Podcast: How Grubhub Uses Culture of Experimentation to Maintain Its Leadership Position
Thanks for having me on your podcast, What’s Next in Commerce!
Quotes:
“Grubhub is an LTV business. It’s not just about the immediate transaction, it’s about what happens after that transaction. For example, if a consumer ends up converting at a higher rate, and then afterward has a poor experience and doesn’t come back, that actually is terrible, terrible, terrible. Your typical, immediate conversion optimization tool would just look at the first part of this. ‘They converted at a better rate, great, awesome, keep it.’ We had to build tools specifically designed to capture these long-term effects. We typically look at the results of these long-term activities over the context of a month. So we need to see what happens to consumers for a meaningful amount of time to have high confidence that it indeed is net beneficial.”
“We are in a unique position of knowing not just who the people were, or when they placed the orders at your restaurant, but knowing exactly what they ordered. We can tell you that on Tuesday night, the reviews for people ordering sushi, are actually worse than on any other night. We can help you see that so that you can train the person that’s working on Tuesday night. These kinds of insights are something that we can uniquely provide to our restaurant partners.”
“Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen the portion of online transactions, and a portion of consumers who first tried buying things online just catapult through the roof. All of those consumers are a new opportunity. They have different expectations. They don’t yet know much about your brand. Being able to understand this newly-online wave, and heightened expectations of the consumers that already happen online, but perhaps not as active with your service, right? Those, I think, are super important. This to me takes us back to the velocity of experimentation being more important now than ever. That is, truly learning from your customers. Observing them, creating experiments, measuring, and getting a feedback loop from them, so that you’re able to focus and find the one thing that you can improve to make the whole story better.”