Max Mullen from Instacart explains how the company gathers and acts on customer feedback. Instacart uses in-app ratings, follow-up emails for low scores, and NPS surveys to catch problems like late deliveries. They deliberately keep the product simple for new users rather than overwhelming them with features.
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How do we get feedback from customers? Yeah, via in the app or— Yeah, absolutely. We do it in several ways. That's a great question. What's your name?
Sean.
Sean? That's a great question, Sean. For one, every time you place an order, we send you a receipt. And at the top of that receipt, there's a prompt to rate your order out of 5 stars. And our metric at Instacart is how many of our orders can we get rated with 5 stars? If you rate your order anything less than 5 stars, we'll email you and say, why was your order not perfect, and how can we make it better next time? And there are actually other ways that we do it as well, more passive ways where we'll email customers proactively and we'll say, how likely are you to recommend Instacart to your friends? And what we want to see people is saying 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 on that survey. And if they don't, we want to understand why they won't recommend to their friends. Right here.
When you only send them an email when it's not a 5, is it not kind of a little bit biased that if they don't have the time to reply to your email, they will just give the 5-star ranking and be done with it? You will not email them and you won't Could there be biases in customer feedback?
Absolutely, there can be. Yeah, and you have to watch out for those. If you—
How do you deal with that?
How do you deal with biases? There's no right way, but you generally want to be fair, and you want to send surveys to all of your customers, not just the ones that you know are happy. And you sometimes want to send surveys to customers who haven't ordered yet and say to them, why haven't you ordered? And if they say things like, well, I don't understand how it works, well, that may point to a problem with the education you're doing in your product. They might say things like, I don't think the way you price your product is right. Well, maybe you need to make an adjustment to that. What are some of the common customer complaints that you get, and how do you address those problems? Common customer complaints. Well, we strive for every order to be perfect. And a perfect order is one where you order several things, every single one of them comes exactly as you ordered it, you're charged exactly what we say you're going to be charged, and you rate that order 5 stars, and it's on time or early. And so some of the common problems with orders could be if there's traffic that we can't predict and an order is late, or if, for instance, there's an event in a city that delays our shopper from getting to the store. Things like that are common issues that, that make customers dissatisfied, and so we go out of our way to try to prevent them. Certainly not everybody agrees with all of our features and the direction of taking the product, but one thing we've done very carefully is we've kept our product simple because it's very important to consider not only the power user of your product, but every new incremental user, and make sure that the experience that every new user gets is very simple and easy to understand. So what I see a lot of companies make the mistake of is they add a lot of features to their product to satisfy existing customers, but that complicates it so much for the new customers. And when those customers come on board, they get overwhelmed and they leave. So we don't, we don't do that at Instacart. We keep it very, very simple. And so there's not a lot to argue with. It's just very easy.
