Creating the best ‘worst case scenario’: customer care in the age of data

When you think of customer care, you might think of people sitting in cubicles, answering the phone, trying to calm down hungry customers. What you probably don’t think of is a complex world of data-driven technologies and a set of business strategies that are all targeted towards proactively caring for the customer and solving problems in a smart and fast manner.

We’re here to prove you wrong, make you forget about cubicles and ringing phones, and show you what customer care – or more accurately: contact centers – really look like in the age of data and machine learning.

Creating the best ‘worst case scenario’

Let’s admit it: When a customer interacts with a contact center, something must have gone wrong. The delivery might not have arrived on time, maybe it contained the wrong items, or the quality just wasn’t good enough. So, getting in touch with a support team really is the worst case scenario in every customer’s journey.

We’ve all been there, and we know that there’s nothing more frustrating than an agent who doesn’t have an answer immediately. Well, we’re all human after all – and when there are many incoming requests during peak times, agents have to juggle a lot of questions and processes at the same time for finding the right solutions.

This is where technology steps up the game!

At Delivery Hero, there’s a team of 25 experts dedicated to developing software that makes operations in our contact centers around the world as efficient as possible – and eventually helps to create the best possible customer experience in this worst case scenario.

On demand delivery requires instant solutions

Quentin Chaleard is Senior Director in the Global Contact Center team which is based in Berlin. His team elevates customer care globally to a whole new level by implementing smart and scalable technologies in our contact centers from Europe to Asia Pacific, from the Middle East to Latin America.

“We work with over ten different technological solutions, and they rank from being developed by a third-party providers and adapted for our needs, to being developed in-house by Delivery Hero tech teams, or even by our own team,” says Quentin.

When a customer is not satisfied with a delivery, nothing should be left to chance. That’s why the Global Contact Center team has built several solutions from scratch to enable local contact centers to handle inquiries with ease. “Our own stack allows us to cater to the specific needs of our on-demand services,” Quentin explains. Because at Delivery Hero there are only minutes (not days or even weeks like in most other companies) between order and delivery, support needs to be immediate as well.

There are three major solutions Quentin’s team is working on right now:

“The first one is a help center solution to enable customers resolve their issues themselves. Imagine you ordered a burger menu but the fries are missing: You will be able to automatically report that and choose between different options of solutions, from refund to redelivery.” The help center provides an easy way for customers to solve some of the most frequent issues of on-demand delivery (including missing or wrong items, late delivery, spilled food) instantly and without the need to call or text an agent.

“Secondly, we work on building a better interface for our agents. Currently they need to juggle different screens to interact with customers, collect information and trigger solutions. Our goal is to provide them with everything they need to solve the customer’s issue in only one screen.”

This is a great example of how data and technology not only make an agent’s work easier, but also increase customer satisfaction: The system will provide all available context of the inquiry (such as: ‘The delivery was delayed by 30 minutes, and it’s already the second time this happens to the customer.’), enabling the agent to really lead a customized conversation (‘My apologies this already happened twice.’) and eventually suggesting next steps (for example: call the restaurant, refund the delivery or send a voucher for the next order).

“Finally, we build software that helps us to manage our workforce more efficiently. We have thousands of agents around the world and with the help of technology, we can do a better job in staff planning.”

Meet the team that shapes the future of customer care

The shift from cubicles to self help centers and intelligent systems also came with a transition in the team: Having been focused on operations (such as customer service and dispatching) in the past, the Global Contact Center team now is a center of excellence for product and system development, as well as “finding the best way to create scalable solutions that can support all our local teams. Each market is quite unique and we often experience positive challenges where we need to adapt our tools and trainings into different languages and alphabets,” Quentin says.

As the team is growing, there’s a lot of room for individual growth as well. “We have a young, international team, and we pride ourselves on our flat hierarchies and the fact that everyone can really take ownership of their projects. We encourage everyone to get involved and share their opinion, no matter what their level or role. On top of that, we organize lots of team events, which helps to bond as a team and keeps the team spirit high,” Quentin says.

Behind the scenes: What’s it like working in the Global Contact Center team?

Kimberley McNeill, Operations Associate

As Operations Associate, Kimberly works with teams across the world. Since joining Delivery Hero in October 2018, she already supported her fellow colleagues in Bucharest, Stockholm and Kuala Lumpur. Quite some input for her travel diary!

What does a typical day at work look like for you?
I’m an Operations Associate within the Contact Center Tools Team and my focus is our global VOIP telephony tool. I’m responsible for migrating contact centers from their current tool to our global solution, providing technical support and continually optimizing the setup to deliver maximum value.

What do you like most about your job?
The satisfaction that comes from delivering improvements from start to finish: From working with our contact centers around the world to understand their individual needs, to being on site with them during go-live to support implementation of the new telephony system.

What are the wins and challenges of working in a global context?
Working in a global context is both challenging yet very rewarding. Be prepared for a few early or late alignment calls, depending on the timezone. In return you’ll be rewarded with having a great relationship with many diverse stakeholders, and if you’re lucky, going for after work drinks with them on the other side of the world.

Martin Potier, Associate Data Scientist

Martin moved from Paris to Berlin to start an internship in the Global Contact Center team. He just finished his internship and now works as a Data Scientist with a mission to bring data and intelligence into a local context.

What does a typical day at work look like for you?
I work as a Data Scientist in the workforce management team. My role is to predict the need for staff in our contact centers, in the long and the short term. Between sessions of development and meetings, we go to lunch in the park and play Molkky for the good of our brains.

What do you like most about your job?
Working with my team. I am not a morning person, but it helps to wake up when I know I’ll be joining this group of young, diverse, open-minded people for the day.

How is your work contributing to innovation within the business?
We are currently building our own stack of software. We aim to make workforce management relying on homemade solutions: more adequation and independence. Everything has to be built from scratch, that is pretty exciting.

Gabriela Jurioli, Operations Analyst

Gabriela joined Delivery Hero in June 2019 as Operations Analyst and focuses on empowering contact centers with data, reports and analysis that help them make better decisions and, therefore, improve their performance.

What does a typical day at work look like for you?
I work as an Operations Analyst in the Reporting & Analytics team. I’m responsible for making sure that the data generated by our contact centers is available and reliable as a basis for business decisions. My day-to-day work includes interactions with users to understand their needs for data, development of reports and roadmap prioritization together with the Business Intelligence team.

What do you like most about your job?
I really enjoy my job, but there are two special aspects of it that I like the most. The first one is that I’m continuously learning, and thus developing myself. The second one is that I’m given lots of autonomy to test my ideas to improve the business.

What does the future hold that you’re very excited about?
Only two months after joining Delivery Hero, I’m preparing for my first business trip to Egypt next week to visit Talabat’s office in Cairo. Besides experiencing a contact center at its fullest, the goal of the trip is to understand their routine in terms of data usage for decision making and to present them the projects that we’ve been working on at the Berlin office. I’m really looking forward to that!

Do you want to join the team? Find open positions here.