Online Consumer Marketplaces: Relentless Customer Focus

Taking a step back to the early days of Just Eat, I want to talk about the relentless focus on the customer. What processes were in place there that really drove that?

It’s how we saw customers. Actually, we would say that customers are three-fold and it’s how we played it in our minds. First, is our supply for the restaurants, the restaurant owners were our customers. There were customers who were typical B2C, the people ordering. But actually, our staff as well. I don’t want to say that we treat the staff as customers, but if you get a great relationship with your supply, with your consumers and your staff, you’re on to a winner.

But very much at the beginning of Just Eat, probably from about 2006 to 2008, 2009, we were heavily focused on our supply. We looked at our restaurants and we said, okay, how can we get restaurants online? How can we get them updating their menu? How can we get them linked to Just Eat? At that time, there was Hungry House and there were a few other local providers, but we knew we had to get them on and we had to keep them on. How do we do that?

I would probably say, in the early years, I don’t want to say that the B2C customers were forsaken, but we had a very strong focus on getting as many restaurants online as we could, as soon as possible. The first kind of consumer experience we had was, getting these restaurants on, doing some account management, ensuring they stayed on book. But what makes us different from the others?

There would be things like, when we sign them up, how do we sign them up? What is the fee? What is the commission rate? Then there’s that follow-on care. Having an account management team that would talk to them. There were a number of things but that was probably our first core consumer focus.

I think, from 2008 to 2009, that started changing. We’d had the supply, we started getting a lot of orders and then we had to start thinking about the experience. We started going from restaurants churning heavily, per month to actually, the restaurants are quite happy now. But then you’d have the consumers come in, having a bad experience, and leaving. This is back in the day, but we got really excited about this stuff. We weren’t really data driven; we had three or four KPIs and as long as they were going up, things were good. We based everything on orders so if you’ve got your order numbers going up, great. If you’ve got the restaurants online, going up, great. There were three or four simple metrics that we looked at.

Then we started getting in, well, if a consumer comes in and has a bad experience, what happens with repeat (business)? When we started getting more educated people in, we knew that a business could not be built on new orders. It had to also be built on repeat and that’s how you become profitable. We said, based on a person’s first experience, what does that do to their journey? All the stats in the world told us that if the first experience goes very well, then everything was great. That was probably our first analysis of B2C consumer interaction. From our perspective, particularly with B2B and B2C, restaurant owners and consumers, there was a lot of focus on making sure that we got both correct.