discovery

Restaurants closing and/or changing their hours without notifying GH was a problem that existed before, but then became worse during the pandemic. Many restaurants were closed or had changed their hours due to staffing shortages and stay-at-home orders. Many of these restaurants had done so without notifying GH beforehand and as a result, diners were still able to order from these restaurants on GH.

The downstream effect is that the driver arrives at the restaurant and sees that the restaurant is closed, the order cannot be completed and is then cancelled, resulting in a missed order for the restaurant, a waste of time for the driver, and a hit to GH’s bottom line. Not to mention a hungry and frustrated diner.

Methodology

A few outcomes we wanted to achieve by approaching this from the driver side:

  1. Improve the driver experience by not only making sure they still get paid for the cancelled order, as it’s out of their control, but speeding up their process so that they can skip a phone call with support and giving them a self-serve way to work through the problem so they can move onto their next order.

  2. Lighten the load on our Driver Care team by reducing calls from drivers due to this specific issue.

  3. Collect operational data on restaurants so that we can prevent the issue from repeating

  4. Reduce the amount of diner concessions we need to make due to order cancellations for closed restaurants

Process map for closed restaurants

We knew we could achieve these outcomes by automating the phone call a driver would typically make to a support agent in this scenario, as well as automating the SOP an agent would work through. That meant we needed to have a way for drivers to mark restaurants as closed and submit any relevant information about the closure.

It would still be in the realm of a support agent to examine the information and verify its accuracy before officially marking the restaurant closed, in an effort to reduce driver fraud. Another risk was that we could make it so easy to close restaurants that drivers would just mark restaurants they don’t want to deliver from as closed. To prevent this, we knew we needed to have not only that verification process, but also a geofence in place so that the feature wouldn’t become available to drivers until they were actually at the restaurant.

Solution & Outcomes

Figma prototype

Once a driver arrives at the restaurant and sees that it is closed, they’re able to access the entry point for the ‘Restaurant is closed’ flow. Once in the flow, they’re able to select from a list of possible reasons the restaurant might be closed. After selecting a reason, we ask the driver to take a photo of a sign that indicates the restaurant is closed or is operating under unusual hours. The driver is able to submit any additional info in a freeform text field if they choose. If the driver is unable to collect any of the relevant info, they can launch a chat with driver support as a fallback option. After submitting, the driver is thanked and reassured that the cancelled order will not affect their pay or performance metrics, and that they can move on with other deliveries.

What we saw month over month after launch was:

  1. Cancelled orders due to closed restaurant down from 63K to 17K

  2. Support tickets down from 96K to 25K

  3. Sum of diner concessions down from $238K to $65K