BUSINESS EXPERIMENT: DATA PLAN

HYPOTHESIS
We think that
We are getting too many customer complaints about late deliveries.

Because
It takes too long to drive to some destinations, and we don’t tell people how long their food will take to prepare or
deliver so they get impatient and complain.

So if we try
Managing customers’ expectations by giving them more accurate information about how long their delivery will take
when they order

And measure
The actual time it takes to deliver our orders, and the number of complaints we get about late and cold deliveries

Then we should see

A reduction in complaints classified as ‘LATE’ from our current level of 39% of complaints (11/28 complaints in
December 2019) to below 30%

DATA COLLECTION PLAN

We currently have
- complaints data, which records the type of complaint, date and a customer and order ID for the complaint.
- delivery data which shows the Order ID, the time it takes to prepare the order, the distance to the delivery
and the estimated time to drive to the destination from the restaurant.

We don’t know if the driving time estimates our system gives us are accurate, so we will measure the times for each
journey using the stopwatches on the driver’s phones. The drivers can text in their order number and journey time
when they reach their destination. If this is too difficult to remember, we can use a mapping app to track their
journeys using GPS.

We already store customer address data, but when we are working with this data, we will
- Remove any personal information and just keep post codes
- Keep all the data securely in a password protected folder
- Delete the data we gather after 3 months
If we’re gathering the GPS tracks of our drivers, we’ll get their consent to use their data, and only take GPS when
they’re on deliveries.
We’ll change the terms and conditions on the website to tell customers we use postcodes to calculate delivery
times.

EXPERIMENT
We know the time in minutes from getting an order to sending an order out for delivery.

Free to adapt and reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
We also know the number of items in each order by referencing the order ID, so we can find out the average
preparation time by order size.

We can track the actual delivery time data from the drivers and use it to check how accurate our delivery estimates
are.

If we find an average delivery time for each postcode subarea (Eg BS5 8-- ) we can tell each customer a more
accurate expected delivery time when they place their order

Delivery time estimate = (Average prep time for number of items in the order) + (Average for customers postcode
subarea)

We will change the order page of the website to show this automatically and put the time in the customer
confirmation email. If customers know how long they will have to wait, they will be less likely to complain.

In the future we can also try

- Limiting our delivery radius to places we can get to in a shorter time, so food does not go cold
- Improving our estimates based on the time of day and traffic

METRICS
Our KPI for this improvement is our rate of complaints in the LATE category.
For December 2019:

Total Orders 476

Complaints 28
Rate (complaints/orders) 5.9%

Complaints by Reason
LATE 11 39%
WRONG 3 11%
QUALITY 1 4%
COLD 7 25%
SERVICE 6 21%

We want to reduce the LATE complaints from 39% of all complaints to under 30% to consider this a successful test.

We should also reduce our overall complaints volume from 5.9% to under 5% (Equivalent to reducing complaints by
5 in December)

We should also check review websites like Google and Yelp to see if our star rating changes.

This may NOT change the ‘COLD’ complaints numbers as all we are doing is giving a more accurate delivery time
estimate, not actually reducing the delivery time / distance – which is what makes the food go cold.

Free to adapt and reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/