B2C Marketplaces: Serving Two Customers

How did the culture at Just Eat encourage that relentless focus on the customer?

I think the first thing was understanding it. Being completely frank about it, if you had the sales director and the operations director, you had a sales director who was all about sales, all about restaurants and restaurant owners. Restaurant is king. Then you had the operations side who said, actually, restaurants aren’t king. Customers are king. Then you would have the cliché phrase, the customer is always right. But we have two customers. So actually, we were learning that, internally, at the beginning. At the beginning, I sat in operations, so my focus was B2C. A big part of that was, I was the one on the table who would go and say, the consumers are having a bad experience and we’ve got to be consumer-focused.

Actually, it was very simple and it had to come from up top and our CEO, nice and simply, said, “We have two customers.” The moment that I started realizing that, hold on, my customers aren’t only your B2C customers but, actually, these restaurant owners are my customers too, that’s when it changed. We did a lot of set up. There were trading meetings, exec meetings, management meetings and so on. But understanding how you fit into that journey, it was very important and quite pivotal to us. As the old cliché goes, it was all about engagement. It was just understanding the pain they are feeling and the pain we are feeling and making sure we got it better.

I think that’s a tricky dynamic with these marketplaces today, where you have two customers and you need to balance supply and demand and manage the liquidity on the platform, manage the pricing, to make the business sustainable.

And it’s also education with your consumers. A simple example at Just Eat was, restaurant owners, at the beginning, wanted to make it more expensive to book online at Just Eat. A typical chicken curry, inhouse, it’s £10; on Just Eat, we want to make it £13. They were adamant. At the beginning, the sales team would allow that. We would come back and the customers were complaining and saying, what’s the point of ordering from you guys. I might as well just order from the restaurant directly. The big piece, from the restaurant’s perspective was, well, you’re taking commission from us, so we have to make that money back and we have to make a profit.

That, as a simple example, you can probably appreciate at the time, the sales director would be, if they don’t have that, they might not come live. But from my perspective, it was very much, if they do have that, then we just won’t get any orders, so it makes no sense. Again, it goes back to the restaurant owner to say, actually, the £10 chicken madras is going to an audience that you would have never had before. You cannot reach this market. We have a world-class marketing team, very experienced. These are orders you would never have got. It’s just that thing of communication. Making the individual understand the pain point that the customer is feeling.

At the same time, from the customer’s perspective – and we did price guarantee in the end – I can never justify to a customer, yes, actually, it is more expensive on our platform, just because they want to avoid commission. I couldn’t say that. I had to follow up and say, I’m sorry, you have to do price guarantee. On both fronts, it’s just constant communication, but the more you do that, the more the supply, particularly, understand it.

Also, just to add to that, supply needs to understand that they are part of the business. They are representing your brand. I think that’s a mistake that everybody makes and I see it sometimes, when I use digital marketplaces, when I have a bad experience, which is, “This is Just Eat’s fault.” “This is Uber’s fault.” I just hate that. Even when I’m calling the Just Eats, the Deliveroo's, the Ubers and they say, this restaurant is just being stupid. Actually, you are the one that signed them up, so that’s not my problem. I think getting that synchronization with the restaurant to say, you represent the Just Eat brand or the Treatwell brand or the Push Doctor brand. We’re one and the same. We’re together. We are both creating this experience for the consumer. I think if you don’t have that, it will reflect in the consumer experience.