Swiggy CRM for Business Growth & Customer Satisfaction

In this article, we will explore the Customer Relationship Management strategies implemented by Swiggy. It is very interesting to see how different highly successful businesses implement different and innovative CRM strategies to not only grow their businesses, but also keep their customers happy. CRM enables businesses to create a win-win situation.

Background

Hyperlocal food delivery business Swiggy was founded in August 2014 by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy, and Rahul Jaimani. Since then, it has come a long way! It began operations in the Koramangala, Bengaluru with just 25 restaurants and 6 delivery executives on its platform. Within one year, the operator expanded its operations to 11 areas in Bengaluru, following which it launched operations in Gurgaon and New Delhi with tie-ups with 300 restaurants and over 1,000 orders daily.

In 2016, the operator, launched operations in all the major cities across India despite stiff competition from Zomato. The same year, Swiggy Express was launched, a service that offers chef-made meals in less than 20 minutes. With tie-ups with more than 5,000 restaurants, the operator employed over 3,000 delivery boys and monthly order deliveries reached 1 million.

By December 2018, the company raised fresh capital of USD1 billion, the biggest ever funding round in India’s food-tech sector, from existing as well as new investors. Naspers and Tencent Holdings are two of the company’s major investors. Following this funding, the company’s valuation reached USD3.3 billion.

Now that we know the company’s background, let us take a look at some of its key CRM strategies:

Chatbot

After having tested third-party messaging/chat software in 2018, which enabled customer care executives to chat with customers, Swiggy found that it had to go above and beyond just chatting with customers. The operator found that 70% of its customers were more comfortable communicating via chat as opposed to a phone call. However, Swiggy experienced rapid growth and expansion to over 200 cities the same here, which resulted in a 10X increase in the number of conversations with customer on a daily basis. This created the need for a more sophisticated system that not only enabled Swiggy customer care executives to chat with customer and resolve grievances, but also gather customer data, ordering trends, and other information that could be analysed later by the company’s internal data science and analytics team to improve customer experiences.

Also, increased traffic resulted in additional pressure on the customer service team, which was solving repetitive queries most of the time pertaining to order cancellation, order status updates, etc. This led to the creation of a customized chatbot, a program that can automatically interact with customers based on certain pre-defined conditions. This chatbot was designed to handle certain common customer queries independently without the need for intervention from a support executive. Despite the fact that chatbots are not designed to replace support executives, they set the pace for the conversation and offer convenient solutions to customers. However, customers can opt to speak to a support executive.

Let us consider the following example:

The best example one can consider is order cancellation. Swiggy went through various conversations with customers and put together the most common reasons due to which customer requested order cancellation. These enabled the creation of an efficient chatbot flow, such as the one listed below:

• Ask for the reason of order cancellation.
• Try and deter the customer from cancelling the order by indicating that the order will be delivered shortly.
• Display a cancellation fee if applicable.
• Display details of the refund.Following the implementation of this automation, the entire cancellation process takes less than 10 seconds. Earlier, customers had to call customer care to cancel their order, which was a time consuming task in itself, as well as call again to know the status of their refund. Automated chatbot flows such as the one described above has saved the time & energy of customers as well as of the operator, and resulted in a win-win situation for both. What’s more, the customer is only one step away from human intervention whenever required!
  
  Some of the other customer queries automated by the company, which have empowered customers to take rapid actions with minimal human intervention and enabled support executives to focus on more pressing issues, are listed below:
• Addition of delivery instructions.
• Reporting issues with a delivered order.
• The selection of alternatives in case of out-of-stock items.
• Details regarding failed transactions and refund status.Value Propositions
• No minimum order requirement is a very unique value proposition offered by Swiggy. Often, the operator accepts orders valued at less than Rs. 100. This has enabled Swiggy to reach close to 14 million orders every month!
• Another value proposition offered by the operator is the acceptance of payment through 8 payment options, which include 4 digital wallets, credit & debit cards, meal cards, LazyPay, and cash on delivery.
• Swiggy is also known to offer a very prompt response on its social media channels.
• To hold all parties accountable and ensure efficient grievance resolution, Swiggy has developed an excellent review, rating, and feedback system for customers as well as delivery executives. Both rate each other based on their experiences. This creates a balance and enables the operator to give equal importance to the experiences of both parties.Swiggy Stores and Swiggy Genie
  
  In February 2019, Swiggy launched a new service Swiggy Stores, which provides users the option of ordering items from partner stores, which the operater will deliver to their homes. This service became operational in over 125 cities across the countries, and partnered with neighbourhood stores as well as the distribution facilities of major retailers.
  
  Swiggy has entered into partnerships with various brands & retailers such as P&G, Dabur, Marico, HUL, Vishal Mega mart, and CIPLA, to name a few.
  
  To take this service further, Swiggy offers Swiggy Genie in over 15 cities, which offers a service similar to Dunzo. It picks up grocery, medicines, and other essential items from stores selected by customers from anywhere in the city, and delivers these items to their doorstep.
  
  With these two services – Grocery and Genie, it aims to address the main pain points of customers as well as local stores who feel that they have lost out on business following the advent of ecommerce platforms.
  To Sum Up, the Key Business Activities of Swiggy Are:
• Forming partnerships with restaurants & food chains as well as retail shops in cities where it operates.
• Hiring full-time, part-time & freelance delivery partners/providers.
• Customer acquisition
• Managing orders from customers
• Handling queries of delivery partners as well as customers
• Management of technical operations
• Updation and management of IT infrastructureThis case study of Swiggy’s business and its value propositions is another great example of running an efficient B2B and B2C business model with efficiency and, at the same time, taking into account the changing needs of customers to offer them new & innovative services!

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