Fireside Chat: How foodpanda is Improving Customer Experience at Scale Across APAC

October 7, 2022

2 mins read

V K Sanjeed

In July 2022, we celebrated the launch of our Toku Contact Centre solution at the beautifully restored and transformed National Gallery Singapore. One of the highlights of the launch was a fireside chat where Jakob Sebastian Angele (APAC CEO at foodpanda) chatted with our CEO, Thomas Laboulle on scaling customer engagement in rapidly changing markets like APAC.

The conversation was packed with useful behind-the-scenes insights on how large enterprises operating in the region like foodpanda can build smoother customer journeys that give a better customer experience (CX).

Here are some of the key takeaways.

The biggest challenge foodpanda faces

foodpanda is Asia’s leading on-demand food delivery platform operating in more than 400 cities across 11 markets in Asia. The platform’s operational complexity is two-fold. On one side, the delivery service needs to be fast with an order ideally getting delivered within 20 minutes, which means a lot of different things have to be quickly sorted out in a short time.

Secondly, there are several stakeholders involved in a single transaction who need to communicate with each other seamlessly. For example, the rider needs to communicate with the customer, customer with the agent, agent with restaurant, restaurant with customer, in some cases, rider with restaurant, etc. As you can imagine, coordinating all this communication can get tricky!

The evolution of foodpanda’s communication channels

Today everyone is familiar with chatting or calling delivery personnel as well as restaurants within the foodpanda app. However, this was not the case ten years ago when the platform just started out. Back then, they relied mainly on email and SMS communications.

While the modes of communication have evolved into a healthy mix of chat and voice calls, the business tries to keep as much of this on the app itself. This makes complete sense as more enterprises seek to enjoy the many benefits of in-app communications.

In fact, even though customers prefer to use different communication apps like LINE or Viber in different countries, foodpanda has been able to simplify their communication setup and create a more consistent CX by using in-app communication.

Why it is so critical to find a reliable technology provider

For a complex operation that runs across 11 markets, it is crucial to use a single technology across all of them to ensure a level of standardisation is maintained in your CX. A reliable technology provider will be able to help you with this, as well as overcome any hurdles you may face in countries that are less technologically advanced.

How Toku helped foodpanda scale operations in 11 markets

With a call centre setup that had over 5,000 agents spread across different BPOs, foodpanda found it tricky to scale localisations as well as segment customers to apply different SOPs. By partnering closely with Toku, they were able to build much more powerful back-office interfaces and tools that supported those SOPs.