Much has been written about Customer Delight, and how exceeding customer’s expectations leads to word of mouth.
Fred Reichheld’s famous HBR paper defining the Net Promoter Score states that the only one question you need to ask your customers is:
How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend?
and that the answer will define your company’s growth over the long term.
Most Fortune 1000 companies now subscribe to this theory. There are even services like Delighted helping companies answer this one seminal question.
At Doorman, we’re no exception.
We obsess over every piece of feedback. Constant communication with you helps us in our search for the perfect customer experience.
But we have an interesting wrinkle in our app:
Our customers are not the only humans involved in the service.
Doorman drivers are a major part of our customer experience. We need to continue delighting them too, if we want our customers to be happy as we expand.
So we’re starting a new initiative at Doorman called Driver Delight.
Introducing Driver Delight
Delivering packages is hard.
Imagine driving an ever-changing, algorithmically optimized route with a car full of boxes while navigating city streets with your phone at night and trying to execute as many deliveries per hour as possible.
You can also imagine that it’s easy to become stressed or lose the friendly air of calm as the amount of packages we deliver increases.
We’ve grown an incredible amount this year. We’re delivering three times as many packages per week as we were a few months ago.
It’s important we improve our awesome drivers’ experience as we expand, too. Continuing to have a Doorman that customers recognize, like, and trust as we scale is why we came up with these three steps.
1. Clarity: Driver App Improvements
We worked hard to make our customer app more beautiful, intuitive and informative this year. Now, similar efforts will go towards simplifying the Doorman driver app.
Over the years we’ve added dozens of features to our service.
Much of this information surfaced to our drivers in their app. Most of it –unnecessary to complete a delivery.
It created friction in driver on-boarding, increasing training time and complicating issue reporting.
So we’re stripping most of it out.
Removing buttons and tabs will make the new app easier to use on-the-go. It will only display the information drivers need at any given step of the delivery process.
We’re really excited to finish building it- we’ll keep you posted when it’s ready.
2. Feedback: Delivery Milestones
Part of my enjoyment of using a product is often what I learn about myself.
Fitbit is based on this principle. The product is a mirror of your activity and almost nothing else.
Nest is just a thermostat. But our old thermostats never broke down our energy usage and compared us to our neighbors.
So, we’ll be congratulating drivers on their milestones and accomplishments:
- Congrats on finishing your first delivery, welcome to the team!
- You just delivered your 1,000th package, you’re officially a Black Belt!
- You’re rated 4.98 out of 5 stars, everybody hearts you 🙂
There are endless opportunities — especially the longer our drivers are with us.
3. Gamification: Driver Rewards
Completing a task repeatedly takes on a whole new meaning if completing a certain number of tasks achieves a larger goal with a reward.
Which is why we created a delivery driver reward program.
It not only has standard quality rewards (on time delivery rate, star ratings, etc.), but also now includes “leveling up” bonuses that earn drivers more money.
For example:
A Level 1 driver will get easier routes that pays a certain rate per delivery.
After leveling up, a Level 2, 3 or 4 driver will get paid more per delivery while taking on more challenging routes.
Conclusion
With a focus on driver delight in the coming months, we intend to train drivers faster, lower our delivery error rate, increase our driver retention, and ultimately ensure that we’re having more fun, making more money and in turn, delighting more customers as we grow.
Delighted by this post? Yeah? No? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
“Delighted” is a good way to encompass the customer experience. Emphasizing the importance of customer service (internal and external customers) especially in the tech marketplace. Doorman provides a solution for a problem—efficient package delivery. With the increase of e-commerce, the solution should “delight” on each and every delivery. It reminds me when I was a manager with Bloomingdales, we all had to read the book “Hug Your Customers” by Jack Mitchell. That emphasized the importance of customer service with every interaction with the customer. With customers today being “empowered” by technology and it’s offerings, this is more important than ever in today’s market. Technology provides many solutions yet it is the people that we need to keep “delighting”